Curviate: search and discovery

Search is where most workflows start: find the person, the company, the post or the posting, then act on it. Two rules decide whether a search is trustworthy, and both fail silently when broken: structured filters take opaque ids, never human text, and a single page is not the result set.

Command surface established against CLI 0.33.0.

Before any command

npm install -g @curviate/cli && curviate --version    # needs Node 18 or newer
curviate login --api-key <key>                        # or export CURVIATE_API_KEY
curviate account list --json                          # the acc_id for --account

• Credentials resolve flag > environment > stored profile (CURVIATE_API_KEY, CURVIATE_BASE_URL, CURVIATE_ACCOUNT).
• --profile <name> picks the stored credential set; --account <acc_id> picks which connected LinkedIn account performs this command. They answer different questions; pass either or both. --account takes an id, never an account name.
• --json on anything you parse; --fields a,b,c to keep result sets small; --verbose when a slim response looks suspiciously empty.
• Put global flags at the end of the command. Trailing placement is unambiguous on every version.
• Branch on the exit code, never on prose. See the table at the end.
• Search is a read. --mode/--max-age are refused here with unknown flag, exit 2. Retrieval mode exists on four commands only, and none of them is a search (see curviate-profile).

Resolve filter terms first

Every id-taking filter (--location, --industry, --company, --school, --title on jobs, --service-category) must be resolved before use:

curviate search parameters --type LOCATION --keywords "Germany" --limit 5 --json
curviate search people --keywords "AI engineer" --location <id> --limit 25 --json

A filter value that is a name rather than an id is silently dropped and the search runs unfiltered, at exit 0. --location "Germany" has returned New York, Bengaluru and Toronto with no warning. There is no error to branch on; the only defence is resolving first. Full parameter-type list and the resolution quirks are in curviate-profile.

The search commands

Command	What it does	Confidence
curviate search people --keywords "…"	Member search. Filters: --industry, --location, --company, --past-company, --school, --network-distance (1-3), --connections-of, --followers-of, --title (free text), --profile-language.	proven
curviate search companies --keywords "…"	Company search. Filters: --industry, --location, --has-job-offers, --headcount.	proven
curviate search posts --keywords "…"	Post search. Filters: --sort-by, --date-posted (past_day, past_week, past_month), --content-type (videos, images, live_videos, collaborative_articles, documents), --posted-by-member, --posted-by-company, --posted-by-me, --mentioning-member, --mentioning-company, --author-industry, --author-company, --author-keywords.	proven
curviate search jobs --keywords "…"	Job-posting search. Filters: --location (single id) or --region, --location-within-area <miles>, --industry, --seniority, --function, --job-type, --company, --title (ids), --presence (on_site, hybrid, remote), --benefits, --commitments, --date-posted (a number of days), --has-verifications, --under-10-applicants, --in-your-network, --fair-chance-employer, --sort-by.	proven
curviate search services --keywords "…"	Services Marketplace providers. At least one of --keywords, --service-category or --location is required. Also --connections (1, 2, 3) and --language.	proven
curviate search groups "<query>"	Keyword search for groups. A no-match search returns an empty list, not an error.	proven
curviate search "<pasted URL>"	Runs a pasted LinkedIn search, saved-search or lead-list URL directly. Reach for it when you already built the filters in the LinkedIn UI.	proven

--filters '<json>', --filters-file <path> and --filters - (stdin) submit a raw filter body on people, companies, posts and jobs. Named flags win on conflict, and the server body schema is strict: an unknown field is a 400, not an ignored key.

Traps

• --industry is a company's registered LinkedIn industry, not a topic. Pairing it with a cross-cutting technology theme silently excludes nearly everything relevant: adding an AI-flavoured industry filter to an otherwise identical function-plus-keywords search dropped a result set from 6,360 to 18. Most companies hiring for an AI role are registered under "Software Development" or "IT Services". Use --keywords and --function for themes; keep --industry for genuine vertical targeting (healthcare, financial services, construction).

• search people --title is free-text; search jobs --title is id-based. Resolving a job-title id and passing it to search people --title silently has no effect: the id is treated as a substring that matches nothing useful.

• --network-distance and --location together have returned a 400 on search people. Pick one or the other however the values were resolved.

• A salary threshold in the raw filter body is unreliable in low-transparency markets. In Germany, three drastically different thresholds against the same search returned identical, unfiltered counts with no error; LinkedIn's salary data is too sparse there to filter against. Spot-check a filtered against an unfiltered count before qualifying leads by salary.

• Job postings can carry company: null, even under --verbose; agency and confidential listings are a legitimate LinkedIn state. Skip them rather than assuming every result has a company.

• Classic job search has no company-size filter. For "mid-size-or-larger companies hiring for X", qualify by size first and then scope the job search to those companies:

  curviate search companies --headcount 201-500,501-1000 --location <loc_id> --json
  curviate search jobs --company <id1>,<id2>,<id3> --function eng --json
  

  The reverse direction (search jobs, then fetch each company to check size) works but is an N+1 with no batch lookup. Use it only when the posting itself is the entry point.

