[HN Gopher] Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineeri...
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Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
Author : kevlened
Score : 831 points
Date : 2026-01-07 16:02 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| kevlened wrote:
| More details:
|
| https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/discussions/1467...
|
| https://x.com/adamwathan/status/2008909129591443925
|
| https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
| ZeroConcerns wrote:
| That's sad to hear, if true, and I'd have gladly paid for
| Tailwind if they'd had a "OK, so you use our CSS indirectly"
| program in place. I'm aware of "Tailwind Plus", but that seems to
| be React-only, and thus the opposite of where I want to be.
| freedomben wrote:
| It's not React only. It has pure/regular HTML, React, and Vue.
| I have mainly only used the pure HTML personally as I use
| Phoenix/LiveView for most of my stuff, and it works
| phenomenally well and is very copy/paste friendly. The
| UI/console they provide is also top notch. For others who do
| use React, the React stuff also worked well too for one project
| I did that was a SPA.
|
| It's well worth the money IMHO.
| ZeroConcerns wrote:
| I just had a more-detailed look, and I'm not sure where I'd
| find the pure-HTML stuff? From
| https://tailwindcss.com/plus/templates/pocket#pricing:
|
| "Our website templates are built using Next.js, so all of the
| markup is written using React"
|
| And the individual components that make up these templates
| don't seem to have pricing attached, nor non-React usage
| examples?
| freedomben wrote:
| Oh, yeah the _templates_ are React /Next.js, but the
| components and things are not (they are what I described
| above). Templates are great but 95% of the value I get is
| the components and things
| ZeroConcerns wrote:
| So, my initial reaction that "Tailwind Plus" only offers
| apparent value for React users is... entirely valid?
| freedomben wrote:
| Only if you ignore this part of my comment:
|
| > 95% of the value I get is the components and things
|
| If you want (and _only_ want) a pre-built site that just
| needs populated with content and maybe minor tweaks to
| things, then yeah it 's React world. However I've rarely
| found that any template site (Tailwind or otherwise) is
| close enough to where it doesn't need medium to major
| surgery to meet my needs, at which point it's usually
| faster to just copy together components to what I
| actually want
| ZeroConcerns wrote:
| > If you want (and only want) a pre-built site
|
| No, I want to be able to @import "tailwindcss" without
| feeling guilty.
|
| > I've rarely found that any template site
|
| Well, meet https://basecoatui.com -- and there's more
| where that came from.
|
| So, ehhm, no, I'm not ignoring the salient part of your
| comment: _you_ are ignoring the entire point of my post,
| which is that if Tailwind had a non-React monetization
| strategy, things _maybe_ , _possibly_ , _might_ have
| worked out better.
| whstl wrote:
| You were linking to their React-only offering above, but
| the actual Tailwind Plus website is this one:
| https://tailwindcss.com/plus
|
| The Tailwind UI blocks are a similar offering to
| Basecoat, and are available in non-React format.
|
| The "Tailwind React Templates" are not really similar to
| Basecoat.
| james2doyle wrote:
| You can actually use tailwind via the script tag in a plain
| HTML file. Not for production, but great for whipping up
| prototypes
| freedomben wrote:
| Indeed, I've done this quite a few times myself. It's also a
| phenomenal way to be able to start poking at UI immediately
| without messing with build pipelines or anything besides just
| pointing your browser at `file:///...`. Then if the prototype
| is useful it's very easy to just delete the script tag and
| get it set up "properly" for a prod build and you know your
| prototype will pretty much "just work"
| freedomben wrote:
| Very sad to hear, I bought Tailwind UI years ago and although it
| was a lot more expensive than I wanted, I've appreciated the care
| and precision and highly recommend buying it (It's now called
| Tailwind Plus) even still (maybe even especially now).
|
| Mad props to Adam for his honesty and transparency. Adam if
| you're reading, just know that the voices criticizing you are not
| the only voices out there. Thanks for all you've done to improve
| web development and I sincerely hope you can figure out a way to
| navigate the AI world, and all the best wishes.
|
| Btw the Tailwind newsletter/email that goes out is genuinely
| useful as well, so I recommend signing up for that if you use
| Tailwind CSS at all.
| dawnerd wrote:
| I think think tailwind ui was one of the better purchases I've
| made (web tech wise). Up there with the lifetime acf pro
| license.
|
| This sucks to see but was pretty obvious when it became the go
| to framework for LLMs.
| khy wrote:
| Tailwind Plus is great - I love the lifetime access, but I
| always wondered how sustainable that model was. Even without
| AI, how many of those memberships could they sell?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I thought the same, and yet on the other hand, how could they
| have done it differently? People don't want to pay a
| subscription just to write a DSL of CSS. Perhaps they
| could've done it per project like some companies, but I don't
| think it'd be as popular as their lifetime model. Ironic.
| re-thc wrote:
| MUI sells paid components paid monthly. Definitely doable
| for the paid product.
| c-hendricks wrote:
| I'm not super familiar with tailwind plus, but I am
| familiar with MUI.
|
| MUIs paid offerings are open-core, you pay for support
| and a couple of extra features.
|
| Tailwind plus looks like paying for basic components
| (checkboxes, sidebars, buttons) and it doesn't even offer
| anything like DataGrid (free with mui).
| risyachka wrote:
| What most don't realize is that this will happen to most
| businesses in all categories as more people rely on ChatGPT and
| Claude for discovery.
|
| No discovery - no business.
|
| And same with ads.if OpenAI decides not to add ads - prepare
| for even faster business consolidation. Those businesses
| preferred by llms will exponentially grow, others will quickly
| go out of business
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Underscoring the parent comment and adding to it: watching
| technologists on a site called Hacker News cheer on the
| centralization of power is really something.
| nine_k wrote:
| There's nothing cheerful in that comment, it describes a
| danger that inexorably draws nearer and nearer.
| npodbielski wrote:
| Maybe he meant this in more general way. Or this is how
| did read this.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| My post was meant to underscore the parent's post, not
| argue with it.
| Aperocky wrote:
| I don't think any power is as centralized as Google is to
| search about 10 years ago? Or Facebook is to social media
| in the same time frame? What has changed other than the
| players?
| raydev wrote:
| Google still offered a path for business/individuals that
| allowed both sides to profit immensely via advertising.
| Google also guided people to sources of information once
| you look past the ads.
|
| With the AI companies, they suck up all freely available
| _and_ proprietary information, hide the sources, and give
| information away to consumers for mostly free.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > as more people rely on ChatGPT and Claude for discovery
|
| In my limited web dev experience with these tools, they
| suggest and push Tailwind CSS very often when asked for
| advice.
|
| The Tailwind company wasn't selling that, though. They were
| selling premium packages of components, templates, and
| themes. The demand for that type of material has dropped off
| significantly now that you can get an LLM to do a moderately
| good job of making common layouts and components. Then you
| can adjust them yourself until they're exactly what you want.
| burningChrome wrote:
| > No discovery - no business.
|
| I do SEO as a side gig to my 9-5 as a developer. All four of
| my freelance companies I work with have seen their traffic
| drop up to 40% since LLM's have effectively taken over and
| people are using search engines less and less.
|
| We've had to pivot to short form social media advertising
| which seems to be closing the gap whereas before the majority
| of our leads were coming from organic search and being ranked
| high in their respective industries. It certainly takes more
| effort to craft a script, film it, edit it to add text
| overlays, animations and catchy effects, but its showing me
| its being effective in the leads we're generating.
|
| I'm not sure if this is a sort of generational thing back
| when my parents were so engrained to use the yellow pages and
| then that stopped once the internet got into the advertising
| business - but it feels like a similar transition is taking
| place again.
|
| As many have already told me, "Ignore AI at your peril"
| motbus3 wrote:
| Same where I work for 30% on some regions and for those
| where they put money only saw a minimum increase.
|
| I honestly think the company is run by some good folks that
| are really trying to do some positive impact. They refuse
| so all sorts of bs ad-tracking gray area stuff, yet, people
| don't give a dime.
|
| We caught over and over anthropic and others using shade
| tactics to bypass bot protection. They get the content,
| plagiarise it and contribute absolute nothing back. For
| weeks, openai was crawling our resources on DDOS levels of
| traffic.
