Why I built a CLI to automate web research instead of relying on browser tabs

A few months ago I noticed something annoying about how I worked: I was spending more time collecting information than actually thinking about it. The pattern was always the same. Open a search engine, open a dozen tabs, skim past the SEO filler and cookie banners, copy the paragraphs that actually mattered into a doc, paste the whole mess into an LLM and ask it to make sense of things. Then, a week later, do it again because whatever I was tracking had changed. At some point I stopped asking "how do I do this faster" and started asking why I was doing it by hand at all. Why the obvious answers didn't work ChatGPT and Perplexity are fine for a single question. They're worse at the part I actually needed help with, which was repetition: running the same research loop on a schedule, keeping a record of what changed, and getting a notification when it did. Neither tool is built to sit in the background and check on a topic for you. Plain scraping scripts have the opposite problem. They get you raw HTML, not understanding. You still have to strip out nav bars and footers by hand, and the moment you point one at a list-style page like Hacker News instead of a blog post, it falls apart. And bookmarking is just deferring the problem. A folder of forty saved links isn't research, it's homework you haven't done yet. I wanted something in between: automated enough to skip the tab-hoarding, but still producing something I could read and trust, not just a black-box answer. So I built Focal Harvest It's a modular CLI that runs the whole research loop, search, scrape, clean, synthesize, report, on its own, and stays lightweight enough to run on a laptop with no GPU and no database. A single run looks like this: you give it a topic and a focus area (what you specifically want answered), it searches the web, pulls and cleans the pages, synthesizes a report, and writes it to disk. There's also a loop mode, so the same query can re-run every few hours and ping you on Discord or Teleg