Introduction

ant is a single binary that puts one URI namespace over the whole tamnd/*-cli family. A book on Goodreads, an account on X, an article on Wikipedia — each is a short URI, and ant dereferences it: it fetches the record, follows the typed links out of it, and writes the slice of the graph you asked for to disk. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to run alongside it.

The model

A resource URI is scheme://authority/path. The scheme picks the site, the authority picks the record type, the path is the id:

goodreads://book/2767052
goodreads://author/153394
x://user/nasa
x://status/20
wikipedia://page/Alan_Turing
wikipedia://category/Computability_theory
youtube://video/dQw4w9WgXcQ
youtube://channel/UCuAXFkgsw1L7xaCfnd5JJOw

Every verb takes a URI and does one thing — resolve normalizes any id or URL to its URI, get dereferences it, links lists its outbound edges, export walks those edges and writes the records to disk as the URI tree, where a record's file path is its URI.

How it is built

• A library package (ant) holds the Engine: a thin layer over a kit.Host that knows every registered site. It dereferences URIs, follows links, and materializes the URI tree.
• A set of domain drivers teach ant each site. A driver is a blank import, the way database/sql learns a database — one line links the site CLI in as a Go library, and its records become addressable.
• A command tree (cli) wraps the engine in subcommands with shared output formats and flags, and one cmd/ant entry point ties them together.

Scope

ant is a read-only front door over data the sites already serve publicly. It reads that data and shapes it for you. That narrow scope keeps it a single small binary with no database, no daemon, and no setup.

Next: install it, then take the quick start.