|
| F them. They just are just stealing and making businesses
| fail. This will be a catastrophe for many but yet, people
| think there is no relation.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Perhaps SEO will become a business to churn out large
| amount of digestable text with friendly robot.txt and
| hoping the next AI model learns it? This seem to be the
| solution, just having a slightly longer turn around time.
| pier25 wrote:
| I'm not sure if this is comparable to the yellow pages vs
| the internet.
|
| Google became profitable in 2001 whereas OpenAI _et al_ are
| still operating at a huge loss. Even with ads it 's not
| clear whether LLMs can be profitable unless they increase
| prices significantly.
| usef- wrote:
| Google was not profitable until they rolled out ads,
| either.
|
| The scope of use of AI assistants in people's lives are
| significantly higher than google search, imo. People use
| it in far more scenarios already than just information
| retrieval. That's why some are betting there's a chance
| it's more valuable than present-day google search.
| LanceJones wrote:
| OpenAI could be profitable (easily) if it stopped
| training new models. Whether they will make that choice
| or not, who knows.
| aatd86 wrote:
| That would be short-termist though. So, quite unlikely.
| In my usage (code) they are still better than everything
| else I have tried. Point being that I am looking
| predominantly for the one llm that gives me the best code
| output. If they risk losing that advantage for immediate
| profit, guess I will cancel like I did for claude... (I
| still got a gemini subscription, for some reason it has a
| good UI, fast for common non technical requests).
|
| Seems to have been my pattern of behavior with all these
| tools.
| zdragnar wrote:
| The real question is, have your actual qualified leads
| decreased?
|
| So much traffic is bogus or looking for something adjacent
| to what they land on that I'm not entirely convinced AI is
| at fault here.
|
| It very well could be, but I'd love to see a real deep dive
| rather than potential coincidence.
| wombatpm wrote:
| If you can identify scraping bots, can't you just serve
| them pages and pages of Lor Ipsum text
| zdragnar wrote:
| Not every human visits to buy either.
|
| The real signal is conversions. If the percentage of
| people who visit and then buy / sign up remains constant,
| while traffic goes down, you can conclude LLMs are part
| of the cause.
|
| OTOH if traffic goes down but conversions goes up in
| percentage, then it's hard to say LLMs are having a
| negative consequence.
| pier25 wrote:
| > _most businesses in all categories as more people rely on
| ChatGPT and Claude for discovery_
|
| What about restaurants, transportation, construction,
| healthcare, or manufacturing?
|
| Will those go out of business too?
| acdha wrote:
| The better question is how well they do in a world where
| you have to pay OpenAI to be included. A local restaurant
| can likely survive on local advertising, neighborhood
| traffic, etc. but I'd bet a lot of categories further
| consolidate to favor larger companies who can negotiate LLM
| placement deals.
| _JamesA_ wrote:
| Are you referring to signing up for the blog[1] email or
| something else? It was last updated July 25, 2025.
|
| [1]: https://tailwindcss.com/blog
| password4321 wrote:
| Referring to TFA (couple of comments on the issue).
|
| https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is.
| ..
|
| https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is.
| ..
| zamadatix wrote:
| I think they mean where does one sign up to this
| newsletter.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Smells like unnecessary sycophancy: I grep'd Adam in every
| comment and every single. one. is positive and phrased like
| this.
|
| I grew up on this site, from 20 year old dropout waiter in
| Buffalo to 37 year old ex-Googler. One of the things I'm
| noticing me reacting to the last year or two is a "putting on a
| pedestal" effect that's unnecessary.
| mmcclure wrote:
| I think context matters here. People are being kind to
| someone who just had to lay off most of their team because,
| despite their project's popularity and success (maybe even
| because of it), a massive change in the ecosystem completely
| destroyed their business model.
|
| I've never been a huge fan of using Tailwind personally, but
| I deeply appreciated that they were making a (mostly) non-
| enterprise FOSS model work in an interesting way. It's a
| shame that it seems that's likely dead in the water now.
| searls wrote:
| This is madness. Some stories actually have good guys. I
| don't know Adam directly, but we have plenty of second degree
| connections. I've benefited immensely from his work, have
| never heard anyone say a single negative thing about him, and
| I genuinely believe he's done more to push the web forward
| with Tailwind than the larger players have done (certainly
| more than Facebook did with React and Google has done with
| Angular/AMP/etc).
|
| Reflexively assuming that unanimous positive sentiment
| towards someone is itself an indication of a problem is
| exactly the reason people are writing posts as recently as (
| _double checks_ ) _yesterday_ titled "65% of Hacker News
| Posts Have Negative Sentiment, and They Outperform"
| https://philippdubach.com/standalone/hn-sentiment/
| refulgentis wrote:
| No one said he isn't a good guy. Just that it was weird to
| have 15 comments saying "ignore the haters you're a good
| guy!"
|
| The "madness" here was you replying as if I said he wasn't.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Perhaps if you'd simply read the thread you would have also
| seen these comments, which don't name Adam but are addressed
| to him:
|
| > We can't make it easier to use our product because then
| fewer people will visit our website" is certainly a business
| strategy.
|
| > You are telling your customers that getting money from
| them, is more important than providing a service to help
| them.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Tailwind did a great job of building a fanbase. Even without
| LLMs I always thought they were on a collision course with
| market saturation, though. They generously gave lifetime access
| for a one-time payment, which was bound to run into problems as
| free alternatives became better and their core fanbase didn't
| have any reason to spend more money.
|
| Their business model also missed the boat on the rise of Figma
| and similar tools. I can think back to a couple different
| projects where the web developers wanted to use Tailwind [Plus]
| components but the company had a process that started in Figma.
| It's hard to sell the designers on using someone else's
| component library when they have to redraw it in Figma anyway.
| dfee wrote:
| alternatively, Adam executed the superior pricing strategy.
| had he charged for recurring licenses, would fewer people
| have signed up? would his subscriptions also be drawing down?
|
| i wouldn't have bought a sub, but i did pay for tailwind
| premium (and, frankly, didn't use it like i'd've hoped).
| however, it was a bit of a Kickstarter investment for me. i
| like Adam's persona, and was happy to see continued
| investment down this path.
|
| as many a business knows, you need to bring new initiatives
| to the table over, or accept that your one product carries
| all your risk.
|
| thank you for Tailwind, Adam.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Adam presented his case for the lifetime pricing model in
| this podcast episode in 2023:
|
| https://hackersincorporated.com/episodes/lifetime-pricing-
| is...
|
| I believe he succeeding in convincing Sam and Ryan to adopt
| lifetime pricing for their UI course at
| https://buildui.com/pricing. I've purchased Build UI, and
| it was an excellent product, but unfortunately it appears
| to be completely dead for at least a full year now.
|
| Neither the unannounced death of Build UI nor this
| apparently financial catastrophe for Tailwind bode well for
| the prospects of lifetime pricing! Although the problem
| might be more related to the entire market segment
| (frontend programming and design courses) than to the
| particular pricing model.
| seanw265 wrote:
| I'll piggyback on this to highlight Refactoring UI as well.
| It's an ebook by Adam and Steve, though I'm not sure if it's
| technically part of Tailwind Labs or not.
|
| This book taught me so much about modern UI design. If you've
| ever tried building a component and thought to yourself, "hmm
| something about this looks off," you might benefit from this
| book.
|
| These days some of the examples might be a little bit dated
| (fashions come and go), but the principles it teaches you are
| rock solid.
| porker wrote:
| FWIW I found Practical UI [1] a more actionable book than
| Refactoring UI. Both are similar but I found it covered the
| material in a more accessible way.
|
| 1. https://www.practical-ui.com/
| port11 wrote:
| I could never afford Tailwind UI but then again I don't really
| use Tailwind. That said, as an open-source styling solution,
| they could be supported in other ways. A lot -- and I really
| mean a lot -- of websites are built with Tailwind, yet very few
| consider donating or buying what they have to offer.
|
| Plenty of F/LOSS is in the same state: businesses extract all
| value they can from open-source, but put back nothing. That's
| mining The Commons. LLMs are just accelerating this trend.
