deepwiki-cli

A command-line tool for asking questions about AI-generated documentation for GitHub repositories. GitHub is a service where developers host and collaborate on code.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to ask about a repository’s architecture or API, list its documentation topics, or read its full wiki.
Why use it?
It helps you understand an unfamiliar open-source codebase without cloning it and reading all its files first.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/hamsurang/kit/deepwiki-cli
Any agent
npx skills add hamsurang/kit --skill deepwiki-cli
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/hamsurang/kit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 73 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 573 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00073 $0.00573
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.00287
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00115
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00057

Measured 2d ago against content hash 0418b4e10c47, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

deepwiki-cli scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/deepwiki-cli/skills/deepwiki-cli/SKILL.md · 79 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 79 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

deepwiki-cli Skill

deepwiki-cli provides AI-generated wiki documentation for GitHub repositories. Use the deepwiki-cli to query it directly — this keeps only the result text in Claude's context, avoiding MCP protocol overhead.

When This Skill Activates

  • User references a GitHub repository by name (owner/repo format)
  • User asks how a library or framework works
  • User needs to understand a codebase they haven't read locally
  • User asks architecture or API questions about an open-source project

How to Use

Run via Bash tool:

# Ask a question about a repository
deepwiki-cli ask <owner/repo> "<question>"

# List wiki topics for a repository
deepwiki-cli structure <owner/repo>

# Read full wiki contents
deepwiki-cli read <owner/repo>

Examples

deepwiki-cli ask facebook/react "How does the reconciler work?"
deepwiki-cli ask vercel/next.js "What is the App Router architecture?"
deepwiki-cli structure rust-lang/rust
deepwiki-cli read tokio-rs/tokio

Prerequisites

The deepwiki-cli binary must be installed:

cargo install deepwiki-cli

If the binary is not found, inform the user to install it first.

When NOT to Use

  • Repository is already cloned locally — use Glob/Grep/Read tools directly
  • Repository is private — deepwiki-cli only works with public repositories
  • User is asking about their own code in the current working directory

Error Handling

If deepwiki-cli is not installed or a command fails:

  1. Check if the binary exists: which deepwiki-cli
  2. If not found, tell the user to install: cargo install deepwiki-cli
  3. If the repository is not found, verify the owner/repo format
  4. If the command times out, try deepwiki-cli structure first (lighter query), then ask specific questions
  5. As a last resort, fall back to web search for the repository's documentation

Why This Saves Tokens

Using the CLI via Bash outputs only the result text to Claude's context. Connecting deepwiki-cli as an MCP server adds initialize handshake + tool listing overhead on every session start.

Read the full file on GitHub · 79 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 79 lines · 73 tokens per session scan A 0418b4e10c47

Subscribe to this mod's changes

deepwiki-cli is a skill published in the GitHub repository hamsurang/kit (19 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 73 tokens to every session and 573 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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