• --headcount 10001+ is not yet supported. Omit that bucket.

Groups

Command	What it does	Confidence
curviate group list	Groups the connected account belongs to: a complete read. --target <slug|URL> enumerates another member's groups instead, which is a partial, interests-only read.	proven
curviate group get <group_id>	One group's detail: name, member count, description, admin contact, and the write-feasibility gates.	proven
curviate group members <group_id>	The member roster: id, profile URL, name, headline, relationship signal. --name filters by prefix or substring, case-insensitively. Requires that the connected account is a member of the group.	proven

Pagination: one page is not the result set

There is no --page N.

Flag	Effect
--limit N	Items per page.
--cursor <c>	Resume from a cursor returned by a previous response.
--all	Stream every page as NDJSON, one object per line.
--max-pages N	Cap how many pages --all fetches.
--page-delay <ms>	Pause between pages (default 400; 0 disables). A modest delay keeps a long stream under the platform rate gate.

Two output shapes, and they parse differently: a single page is an envelope ({"object": "…_list", "items": [...], "cursor": …}), while --all is NDJSON. Some searches add paging.total_count.

--all can stop early. Its last stdout line is then {"object": "stream_truncated", "pages_fetched": N, "has_more": true}. Check for that line before treating a stream as exhaustive.

Full command surface

Read from the CLI's own --help at version 0.33.0. Descriptions, traps and confidence tags elsewhere in this skill are hand-written and carry the version they were established against.

Every command below that takes flags at all also accepts --account, --api-key, --base-url, --beta, --fields, --json, --preview, --profile, --timeout, --verbose.

Command	Arguments	Flags
curviate search	URL	--limit, --cursor, --all, --max-pages, --page-delay
curviate search people	(none)	--limit, --cursor, --all, --max-pages, --page-delay, --keywords, --filters, --filters-file, --industry, --location, --company, --past-company, --school, --network-distance, --connections-of, --followers-of, --title, --profile-language
curviate search companies	(none)	--limit, --cursor, --all, --max-pages, --page-delay, --keywords, --filters, --filters-file, --industry, --location, --has-job-offers, --headcount
curviate search posts	(none)	--limit, --cursor, --all, --max-pages, --page-delay, --keywords, --filters, --filters-file, --sort-by, --date-posted, --content-type, --posted-by-member, --posted-by-company, --posted-by-me, --mentioning-member, --mentioning-company, --author-industry, --author-company, --author-keywords
curviate search jobs	(none)	--limit, --cursor, --all, --max-pages, --page-delay, --keywords, --filters, --filters-file, --location, --industry, --seniority, --function, --job-type, --company, --sort-by, --date-posted, --region, --title, --presence, --benefits, --commitments, --has-verifications, --under-10-applicants, --in-your-network, --fair-chance-employer, --location-within-area
curviate search groups	QUERY	--limit, --cursor, --all, --max-pages, --page-delay
curviate search services	(none)	--limit, --cursor, --all, --max-pages, --page-delay, --keywords, --service-category, --location, --connections, --language
curviate group list	(none)	--limit, --cursor, --all, --max-pages, --page-delay, --target
curviate group get	GROUPID	(none)
curviate group members	GROUPID	--limit, --cursor, --all, --max-pages, --page-delay, --name

Exit codes to branch on here

Code	Meaning	What to do
1	INTERNAL from the server itself: a genuine bug on the platform side.	Worth one retry; if it repeats it is a bug to report, not a state to work around.
2	Usage or invalid input, usually raised before any network call: an unknown flag, a malformed id, a filter body the strict schema rejected.	Fix the invocation. Never retry unchanged.
4	Not found.	Wrong identifier form, or the resource is gone.
5	Three causes, one code: read error.code. NO_ACTIVE_SEAT: the account is on no active seat. LINKEDIN_FEATURE_NOT_SUBSCRIBED: LinkedIn itself lacks the feature. BETA_NOT_ENABLED: the operation is beta-gated and this workspace has not opted in.	Branch on error.code: the three fixes have nothing in common, and none is fixed by retrying unchanged.
6	PLATFORM_RATE_LIMIT and its siblings. Carries retry_after in whole seconds. A response naming budgetRow means only that row is paused; every other row on the account keeps working.	Back off and retry after that many seconds. A long --all walk is the usual cause; raise --page-delay. On a named budgetRow, switch to other work on the account rather than backing off across the board.
7	Transient platform fault: a hiccup, or a request that got no response at all (network error, DNS failure, timeout) or one that came back as something other than a valid API answer. Carries retryLikelyToSucceed: true.	Retry with backoff.
13	BUDGET_EXHAUSTED: a safety rule of your own refused the action, not LinkedIn. Read error.safetyReason: ceiling means the row named in error.budgetRow hit its configured limit; activity_window means the account is outside the hours it works in (no budgetRow on that one). Nothing reached LinkedIn and nothing was spent. reset_at can be weeks out, and may be null where no clock frees it.	Do not back off and retry. error.safetyHint.parameter names the exact setting to change. Read quotas[] via curviate account get <acc_id> --json, then wait for the named reset or change that setting.