|
| It's never gonna work in the long run. Let's go back to writing
| everything in house then, since we're 100x more productive and
| don't have to pay a dime for other people's work.
| tazjin wrote:
| My current take is that if you start an open-source project
| now, you should go full AGPL (or similar copyleft license),
| and require a CLA for contributors.
|
| If your thing ends up actually good you now have a defence
| against exploitation, and a way to generate income reliably
| (by selling the code under a different license). afaik,
| organisations like the FSF even endorse this.
| matt-p wrote:
| I agree, I'm quite curious on what feelings are about still
| putting it in a public GitHub repo?
|
| AI models will train on your codebase, unethical actors
| will still take it and not pay. Others can give the .zip to
| Claude and ask it to reimplement it in a way that isn't
| license infringement. I think it really turns open source
| upside down. Is this a risk worth taking or best to just
| make getting the source something that's a .zip on a
| website which the models realistically won't train on.
| mooreds wrote:
| > Btw the Tailwind newsletter/email that goes out is genuinely
| useful as well, so I recommend signing up for that if you use
| Tailwind CSS at all.
|
| What is the signup link? I googled a bit but couldn't find it.
| jolt42 wrote:
| AI taking jobs by users avoiding ads. It makes me wonder how
| widespread this is and what other "not so obvious" job-taking
| effects it has.
| bjord wrote:
| That's not what they're talking about here, though, is it? They
| have premium offerings as well, which LLMs are causing people
| to not buy.
|
| Put another way: Adam said traffic to their docs was down 40%
| and revenue was down 80%. I don't think it's purely traffic-
| driven revenue.
| srameshc wrote:
| > But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering
| team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact
| AI has had on our business.
|
| Adam is simply trying to navigate this new reality, and he's
| being honest, so there's no need to criticize him.
| random_duck wrote:
| Agreed. Also I could not imagine being in his shoes, it must be
| heartbreaking seeing all his work burn like this.
| blitzar wrote:
| It is "progress" when tech bros displace traditional workers,
| but it is "heartbreaking" when a tech bro gets displaced by
| other tech bros.
|
| Whats the 2026 version of _" you should learn to code"_?
| elictronic wrote:
| You should learn to vote for UBI?
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| Everyone suggests UBI like this sort of thing is a
| massive hurricane and we just gotta take it on the chin.
|
| Nah man, this stuff isn't happening anywhere else. We can
| simply say "No, you don't get to ruin the economy for
| your personal profit."
| falcor84 wrote:
| Well, here you said it; is it over now?
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| I'm confused, do you not know what "we" means?
| falcor84 wrote:
| Yes, I have no idea who's this magical "we" in your "We
| can simply". To me this seems like a textbook
| coordination problem leading to a tragedy of the commons-
| even if you got 99.9% of the world into your "we", the
| remaining "defectors" would have a massive benefit from
| using AI to replace human labor.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| It really seems like you do know what I mean and you're
| just communicating in bad faith which is against the
| rules:
|
| > Please respond to the strongest plausible
| interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one
| that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
|
| I know it feels good to get off a quip, but resist the
| urge.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| the strong interpretation is that you mean we gotta do
| something. and it's really not "simply" even because "we"
| needs to include everyone and whoever is a renegade will
| get more benefit.
|
| so if "say" is an euphemism for "do" it seems an obvious
| question what exactly do we "do". that's another reason
| why it's not "simply". even if everybody was ready to do
| something as one, if you think everybody just knows what
| we should do because it's so obvious you'r mistaken.
|
| sure it's asked a bit sarcastic but sarcasm isn't banned
| right?
| umanwizard wrote:
| No, I have the same question as that other poster. It is
| not a bad faith question.
|
| There are a lot of problems that would be solved
| immediately if "we" (i.e. all of humanity, or all of the
| U.S. or some other country) decided collectively to do
| something: climate change, nuclear weapons proliferation,
| war, and so on. But that's effectively wishing for magic
| -- there is no way to get everyone to collectively agree
| on something, so unless you explain how to cope with that
| fact, you haven't actually made any progress.
|
| Given that I personally don't control humanity as a hive
| mind, what can I do to fix this problem? You haven't
| proposed an answer to that.
| paul7986 wrote:
| Indeed we need to revolt against AI and force every other
| big powerful nation to do the same thing. Yet
| unfortunately that seems like a big joke until AI has
| destroyed their society too.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Not only can we not just do that (you did not even define
| what you mean), but China is coming out with models that
| are good enough for this purpose - and they are, because
| they are open, everywhere.
| Tostino wrote:
| Agreed, it's one of the only ways forward I can think of
| while still maintaining markets in some part of the
| economy...that is, if you care about the human condition
| at all. Plenty of these tech leaders seem to want to
| replace humanity though, so this will be an uphill
| battle.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It's a nice fantasy but completely contrary to human
| nature.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| What is your alternative, when the price humans can sell
| their labor at dips below what is necessary for them to
| survive? All these takes about "UBI will demolish the
| human spirit" or whatever are just ridiculous when the
| alternative is "starve to death".
| ryoshoe wrote:
| Just doing nothing isn't great for the "human spirit",
| but UBI doesn't mean people can't find their own goals to
| pursue. The idea of something where people are not longer
| required to work to survive is hard to accept since many
| people haven't seriously considered how they could
| meaning outside of their careers
| hackable_sand wrote:
| I could ask every one of my coworkers what they would do
| and they would have a realistic answer.
|
| I don't really have sympathy for people attached to their
| careers. They did that to themselves.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I see two alternatives, one that people find new ways to
| do productive work with or in the presence of LLM, or
| massive social unrest, rebellion, war and/or starving to
| death, followed by a reset. I.e. the way human nature has
| responded to similar imbalances in the past.
| Tostino wrote:
| So, you have no actual thoughts on this topic other than
| "UBI is bad" is what I hear.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| My thoughts are that UBI is not compatible with human
| nature. It cannot work at societal scale. I'm not sure
| how I can state it more simply.
| Tostino wrote:
| You were asked for alternatives, and said essentially
| "UBI bad, keep doing what we've been doing". Sorry, that
| seems lazy and uninteresting to me.
| mulmen wrote:
| So is a compiler. Humanity is the conscious altering of
| nature.
| squibonpig wrote:
| Glad to hear you've isolated the UBI-incompatibility
| (UBII) gene. Could you present your findings for the rest
| of us?
| smileson2 wrote:
| be real it's just going to be slavery and murder of
| anyone who disagrees
| j16sdiz wrote:
| I can't imagine how it could work internationally, when
| people can literally migrate between countries and
| countries ain't sharing resources for free
| esafak wrote:
| They can? How many times have you migrated? Try going
| from the Middle East or Africa to any developed country.
| npodbielski wrote:
| You are joking right? There were handred of thousands of
| people that did this in last ten years or so to EU.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| Funded by an automation tax as proposed by Martin Ford.
| Not holding my breath on either count. We mustn't upset
| the 1,000 or so billionaires in this country in any way
| for they are wise and they are kind and only bad things
| will happen if we do.
|
| But chin up, peasant, each and every one of us can dream
| of one day being a billionaire as well if only we act as
| wise and as kind as they do.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| > But chin up, peasant, each and every one of us can
| dream of one day being a billionaire as well if only we
| act as wise and as kind as they do.
|
| (I know this was written satirically) but this is a nice
| example of doublespeak and I immediately got reminded of
| it.
|
| I wouldn't say that we have reached 1984 level, there is
| still some decentralization where you can get hosting and
| then self host from small vps providers as well etc.
|
| Not that most people do such things tho. Internet is
| still heavily centralized but overall, there are still
| outlets of escape legally and you are able to sometimes
| even talk to vps provider owners themselves directly in
| some cases if they are small enough.
|
| But still, each year although we get away from 1984 the
| year, we get near to 1984 the book.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| As much as I am pro AI and I really am very pro AI, there
| is definitely an emperor's new AGI vibe amongst the tech
| bro and billionaire classes. I can only attribute it to a
| compulsive need to oversell everything and then deliver
| 25 to 50%, a state everyone is so used to now that if you
| try to be honest and make claims that state what you can
| really deliver, they will assume you can only deliver 25
| to 50% of what you are claiming and therefore the guy
| promising twice as much gets the funding.
