What's new in tl v0.7.11: smarter creator search and automatic YouTube discovery

A new release of the tl CLI is out today: v0.7.11. The headline change is something every account manager and brand researcher hits a few times a week — looking up a creator by name. That moment when you paste in a channel name and get back “Not found” used to be a small but real friction point. This release closes it almost entirely. As always, your AI agent — Claude Code, Gemini, Codex, or OpenCode — picks all of this up automatically.

Finding a channel by name now actually works

Two long-standing rough edges in tl channels find have been smoothed out. They sound small, individually; together they change how the command feels.

Spacing and typos no longer break the search. A name like “Deco Destiny” used to come back empty if the creator brands themselves as DecoDestiny — and vice versa. The search now matches across spacing variants, common typos, and capitalisation differences, and either resolves the right channel directly or hands back a short list of candidates ranked by how close the name is. You no longer have to guess the exact stylisation a creator picked for their handle.

A name we don’t track yet gets looked up on YouTube. This is the more exciting one. If the name isn’t in our index, tl channels find now reaches out to YouTube — a quick exact-handle check first, then a broader search — to see if the channel exists in the real world. Two things can happen:

• The channel exists and we already track it under a different name. It resolves directly.
• The channel exists but we’ve never seen it before. It gets queued for analysis automatically, and the response tells you to check back in about 24 hours.

A plain “Not found” now means something stronger than it used to: even YouTube doesn’t have a match. That’s usually a sign the name is wrong, not that the creator is missing from our catalogue.

What this unlocks, in the kind of conversation you’d have with your agent:

• “A prospect just mentioned a creator called ‘Deco Destiny’ — pull what we have on them.”
• “Here’s a list of fifteen channels a brand wants us to evaluate. Resolve them all and flag any we don’t track yet.”
• “Find me ‘Mythical Kitchen’ — and if we don’t have them yet, queue them up and I’ll loop back tomorrow.”
• “This influencer was on a podcast last week, the host called them ‘Anna’s Analog’. Find their channel.”

The result: fewer dead ends, fewer follow-up questions, and a smooth path from “I just heard about this creator” to “they’re in our system, here’s the analysis” — without you having to know the precise way they spell their own name.

When using the tl tool directly, the command stays the same:

  tl channels find "Deco Destiny"
  tl channels find "Mythical Kitchen" --json

Smoother setup for Claude Code

Setting tl up inside Claude Code (tl setup claude) is now plugin-first: it installs the whole CLI as a proper Claude Code plugin and adds a /tl shortcut so the way you’ve always invoked it keeps working. If for any reason the plugin install can’t run on your machine, it quietly falls back to the standalone skills. If you’ve already set it up, the next run will tidy up any leftover copies that exactly match the bundled ones — without ever touching files you’ve edited yourself.

Nothing to do on your end except, if you haven’t yet, run tl setup claude once.

Under-the-hood improvements

A few smaller items round out the release, mostly for the analysts and engineers who write custom data queries directly:

• Bigger pages for custom queries. Raw-DB lookups can now pull back up to 10,000 records per page (was 500), so wide sweeps finish in fewer round-trips.
• Cleaner schema documentation. Two long-standing confusions about what specific fields actually mean (reach is the subscriber count, impression is projected views — not actual ones) are now corrected everywhere your agent looks them up, so analytical answers come back accurate the first time.
• Smarter agent routing for named lookups. The built-in guidance now tells your agent to reach for tl channels find and tl brands find first whenever you mention a creator or brand by name — instead of slow, expensive scans through the raw database. That’s faster answers and smaller bills on questions like “what do we have on this creator?”.

Updating

Run tl update to pick all of this up — or just keep working, and the auto-updater will catch you up on your next command. tl changelog always shows the running log of what’s landed.

Happy hunting.