I gave open claw and codex the whole internet without any api keys using this tool and it was never performed better
AI agents can reason about the web. But giving an agent unrestricted browser or network access creates a serious authority problem. The obvious solution is to restrict the tools available to the agent. Then I kept running into the opposite problem: Once the tool became sufficiently restricted, it lost many of the capabilities required to complete real work. I wanted both sides: Enough power to crawl, render, navigate, extract, capture, and investigate the web Explicit operator control over origins, credentials, budgets, browser hooks, profiles, and evidence So I built Cockroach Crawler . It is an open-source Node.js and TypeScript toolkit for AI agents, RAG pipelines, documentation indexing, research, QA, and web-data workflows. I connected it to OpenClaw and Codex , and the difference was honestly wild. Instead of giving the agents one narrow search tool, I gave them a bounded web-research layer that could crawl websites, inspect JavaScript applications, extract structured data, process PDFs, take screenshots, generate PDFs, inspect public sources, and return evidence with provenance. And for many public workflows, I did not need to configure a separate API key for every source. GitHub: https://github.com/AjnasNB/cockroach-crawler Documentation: https://cockroachcrawler.com/docs/ npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/cockroach-crawler What changed after I connected it to OpenClaw and Codex? Before this, the agents could reason well, but their web access was limited. They could answer questions, write code, and work with the context I gave them. But once a task required deeper live-web investigation, I still had to manually combine several tools. After connecting Cockroach Crawler, they could: Crawl public websites Render JavaScript-heavy pages Follow sitemaps Search and map documentation sites Extract readable Markdown Extract structured fields with CSS, XPath, or restricted regular expressions Read local and remote PDFs Generate PDFs Take screenshots Handle bounded c