|
| This makes me happy that I'm nearing retirement but that
| switch flipping is being delayed by my hourly rate going
| up for possessing forgotten knowledge. Sigh...
| ecshafer wrote:
| UBI will turn Earth into the Earth of the Expanse. I
| truly believe it would be absolutely ruinous on man. Our
| psychology is just not built for that.
| Rumple22Stilk wrote:
| The earth of the expanse is 1000 times better than any
| time in history.
| ironman1478 wrote:
| The life of people on earth doesn't seem better than
| people now. For connected people it seems great, but for
| the average joe it seemed awful.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Did you read the expanse? The earth of the expanse is
| full of crime and destitution. People apply in the tens
| of thousands for every lottery slot of school or jobs.
| People just wallow in nothingness. The people fleet earth
| for mars and the belt just to have a basic sense of
| purpose.
|
| If we are to just have UBI. Have basic sustenance for no
| effort, while we have unlimited entertainment and porn at
| our finger tips. It would be a disaster. I would
| literally we rather have make work programs.
| acdha wrote:
| That's unproven, but suppose it's true: what's your
| alternative? If we are in fact facing widespread
| unemployment, what's going to be better than UBI at
| avoiding societal collapse? Billionaires paying private
| armies to contain poor people is a straight-up sci-fi
| dystopia but even that depends on enough people having
| money to buy things from their companies.
| ecshafer wrote:
| If we truly hit the point where we have more people than
| jobs. That we hit AI improving at miraculous paces that
| we cant even reskill people. I think it would be better
| to essentially have make work programs. Have basic
| qualification programs where you are guaranteed a job.
| People need a purpose. Throw every person capable of
| getting an engineering or science degree into labs.
| Massively expand teaching, nurseing and medicine so there
| is extremely personal care just by the sheer numbers.
| monknomo wrote:
| retraining programs are famously both failures and mostly
| absent for this sort of disruption.
|
| displaced factory workers mostly drift into janitorial or
| cab driving sorts of work. Why would it be different for
| other sorts of workers?
| hackable_sand wrote:
| This is so fucking dumb. I hate when software engineers
| try to solve problems. You are good at one thing, do
| that.
|
| The rest of us will struggle without your help because
| that's what we been doing. We are literally struggling to
| fulfill our purposes _because_ we have jobs.
| bgwalter wrote:
| DDT has been banned, cigarettes are all but banned,
| leaded fuel has been banned. Nuclear energy has been
| banned in Germany.
|
| The industry wanted all of that and did not get its way
| after some time. You can ban "AI", make companies respect
| copyright. You can do all sorts of things.
|
| Since "AI" can only plagiarize, countries that do the
| above will have an edge (I'm not talking about military
| applications that can still be allowed or should be
| regulated like in treaties for nuclear weapons).
| throwway120385 wrote:
| The reality of UBI in the United States is that it's
| going to go from being something freely given to being
| something that is a full time job to maintain, and then
| it will be cut or replaced with services that are
| specifically designed to be as cheap as possible. Until
| we're all living in terrafoam, birth-controlled and
| warehoused until we die.
| joquarky wrote:
| Manna keeps coming to mind for me as well.
|
| It feels like UBI is (at best) likely to become as
| complicated and corrupt as our tax system already is.
| inchidi wrote:
| unfortunately, it doesn't seems like tech bro gets
| displaced by other tech bros at all and more like
| _corporates running costly ephemeral branding as tech bro
| by abusing other tech bros works_.
| falcor84 wrote:
| What's the difference between tech bros and corporates?
| Isn't being a tech bro almost by definition about getting
| to the point where your can sell out your company and
| your principles?
| blitzar wrote:
| 10 biggest companies (by value) in the world ... all tech
| companies except number 9 on the list Saudi Aramco.
| tqi wrote:
| When you talk in meaningless terms like "traditional
| workers" and "tech bros", all it tells me is that you have
| divided the world into people you like and people you
| dislike and mourn / celebrate accordingly.
| blitzar wrote:
| If ones position for "other people" was "they should pull
| themselves up by their bootstraps" then the same applies.
| If your position was we should stop/slow/consider the
| march of progress - well you lost to 30 years of moving
| fast and breaking things.
|
| I suggest and ask for nothing but consistency,
| irrespective of if you like or dislike the people who are
| affected.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| would you prefer "labor" and "class traitors"?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Sure! But when you imagine using those terms:
|
| > It is "progress" when class traitors displace labor,
| but it is "heartbreaking" when a class traitor gets
| displaced by other class traitors.
|
| it becomes clear that the original comment was a
| pointless strawman of a position that nobody holds. A
| class traitor wouldn't be expressing sympathy about
| displacement in the first place. It only seemed to make
| sense because, when you say "tech bro", people
| superimpose the general category of technologists who
| think they can make the world better on top of one
| specific stereotypical guy who believes all the worst
| things they've ever heard a technologist say.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Well, I never read the artcicle because paywall, but there
| is a WSJ headline today about a $160k mechanic job at Ford
| that can't be fulfilled because no labor
| Fraterkes wrote:
| There's many people who dislike both of those things.
| Please think before you write
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| "You should learn how to vibecode and ship whatever works
| enough, as fast as possible, to get bought for a wildly
| disconnected from fundamentals valuation." This may sound
| flippant, or low quality, but it I assure that it is not
| intended to be. It is derived from observations of the
| current tech macro. Quality does not appear to matter,
| ethics do not appear to matter, sustainability and
| engineering rigor do not appear to matter; it appears that
| all that matters is "Start up. Cash in. Sell out. Bro
| down."
|
| I would love to be proven wrong, truly, because this is a
| path to the death of craftsmanship, deep knowledge, and to
| some extent, curiosity, in the domain.
| agentultra wrote:
| It satisfies the dream of a business with no people. As
| Doctorow illustrates it, like plugging the Fisher-Price
| steering wheel into the drive train of the business.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| You might be right but even then this feels fundamentally
| really immoral
|
| The sell out is the biggest fundamental issue in this
| equation because it is the part of the equation which
| doesn't reward Quality,ethics,sustainability and
| engineering rigor overall.
|
| Welcome to the AI bubble fueling it.
|
| I genuinely don't know but I think AI prototyping/using
| it for personal use cases are fine but when we completely
| start to vibecode, if your project is complex enough, you
| will reach problems and all the other factors/researches
| point out. In my opinion, for longevity, vibecoding is
| not the deal.
|
| But as you said, longevity isnt rewarded. I really hate
| how the system has become of just selling businesses.
|
| I feel like as such the businesses who are truly
| passionate about their product (because they faced the
| problems themselves or are heavily interested in
| it/passionate about it) might win "long term"
|
| To me trust feels the biggest resource in this day and
| age. Information era has now been sloppified. Trust is
| what matters now.
|
| I don't know but I will take the slow but overall steady
| route. There is a sense of commitment with human trust
| which I feel would set apart businesses and I will try to
| create side projects with that initiative
|
| One of the ways I feel like acheiving it while still
| getting the shipfast aspect is that I just build things
| for myself, vibe coding in this case can help and I
| launch it for public, if there is interest in any product
| or smth, I will try to respond and try to add feedbacks
| fast (perhaps still using vibecoding) but in long term, I
| try to promise to keep the code lean (usually approx 2-3k
| lines of code at max) and then if I see prospect and
| interest about the idea, I have tried to think that a
| middle way is either rewriting or completely
| understanding AI generated code to its core and having a
| very restrictive AI access afterwards any product feels
| good and then the trust aspect of things can be gained.
|
| I don't know too much about side hustles. I just build
| things for myself in whatever I want mostly I must admit
| using vibe code and end up usually sharing it
| online/deploying it for others as well if it might help.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > _Quality does not appear to matter, ethics do not
| appear to matter, sustainability and engineering rigor do
| not appear to matter_
|
| I don't know why people keep saying this, as if quality,
| ethics and sustainability mattered before and every
| developer was a pure artisan of their craft. In reality,
| having been in many companies and looking at their
| codebases, it has always been slop, with very few
| exceptions.
