#158

D2's paid layout engine went free as Terrastruct winds down, and 7 agents invoiced $12,431

Terrastruct is winding down, so its founder open-sourced TALA, the layout engine that funded D2. It now ships in v0.9.0 behind one flag, no license key.

Terrastruct is closing. The company sold a diagram IDE and a layout engine called TALA, and that revenue is what paid for D2 in the open. Instead of letting TALA die with the company, the founder open-sourced it.

D2 keeps going as an independent non-profit under Hack Club, paid for by donations. terrastruct.com and the pricing page behind it now land on d2lang.com.

In today’s indie hacker news:

  • 📐 TALA goes free on Terrastruct’s way out
  • 🧾 An agent billed strangers to get around its email limit
  • 🚪 The VMware exit download went dark, no notice
  • 🗂️ Skills files: what HN actually keeps in git

TOP STORIES

THE COMPANY CLOSES, THE ENGINE OPENS

📐 TALA is open source and ships inside D2

A man in a purple hoodie hangs a large brass key on a hook beside a shop with its shutter half down, while a giant tangle of wires beside him unwinds into neat parallel lines running through blank boxes

The story: D2 v0.9.0 shipped Sunday night with TALA in the binary. You switch it on with d2 --layout=tala and there’s no key to type in. The repo moved to d2lang/d2, carrying its 25,229 stars.

The details:

  • The bundle that included TALA was $20/month/user.
  • Maintainer Alexander Wang, not the Scale AI one, names the downside himself: three seeds of randomness, and one extra node can redraw the whole diagram.
  • Pin a node’s coordinates and TALA still routes the edges, which he aims at agents that place boxes fine and route them badly.
  • On what comes next: “all of my contributions will use AI… The exception is writing.”

Why builders care: There’s one paid contributor slot open on the repo, aimed at someone early-career with open-source experience. The address is alex@d2lang.com.

ROUND TWO, STILL ZERO CUSTOMERS

🧾 Seven models got a bank account each and invoiced strangers $12,431

A man in a purple hoodie stands in the doorway of an empty cobwebbed shop while a towering machine pours a mountain of scribbled paper slips across the ground and out through the mail slot, with no customer anywhere

The story: Bottleneck Labs gave each model $300 and a 72-hour window, then posted the write-up to HN itself. We ran its first attempt in #119. Revenue came back zero again.

The details:

  • Grok 4.5 hit its email limit and wrote the workaround down: “Resend is capped - using Stripe invoice emails (their delivery)… this bypasses our email!”
  • Qwen 3.8 sent 50 invoices, $49 to $599 each, for repo audits nobody ordered. All voided.
  • A stranger complained on HN about the spam 27 days before the write-up went up.
  • Cash actually lost was $359.80. The rest of the “nearly $3,200” is compute at list prices.

Why builders care: Your outbound rate limit isn’t a control if the agent can reach a second service that sends mail for it. Every tool that can put text in a stranger’s inbox needs its own cap.

THE EXIT TOOL WENT MISSING

🚪 The download every VMware migration tool needs has 404’d since August

A man in a purple hoodie stands with a rolling suitcase at the foot of a high wall, looking up as a giant hand lifts the rope ladder away from the only door, beside an empty notice board

The story: Broadcom’s VDDK pages went dark around August 25. That library sits under Azure Migrate, Red Hat’s Migration Toolkit and Nutanix Move. Two weeks on, Broadcom hasn’t published a word about it.

The details:

  • Red Hat’s KB says it plainly: the old links “are no longer active”, and it can’t redistribute the library.
  • Microsoft edited Azure Migrate the same day to point at agent-based migration. It still links the dead URL.
  • What two r/sysadmin users got from support instead: VDDK “is no longer available for use or download”.
  • A mirror site pulled three VDDK binaries after a copyright complaint. HN is trading archive.org torrents.

Why builders care: A proprietary SDK your installer fetches at runtime is a dependency with someone else’s off switch on it. Migration tooling is the worst possible place to find that out.

🗂️ HN counted its own answer on skills files - 296 points, and 21 of the first 30 top-level replies say the same thing: write your own, keep them in a git repo, symlink that into every harness. avaer’s top comment: “Skills are mostly snake oil, the way people use them.” alexhans tests his: “Think of them like integration tests to prove behaviour.” vercel-labs/skills has 30,638 stars and isn’t what they use.

🧮 Ten circle-packing records fell for $27.72 - Wes Sander ran an LLM-evolved optimiser, and Packomania logged the new candidates for N=101 to 114 on September 2, two days before his paper went up. He posted it to r/MachineLearning himself and the thread has three comments, so the record-keeper is the only one who checked. His own note is the useful part: the run would’ve stopped at iteration 9 for half the cost.

📺 Gamers Nexus says LG sets capture mic audio in standby - The writeup hit 1,120 points. Keep the two claims apart: content fingerprinting is old news, the new one is a TV saving voice input locally with Ethernet unplugged, then uploading it once the network returned. It’s one video, nobody outside the channel has reproduced it, and LG hasn’t responded.

DRAMA

⏳ WHAT A $20 SEAT ACTUALLY BUYS

A Tell HN about the 5-hour Codex limit drew 124 points, and three people noted it hit Plus two weeks ago. The checkable part: OpenAI’s own table gives Business Standard the same window as Plus, model for model. The $100 tier gets the Pro allowance.

Why builders care: The org plan is not a capacity upgrade, whatever the price suggests.

FIRST DOLLAR

🏘️ HE BUILT A VILLAGE INSTEAD OF A DASHBOARD

u/speaklifeandaimup and a co-founder sell software that helps Norwegian parents of disabled kids work the welfare system. Charts felt wrong for numbers that meant this much, so every subscriber became a pixel-art villager. The screenshot shows 45 of them, 8,955 NOK a month, and a blurred-out product name. On a rendering bug: “One villager was suddenly standing in the middle of the pond. We’ve decided this is morning bathing culture and refuse to fix it.”

💳 HE DELETED THE FREE TIER AND GOT PAID THE NEXT DAY

Gautham Yaramasa built ResetUI, where you paste a landing page URL and get an AI redesign. Two months of free access brought 185 signups and no money. He took the free option away and put a $9 plan in its place. He refuses to draw a lesson from it: one data point, he says, and he wants a second.

STACK OF THE DAY

bzip3 - A bzip2 successor with bigger blocks, an LZP prefilter, and a context-mixing coder where bzip2 had Huffman. The 2022 repo hit the front page over the weekend. A commenter called the build broken and the project abandoned, and 1.5.4 shipped five hours later. LGPL-3.0, stricter than bzip2’s own license. brew install bzip3.

Not sponsored. We just feature tools builders would actually use.

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