February 3, 2026
Tiny tadpole, big license drama
Tadpole – A modular and extensible DSL built for web scraping
New ‘Tadpole’ scraping tool launches and the internet immediately argues about its weird license
TLDR: A new tool called Tadpole promises easier, Lego-style instructions for bots that browse websites for you, but the community instantly zoomed in on its unusual “open later” license. People are split between liking the protection from freeloading companies and side-eyeing how free this tool really is right now.
Tadpole, a new mini-language made just for web scraping (that’s automated website data grabbing), has landed—and the very first thing the community wants to talk about is… its legal fine print. The creator shows up in the comments like “hey, I built this cool thing!” and instantly gets hit with, “Wait, what is KDL and what is this Frankenstein license?”
Some users are intrigued by Tadpole’s promise: you write simple, Lego-like instructions and it pretends to be a human using a browser, moving the mouse in smooth curves and clicking around for you. The creator proudly pitches it as “a standardized way of writing scrapers,” basically a universal recipe format for bots. But one commenter steals the spotlight by confessing they had to Google both the underlying format and the license, then casually drops the bomb that this thing isn’t really open source—at least not for two years.
That’s where the drama kicks in. To some, the delayed “real” open license is a clever way to keep big companies from freeloading. To others, it’s a red flag dressed up as a feature. The mood? Curious, slightly suspicious, and very ready to debate whether this tadpole will grow into a beautiful open-source frog or stay a locked-up lab experiment.
Key Points
- •Tadpole is a domain-specific language created for web scraping.
- •The tool emphasizes declarative, modular code for building scrapers.
- •Tadpole supports importing modules from local files or remote repositories.
- •Browser interaction complexity is abstracted by the language.
- •The site includes an Example section (“redfin.kdl”, “output”) and links to Docs and GitHub.