| wredcoll wrote:
| Yeah, no kidding. I was alive 20 years ago, this isn't
| like talking about the 1800s, what exactly was different
| with the craftsmanship and ethics back then?
| Rzor wrote:
| >Whats the 2026 version of "you should learn to code"?
|
| Elderly care.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| > Whats the 2026 version of "you should learn to code"?
|
| buy a gun
| ericmcer wrote:
| Tools like Tailwind are one of the few cases where I totally
| believe it when the CEO says "we are cutting jobs because of
| AI".
|
| Sucks that anytime you ask AI to generate a site for you
| Tailwind will have an impact on that.
| echelon wrote:
| Anything open source will be turned against its authors and
| against ICs.
|
| We thought it would give us freedom, but all of the advantage
| will accrue to the hyperscalers.
|
| If we don't build open source infra that is owned by
| everyone, we'll be owned by industrial giants and left with a
| thin crust that is barely ours. (This seems like such a far-
| fetched "Kumbaya, My Lord" type of wishful thinking, that
| it's a joke that I'm even suggesting this is possible.)
|
| Tech is about to cease being ours.
|
| I really like AI models, but I hate monopolies. Especially
| ones that treat us like cattle and depopulate the last
| vestiges of ownership and public commons.
| lifetimerubyist wrote:
| Opensource was conveived by a crackpot communist and the
| capitalists were like "sweet, free labour".
| ivell wrote:
| It did provide us with lots of non vendors locked
| products. World has been a better place because of open
| source.
| lifetimerubyist wrote:
| You have no way way of knowing if that is true
| whatsoever.
| deckard1 wrote:
| it's a real shame no one warned us this would happen when a
| bunch of corporatists and opportunists wrested the term
| "open source" from the advocates of true freedom in the
| late '90s.
|
| https://www.fsf.org/
|
| But there was money to be made and the friends you thought
| were friends were just mercenaries with a shiv in their
| hand.
| acdha wrote:
| Also the FSF squandered its opportunity being RMS' hobby
| / support organization and skipped a lot of important
| discussions, even before the skeevy behavior they'd been
| ignoring came to light. I used to donate in the 90s but
| ... really feels like that was just flushing cash.
| infamouscow wrote:
| If my timelines are correct, the FSF ousted RMS before
| ChatGPT came out.
| bgwalter wrote:
| The FSF also ignored the SaaS revolution. They put out
| the AGPL but did not really market it or convert FSF
| projects to it.
| supern0va wrote:
| They actually re-appointed him to the board in 2021, also
| before ChatGPT came out:
| https://www.fsf.org/news/statement-of-fsf-board-on-
| election-...
| acdha wrote:
| ChatGPT came into the picture long after the open source
| issues we're talking about were apparent. AI companies
| are making it even worse but solid advocacy in the 2010s
| or 2000s would've been helpful.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I'm just not sure how to connect this rhetoric to the
| facts of the source link, where a hobbyist attempted to
| extend some source-available code to support a new
| technology, and the CEO of the for-profit company who
| owns the license said he's not allowed to for business
| reasons.
|
| You can be and I am sympathetic towards the CEO! I
| wouldn't accept a PR for cannibalize_my_revenue.txt
| either. But if we insist on analyzing the issue according
| to the categories you're describing, it seems undeniable
| that the CEO is a corporatist, and that he put an unfree
| license on his repository to stop people from freely
| modifying or redistributing it.
| tills13 wrote:
| It's just interesting because most of the talk is programmers
| talking about AI taking their job by replacing them not
| taking their job because it's taking away revenue from the
| business.
|
| Reminds me of the problem with Google & their rich results
| which wiped out and continues to wipe out blogs who rely on
| people actually visiting their site vs. getting the
| information they seek without leaving Google.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| I think it's fairly sad that somebody feels this needs to be
| said.
| pmdr wrote:
| If there's anything AI coding is good at, it's writing react
| components and tailwind css.
| warmedcookie wrote:
| If you want a bunch of tailwind class slop, then yes.
| Otherwise, A lot of context engineering is needed if you want
| it to write modular tailwind components properly for large
| projects where consistency is important.
| pmdr wrote:
| Absolutely, but the AI era seems to have lowered the bar
| for what's considered passable code. Slop works for most
| projects.
| dinkleberg wrote:
| And design too. I shouldn't be able to tell Claude
| designed your site/app, but it is too often the case.
| Good taste still remains an advantage thankfully.
| pests wrote:
| > Otherwise, A lot of context engineering is needed if you
| want
|
| I am not seeing that. I have a few AI-assisted projects
| using tailwind and scrolling through it now 99% of it
| looks... completely modern and professional. I had
| previously asked it to "completely refactor, a rewrite if
| needed, all the tailwind/css/app styles. ensure visual and
| code consistency across pages".
|
| Modern coding tools add tons of their own content, but none
| of the above was "a lot of context engineering".
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > _completely modern and professional_
|
| And it looks completely the same, so much so that people
| can tell it's AI generated now simply due to the
| gradient, among other design choices LLMs seem to make by
| default: https://prg.sh/ramblings/Why-Your-AI-Keeps-
| Building-the-Same...
| pests wrote:
| Isn't that an article about using a frontend aesthetics
| prompt in order to avoid the AI tells? A lot of the with-
| aesthetics pages look pretty good imo.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| It's describing the problem and also giving a solution.
| The problem of vibe coded sites all looking the same is
| very real however, if you don't consciously and actively
| guide the LLM towards being different, as described in
| the article.
| torginus wrote:
| I am not 100% sure about that - I usually find AI written CSS
| to be slightly visually flawed and almost always logically
| flawed.
|
| The way you write websites that actually work imo, is you
| understand how your chosen CSS layout engine works roughly,
| and try to avoid switching between layout modes - traditional
| to flexbox to grid to flexbox again down the tree can drive
| the most brillant devs utterly mad .
|
| But seriously, after a certain complexity threshold, it
| becomes impossible to tell what's going on and why.
|
| And if you don't think about it in advance, it's very easy to
| reach that threshold, especially if you don't get to write
| the whole page from scratch, but have to build on the work of
| others.
|
| AI (and many frontend devs) do write-only CSS - they add
| classes until the code they write looks right.
|
| But code like that tends to fall apart under multiple
| resolutions, browsers, screen sizes, devices etc.
|
| I am not a frontend dev, and came pretty late to the frontend
| party. That said I felt that anything that obscures the raw
| CSS makes it much harder to deliver UI that works right, as
| it peppers hidden side effects across your code.
|
| That's why I wasn't too keen on CSS frameworks like Tailwind
| - I found that when writing frontend code the writing part
| takes up the minority of the time, it's producing a well
| thought out layout flow is what is actually the biggest sink
| of time and effort.
|
| That said, I'm not a frontend dev, and I'm to too good at CSS
| - but not horrible either - so I defer to the judgement of
| others who are pros at this, its just my opinion and
| experience.
| pmarreck wrote:
| > I usually find AI written CSS to be slightly visually
| flawed and almost always logically flawed.
|
| Funny, this also qualifies most of the _human_ written CSS
| I've seen. !important all the things!
| Alex2037 wrote:
| >and he's being honest
|
| oh, come the fuck on. it's "AI made us do it" drivel that
| companies began to justify layoffs with in 2023 (!!!).
|
| Tailwind is just another FOTM frontend thing. I saw dozens of
| them come, gain some popularity, then abruptly disappear once
| the marketing budget ran out.
| jact wrote:
| He mentions that tailwind is more popular than ever before
| but their revenue is down 80% so unless he's lying about that
| it makes sense rather than tailwind going out of style.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I suppose Tailwind might be more popular because it fits AI
| development better?
| sureglymop wrote:
| However, why is that even surprising? Tailwind is
| essentially a frontend css stylesheet. What business could
| there possibly be around that?
|
| I understand, they have UI kits, books, etc. but just
| fundamentally, it was never going to be easy to monetize
| around that long term, with or without AI.
| port11 wrote:
| Some of the critics in the thread are... odious. I've written
| down some of the GH handles, because if I'm ever hiring again,
| I wanna make sure I'd never hire some of these folks.
