What's new in tl v0.8.0: clearer field names across the board and Media Selling Network editing from the CLI

A new release of the tl CLI is out today: v0.8.0. The headline is what we’ve been calling internally the big rename — a friendlier, more self-explanatory vocabulary for the fields your AI agent uses every day. Add to that a new lever for managing the Media Selling Network from the CLI, and a small documentation polish on keyword research. As always, Claude Code, Gemini, Codex, and OpenCode pick everything up automatically the next time you run tl update.

Field names that mean what they say

If you’ve ever squinted at an tl sponsorships show output and tried to remember which of the half-dozen date or count columns meant what, this release is for you. We took a pass across the entire CLI surface — sponsorships, channels, schema references, glossary entries, query examples in the bundled skills — and renamed the fields that had drifted away from plain English.

What changed, in language your agent can now use directly:

• advertiser — the brand-side party on a sponsorship. The previous label was an internal-facing term that didn’t match how account managers actually talk about deals.
• subscribers — a channel’s subscriber count. Previously hidden behind a less obvious column name; it’s now a first-class field everywhere it appears.
• projected_views — the day-30 view forecast for a sponsorship. The earlier name suggested something more abstract than what the number actually represents.
• is_tpp — the Top Tier Partners flag on a channel, now named for what it is.
• scheduled_date (was send_date) — when a sponsorship is set to go live. The accompanying CLI filters move with it: --scheduled-date-start / --scheduled-date-end for sponsorship date-range queries.

The practical effect: when your agent reaches for any of these fields — in a tl sponsorships history filter, a tl db sql query, or a query example in one of the bundled skills — it now reaches for a name that reads like the thing it represents. Fewer guesses, fewer “did you mean…” exchanges, fewer little stumbles in the middle of a research session.

In agent-speak, the kind of question that used to require a follow-up clarification now lands cleanly on the first try:

• “Show me sponsorships scheduled to go live in the next two weeks, sorted by projected views.”
• “Pull the channels with more than 500K subscribers that are flagged as Top Tier Partners.”
• “For each open sponsorship with this advertiser, give me the scheduled date and the projected views.”
• “Build a list of channels not yet on the Media Selling Network, ranked by subscriber count.”

If you’ve never typed a column name yourself, you won’t notice — your agent absorbs all of this and your prompts keep working. If you have, you’ll likely find the new names easier to remember and easier to teach to a teammate.

A small note for the curious: the raw Elasticsearch search index keeps its existing field names (it isn’t being migrated), so anyone writing raw tl db es queries by hand will see the legacy names there. The schema reference your agent reads has been updated to reflect that — so your agent picks the right name automatically depending on which engine it’s querying.

Add or remove a channel from the Media Selling Network in one line

The Media Selling Network (MSN) — the curated set of channels we actively sell into — has always been visible from the CLI. As of v0.8.0, your agent can also edit it.

tl channels update now accepts a media_selling_network_join_date field. Pass a YYYY-MM-DD date to add a channel to the MSN as of that date; pass null to remove it. That’s the whole interface.

What this unlocks, in the kinds of conversations account managers have a few times a week:

• “This creator just signed with us — add channel UC1234abcd to the Media Selling Network as of today.”
• “We’re winding down our partnership with this channel. Remove it from the MSN.”
• “Backdate channel UCxxxyyy’s MSN join to 2026-05-01 — that’s when the contract actually started.”

It’s a small change in code, but a meaningful one in workflow. Updating MSN membership used to mean leaving the CLI and going to do the edit somewhere else; now it lives in the same place where your agent already looks at the channel.

A small polish on keyword research

The keyword-research skill (the one your agent reaches for whenever you ask “find me channels that cover X”) got a documentation refresh to keep its description in sync with the CNF expression flow that landed in v0.7.15. Same behaviour — boolean refinement over at least three rounds, ranked and validated channel shortlist as the headline result, the final keyword expression saved as a reusable CNF artifact — just clearer wording in the skill blurbs so your agent reaches for it on the first ask.

If you missed the bigger v0.7.15 write-up on this flow, it’s worth a look: find me channels that actually cover [topic] is now a one-shot ask, and the agent shows its work as it narrows in.

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.