|
| I don't understand how someone can display such contempt
| towards the maintainer of a thing they've used for free.
| latexr wrote:
| > I've written down some of the GH handles, because if I'm
| ever hiring again, I wanna make sure I'd never hire some of
| these folks.
|
| You can block accounts on GitHub and add a note as to why.
| Might be simpler and more accessible later on than a random
| TXT (plus, it probably updates if they change their
| username).
|
| Note that blocking also means they can't contribute to your
| repos. Which you may not care about anyway.
| port11 wrote:
| Thank you, that's indeed much cleverer. Unfortunately I've
| closed my account this year, trying to _put my money where
| my mouth is_ and not furthering the goals of GitHub or
| Microsoft.
| waffletower wrote:
| I am one of those critics, but I never used Tailwind. A
| layoff of that magnitude is horrific, but if what they are
| describing as their business model is true, they really
| really need to rethink it. I wonder what the size of their
| marketing team is like, and if they were involved in the
| layoffs. Seems like they need some help there. I found the
| "downvote" spam in that thread, for reasonable posts, to be
| quite off-putting, and that led me to my remarks.
| slig wrote:
| Tailwind, not Tailscale.
| waffletower wrote:
| thanks :D
| usernamed7 wrote:
| > making it easier for LLMs to read our docs just means less
| traffic to our docs which means less people learning about our
| paid products
|
| This is incredibly dumb and greedy on so many fronts. He's
| encouraging a worse experience for developers in an effort to try
| and make more money in the HOPE that they'll buy their paid
| products once they read about them. Absolutely repulsive attitude
| to take and a truly stupid strategy that can/will backfire.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| Greedy? He said revenue was down 80%.
| freedomben wrote:
| He's still trying to figure it out. I've been a customer for
| years now and I've rarely ever bought a product that is an
| user-friendly and user-respecting as Tailwind UI (Tailwind
| Plus). If you've never had to lay people off before, it is an
| absolutely gut wrenching experience, surely moreso when you
| have to be the one to make the call. Let the man be a human and
| experience some emotions. I have a lot of faith that he'll make
| the right call.
| beart wrote:
| Greed implies excessive accumulation of wealth. Based on the
| public statements, they are laying people off because they
| cannot afford to keep paying them while keeping the project
| afloat. It doesn't seem like greed is a factor here.
|
| AI putting people out of work is a very real issue, and it is
| discussed on HN quite often. Here we have a very real example
| of it (apparently) and the reaction is vitriolic, but not
| against the AI processes, but the creators who are losing their
| work.
| ares623 wrote:
| There definitely is greed involved. But the other way around
| stephenheron wrote:
| We bought Tailwind UI and it was very good and I learned a lot of
| nice tricks from it.
|
| Real shame, and I fear it is just the start of the impacts of AI
| on our industry.
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| It is clearly the beginning of the end of many small shops in
| the supply chain. I hope bigger fish buy them so the tech can
| be more integrated into future AI products, but I doubt they
| will be smart enough to do that.
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| This is miserable all 'round. I don't know Adam from, well, Adam,
| but he seems a decent skin in the podcast. Nor, do I know much
| about Tailwind. However, I do feel for him, and his team, and his
| ex-team. Just miserable all 'round.
| multisport wrote:
| Didn't he (half) jokingly ask Anthropic to buy Tailwind a few
| weeks ago, right when Bun was acquired? Makes a lot more sense
| now.
| hmokiguess wrote:
| source?
| multisport wrote:
| found it
| https://x.com/adamwathan/status/1995940378101621194?s=20
| hmokiguess wrote:
| thx :)
| ramoz wrote:
| Here is a link to their commercial offerings.
|
| https://tailwindcss.com/plus?ref=top
| dallen33 wrote:
| There should be a monthly option - I'd pay for that.
| agentifysh wrote:
| i just gave my favorite LLM a screenshot of one of those
| components and it recreated it perfectly. i paid $0.
|
| i dont see how any business model can compete with free. maybe
| they can focus on branding like Pepsi or Coke and see if
| developers will make their decisions based on that.
| i_have_an_idea wrote:
| > i just gave my favorite LLM a screenshot of one of those
| components and it recreated it perfectly. i paid $0.
|
| Because it's most likely in the training data. I.e., it stole
| it for you.
| omnimus wrote:
| Copyright washing as a service.
| falloutx wrote:
| how do you know it recreated perfectly. Is it equally
| customizable? Is it equally accessible? And your LLM models
| cost money too. If you use the API keys, you can quickly see
| the cost.
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| Being 100% honest even though it sucks to be the truth - it
| doesn't matter if its customizable or accessible or not
| because you just ask the LLM to do that for you.
|
| Or ask the LLM to customize it to your specific use case
| since most people really only really care about their
| situation - not for it to be customizable to everyones use
| case.
| prodigycorp wrote:
| It's just too ironic and such a shame that LLMs have railroaded
| the business model of Tailwind when LLMs have made it so much
| more popular.
|
| Does anyone have any backseat driver ideas for how tailwind could
| make enough money to hire a team to work on the framework?
| dabbz wrote:
| I was going to say before LLMs Tailwind UI helped me get moving
| much faster on front-end code. Now I wish there was some kind
| of context I can provide to use the Tailwind UI instead of
| hallucinating its own. Tailwind UI still looks better than the
| generic stuff LLMs generate.
|
| (Open to any suggestions to feed existing ui components from
| Tailwind into my projects/llm).
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| Do you mean headlessui? If so it seems to be indexed by
| context7 [1] so you could use it with their MCP server?
|
| [1] - https://context7.com/tailwindlabs/headlessui
| nemomarx wrote:
| Does asking for tailwind directly in the prompt not get it
| looking in that direction? I wonder if you could get a large
| enough context to include the css directly too
| dabbz wrote:
| I was more hoping to use the Tailwind UI components (or
| tailwind plus or whatever they're calling it now) with the
| LLM output. I don't think they offer downloadable
| components or whatever so the LLM would need a way of
| knowing which were available to use and be able to pull
| them in for reference. At least that's my assumption.
| graeme wrote:
| There might be a business model for Tailwind here. I was
| looking at buying Tailwind Plus after reading this news, and
| my first question was how to get AI to use it efficiently.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Make Tailwind Plus an annual subscription, not a one-time
| purchase.
|
| Corporate sponsorships.
|
| In-person training focused on big corps.
|
| Acquisition.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Just to build on this, Vercel would be an obvious acquisition
| candidate. It feels up their alley and they make heavy use of
| Tailwind.
| sosodev wrote:
| The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and
| templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced
| traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such
| things.
|
| While I understand that this has been difficult for him and his
| company... hasn't it been obvious that this would be a major
| issue for years?
|
| I do worry about what this means for the future of open source
| software. We've long relied on value adds in the form of managed
| hosting, high-quality collections, and educational content. I
| think the unfortunate truth is that LLMs are making all of that
| far less valuable. I think the even more unfortunate truth is
| that value adds were never a good solution to begin with. The
| reality is that we need everyone to agree that open source
| software is valuable and worth supporting monetarily without any
| value beyond the continued maintenance of the code.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Agreed. I don't know how realistic it is without a major need
| that would force major player to abide by it, but yea..
| K0nserv wrote:
| Having worked on a design system previously I think most
| people, especially non-frontend developers, discount how hard
| something like that is to build. LLMs will build stuff that
| looks plausible but falls short in a bunch of ways
| (particularly accessibility). This is for the same reason that
| people generate div-soup, it looks correct on the surface.
|
| EDIT: I suppose what I'm saying is that "The paid products Adam
| mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It
| seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that
| AI largely eliminates the need for such thing." is wrong. My
| hunch is that AI has the appearance of eliminating the need for
| such things.
| sosodev wrote:
| I think you're overestimating how much people care about
| quality.
| K0nserv wrote:
| Oh no I'm very cynical about that.
| sbarre wrote:
| I think perhaps the nuance in the middle here is that for
| most projects, the quality that professional components
| bring is less important.
|
| Internal tools and prototypes, both things that quality
| components can accelerate, have been strong use-cases for
| these component libraries, just as much as polished
| commercial customer-facing products.
|
| And I bet volume-wise there's way more of the former than
| the latter.
|
| So while I think most people who care about quality know
| you can't (yet) blindly use LLM output in your final
| product, it's completely ok for internal tools and
| prototyping.
| sublinear wrote:
| It's not that people care about quality, but that people
| expect things to "just work".
|
| Regarding the point about accessibility, there are a ton of
| little details that must be explicitly written into the
| HTML that aren't necessarily the default behavior. Some
| common features of CSS and JS can break accessibility too.
|
| None of this code would obvious to an LLM, or even human
| devs, but it's still what's expected. Without precisely
| written and effectively read-only boilerplate your webpage
| is gonna be trash and the specifics are a moving target and
| hotly debated. This back and forth is a human problem, not
| a code problem. That's why it's "hard".
| ctoth wrote:
| I use the web every day as a blind user with a
| screenreader.
|
| I would 100% of the time prefer to encounter the median
| website written by Opus 4.5 than the median website
| written by a human developer in terms of accessibility!
| K0nserv wrote:
| That's really interesting. Are you speaking from
| experience with websites where you know who authored them
| or from seeing code written by humans and Opus 4.5
| respectively?
| ctoth wrote:
| So I have been using the human-authored web since well...
| 1999 or so, starting with old AOL CDs. I've obviously
| seen a lot of human content.
|
| Back in the old days you might have image links and other
| fun stuff. Then we entered the era of flash. Flash was
| great, especially the people who made their whole site
| out of it (2004 + not being able to order ... was it
| pizza? something really sticks in my memory here.)
|
| Then we entered the era of early Bootstrap. Things got
| _really_ bad for a while -- there was a whole Bootstrap-
| Accessibility library people ended up writing for it, and
| of course nobody actually used the damn thing. The most
| frustrating thing at this point (2010?) was any dropdown
| anywhere. Any bootstrap dropdown was completely
| inaccessible using typical techniques, and you 'd have to
| do something tricky with ... mouse routing? Gods it's
| been 15 years.
|
| CAPTCHAs for stupid things became huge there for a brief
| moment -- I remember needing to pass a CAPTCHA to
| download ... was it Creative drivers? That motivated me
| to make a service called CAPTCHA-Be-Gone for other blind
| people for a while.
|
| Then we see ARIA start to really come into its own...
| except that's a whole new shitshow! So many times you'd
| get people who thought "Oh to add accessibility, we just
| add ARIA" and had no fucking idea what they were doing,
| to the point where the most-common A11y advice these days
| has become "Don't use ARIA unless you know you need it."
|
| Oh then we had this brief flash (~10 years ago?) of "60
| FPS websites!" -- let's directly render to the fucking
| canvas, that'll be great. Flutter? ... Ick!
|
| Nowadays the issues are just the same as they ever were.
| People using divs for everything, onclick handlers
| instead of stuff that will be triggered with keyboard...
| Stuff that Opus just doesn't do!
|
| I guess I've only been using Opus 4.5 for about a month
| but just ... Ask it to build something? Use it with a
| screen reader? Try it!
| sublinear wrote:
| > Then we see ARIA start to really come into its own...
| except that's a whole new shitshow!
|
| I am not blind, but my experience trying to write
| accessible web pages is that the screen readers are
| inconsistent with how they announce the various tags and
| attributes. I'm curious what you think about the screen
| readers out there such as NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver,
| TalkBack, etc. and how devs should be testing their web
| pages.
|
| Many of the larger corporate clients tend to standardize
| on the exact behavior of JAWS and I am not sure that is
| helpful. It's like the Internet Explorer of screen
| readers.
|
| If you want to know _why_ a page ends up riddled with
| ARIA overriding everything, that 's why. In even the best
| cases, the people paying for this dev work are looking
| for consistency and then not finishing the job. It's
| never made the highest priority work either since testing
| eats up a ton of time.
|
| To reinforce my original point, I just don't think LLMs
| can write anything but the most naive code and everyone
| has opinions and biases completely incompatible with
| standardization. It's never "done" and fundamentally
| fickle and political just like the rest of the web.
| fireflash38 wrote:
| If you can produce something that works 80% of the time for
| 5% of the cost? People take that all the time when they buy
| cheap shit off Temu or Amazon.
|
| They almost completely just give money back if it
| fails/sucks, and they are still coming out ahead.
| elitan wrote:
| Amazon (AWS) is not cheap! :D
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Accessibility is an interesting space for quality because
| under the ADA you can be sued for it and be exposed to huge
| liability.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| But accessiblity on the frontend is to a large extend
| patterns - if it looks like a checkbox it should have the
| appropriate ARIA tag, and patterns are easy for an LLM.
| falloutx wrote:
| LLMs are not that cheaper, a customizable accessible
| component is still worth hours of work.
| beberlei wrote:
| While I believe you, its an argument that artists bring
| forward since the beginning of art, so even many hundred
| years before the internet on average humankind did not value
| this work.
| lone-cloud wrote:
| It's not that hard to build a design system with decent
| accessibility. Just use shadcn ui components instead of
| rolling your own.
| K0nserv wrote:
| It's not really a refutation of my point about how building
| a good component library is hard, to suggest using another
| component library. Of course, if you use one it's easier,
| that was my entire point.
| nemomarx wrote:
| Maybe we need patreon equivalents for open source development?
| sosodev wrote:
| It already exists. Tailwind has had GitHub sponsorships
| enabled for years but only 5 people have ever given them
| money that way.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Meanwhile Evan You of Vue JS was making something like 200k
| just from Patreon before starting void(0) which is venture
| backed, it's all a marketing problem because I don't think
| anyone knew their GitHub sponsors even existed, people just
| don't seem to use it in general.
|
| I don't know why Tailwind needed anyone more than Adam, I
| understand that more people makes the work go faster such
| as for their Rust compiler but then you run into money
| problems like this.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| They have off-GH sponsorship that's much more widely
| subscribed.
|
| https://tailwindcss.com/sponsor
| jonas21 wrote:
| Yeah, it's apparently pulling in over $800K in annual
| revenue [1].
|
| EDIT: Doing the math on the sponsor list, it's probably
| around $1M in ARR now.
|
| [1] https://petersuhm.com/posts/2025/
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I think we just need better platforms for enterprise
| procurement.
|
| The issue is that currently you either publish as free &
| open-source and get tons of traction and usage but little
| funding, or you publish as paid and get no traction.
|
| The blocker for paid software isn't actually the money itself
| (this is solvable by just pricing it reasonably), it's all
| the red tape that someone has to go through to get their
| company to purchase a license to begin with.
|
| Maybe a marketplace that preemptively does audits, provides
| insurance, code escrow, licensing, etc ahead of time, that
| vendors can put their software on it proactively and
| companies can have accounts where their employees can just
| open an "app store" and just buy/license software directly?
| Similar to the AWS marketplace but for libraries.
| speed_spread wrote:
| Sounds like the kind of enterprise-class walled garden that
| IBM or Oracle maintains.
| spzb wrote:
| AI's going to be a whole lot less useful when it doesn't have
| any open source component libraries to crib from.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| They already pay people to generate training data.
| css_apologist wrote:
| this is news to me, how does this work? who is getting
| paid?
| babelfish wrote:
| Mercor, Turing, Scale, etc facilitate the work. Labs pay
| them, they pay contractors.
| simonw wrote:
| Some relevant job ads for Anthropic:
|
| https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs/5025624008 -
| "Research Engineer - Cybersecurity RL" - "This role
| blends research and engineering, requiring you to both
| develop novel approaches and realize them in code. Your
| work will include designing and implementing RL
| environments, conducting experiments and evaluations,
| delivering your work into production training runs, and
| collaborating with other researchers, engineers, and
| cybersecurity specialists across and outside Anthropic."
|
| https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs/4924308008 -
| "Research Engineer / Research Scientist, Biology & Life
| Sciences" - "As a founding member of our team, you'll
| work at the intersection of cutting-edge AI and the
| biological sciences, developing rigorous methods to
| measure and improve model performance on complex
| scientific tasks."
|
| The key trend in 2025 was a new emphasis on reinforcement
| learning - models are no longer just trained by dumping
| in a ton of scraped text, there's now a TON of work
| involved designing reinforcement learning loops that
| teach them how to do specific useful things - and
| designing those loops requires subject-matter expertise.
|
| That's why they got so much better at code over the past
| six months - code is the perfect target for RL because
| you can run generated code and see if it works or not.
| sublinear wrote:
| The funny part is how they think this will give them the
| power to take control of what is the defacto standard and
| circumvent standards.
|
| It will instead further distinguish what is AI slop because
| it doesn't work and be siloed off to people who don't care
| about the code so can't fix it.
|
| If people want good interoperable production ready code
| that can be deployed instantly and just works and meets all
| current standards and ongoing discussions, we've had it for
| many decades and it's called open source.
| figassis wrote:
| These people won't have to be experts like the tailwind
| team? Quality will be spontaneous?
| lbrito wrote:
| This can never match the scale of organic training data
| theappsecguy wrote:
| Or quality
| jacooper wrote:
| Actually synthetic training dats is better, thats why the
| new models are all better at design.
| jsheard wrote:
| If synthetic data is so much better then what are AI
| crawlers still DDOSing everyone for? Are they stupid?
| mirsadm wrote:
| They pay people to generate open source libraries? I'd love
| to see it
| rikschennink wrote:
| I don't think the scraping party cares about the license, if
| the JavaScript code is linked online they'll just take it.
| Source: see the art industry
| tschellenbach wrote:
| Well.. there are many fast growing companies that provide UI +
| APIs for certain components of your app. Sure you can build
| things easier in-house, but the opportunity cost of doing so
| also went up. Supabase, Stream, Clerk, Stainless all growing
| very well.
| jesse_dot_id wrote:
| I bought a Tailwind Plus trial a few years ago and I've been
| using AI tools since they came out. I typically find the block
| or template I want to use via the Tailwind Plus site and then
| feed it into Claude Code and ask the agent to modify them as
| required. This has been working well for me. I think the
| problem is that the Internet is absolutely full of people who
| expect free shit and never even consider paying for it to
| support the devs. I don't really know how you fix that. In a
| sane world, we'd be funding the most popular/useful projects
| using government grants, since our entire fucking economy sits
| atop a pile of OSS.
| YaeGh8Vo wrote:
| Ironically, some of the same people that are ready to pay
| $200.-/month Claude subscriptions.
| jesse_dot_id wrote:
| You're not wrong.
| legitster wrote:
| Well, you can tell from the tone of his post that he isn't
| blaming anyone directly. They monetized convenience, and
| something more convenient came along.
|
| I think it's more shocking to everyone how quickly something
| like that happens.
| suyash wrote:
| Exactly the business model wasn't strong enough, just
| upselling templates for hundreds of dollars which AI can
| churn in few tokens was easy to disrupt.
| mmcnl wrote:
| The business model is strong. AI is stealing traffic/money
| from creators. That's not a problem with the business
| model, it's a problem with AI. AI hyperscalers shamelessly
| monetize other people's work without compensation. Truly an
| awful dystopia.
| kimixa wrote:
| The output of AIs that is "churned out" wouldn't exist
| without templates like this being used as an input to the
| training. But that isn't "Copyright Infringement",
| according to the AI companies.
| mmcnl wrote:
| They have more and better lawyers. But I know what feels
| morally unjust.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| If a business model can't withstand being disrupted, it
| is no longer viable. It's like Uber putting cabs out of
| business with something better. Selling templates is now
| no longer viable, and blaming AI will not do anything. As
| Darwin would say, adapt or die.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| I disagree. The bare minimum they could have done in all
| these years was build a proper high quality, tightly
| coupled component library instead of riding this "copy
| paste your way to a result" trend.
|
| Not stuff like shadcn and Tailwind Catalyst, but a proper
| versioned, tightly coupled UI library with rich theming
| capabilities made for the 99% of users who aren't skilled
| enough at design to be cobbling together their own design
| systems or editing a Button component directly.
|
| Instead they rode the wave (despite being best positioned
| to redirect the wave) and they're paying the price.
|
| If it wasn't AI it'd be the first version of MUI that
| moves on from Material Design 2 as a default. Or Hero UI
| v3. Or literally anyone who brings sanity back to the
| space of component libraries and leaves "copy and paste
| code snippets" behind
| usef- wrote:
| It isn't just the product itself: he's saying traffic to
| the site has dropped substantially, so _any_ product will
| be harder to sell now for them.
|
| Some people who would buy the higher quality templates
| don't know that they exist now.
| suyash wrote:
| I think the era of buying templates is over, when you can
| get a tool that listens to you patiently, iterates again
| and again till you're satisfied for pennies, why would
| you pay hundred's for a template that is there for anyone
| else to buy as well.
| jsheard wrote:
| > The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components
| and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't
| reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need
| for such things.
|
| Or more cynically that it eliminates the need to _pay_ for such
| things. Claude and friends were no doubt trained on the
| commercial Tailwind components, so the question becomes whether
| those models could have done the job of Tailwind UI _without_
| piggybacking on the unpaid labour of the Tailwind UI
| developers. If not then we clearly have a sustainability
| problem here - someone still has to do the hard work to push
| things forward, but with the knowledge that any attempt to
| profit from that work will be instantly undercut by the
| copyright laundering Borg.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| The only thing that can save open source software is open
| source LLMs
|
| Unfortunately only the Chinese are really being serious about
| that
| Vinnl wrote:
| Does it matter whether it's been obvious that it would be a
| major issue? It's not unlikely that he did realise this a long
| time ago, and if he did, it's also not unlikely that he still
| hasn't found a solution, because there might not be one.
| biztos wrote:
| Is AI making component libraries redundant? Or is it just
| making it really easy to use free component libraries?
|
| (Or is it really more about traffic to the documentation site
| and thus eyeballs on the sales pitch?)
|
| I'm making an app using ShadCN, which is pretty good and free
| -- maybe Tailwind Plus would be significantly better, I don't
| know, I had to consider the possibility that this project never
| makes any money so I wanted free for the first shot. And the
| LLMs turn out to know it pretty well.
|
| Once I get it built using ShadCN, it's hard to imagine when I'd
| have time to go redo all the component hackery with another
| library, even if it were way better.
|
| I guess my point is just that "paid UI components" is a really
| tough business when there are so many people willing to make
| components just for the fun/glory/practice. Same with a lot of
| UI stuff it seems -- I highly respect icon designers, but I'm
| probably just going to use Lucide.
| falloutx wrote:
| How does it eliminates the need for simple templates and
| components? Templates and components are always gonna be more
| cost effective, back in the day we used to buy simple jQuery
| components for like 5*$ and even LLMs cant beat that, you will
| quickly end up with a shittier component with 0 accessibility
| and end up paying more to the Claude Opus
| oefrha wrote:
| I bought Tailwind Plus when it was still Tailwind UI years ago
| and thoroughly enjoyed it in hobbyist projects and some
| professional projects. Would have pushed for company license if
| my current company isn't exclusively native apps.
| fourside wrote:
| How does something like Tailwind lead to a company big enough
| that you can layoff 75% of the engineering team?
| eatonphil wrote:
| LinkedIn says the company was 2-10 employees. 75% laid off
| wouldn't have been a lot of people. Tough for them though.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Three engineers laid off, one remaining.
| whatamidoingyo wrote:
| I was wondering the same thing.
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| 3 of 4. Not a behemoth by any stretch. A bit sad.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| I don't know how big the "team" was, but 75% suggests maybe 4
| engineers, one left. The next number up that works is 8, and 8
| full time engineers to work on tailwind seems like a lot.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| Listened to the podcast, it was 3 laid off.
| phonon wrote:
| It was three out of four people.
| solarkraft wrote:
| It's crazy to me that it was ever a business to begin with.
|
| Cool, in a way! But this feels like just going back to normal.
| sp4cec0wb0y wrote:
| A lot of open source projects attempt to become a business in
| some form or another (or vice versa). Great examples of this
| include Astral (creators of UV and Ruff), TursoDB, TigerBeetle,
| etc etc etc. People want to get paid for the project they work
| on. Some of their business models will fail. This is probably a
| case of tailwind growing their engineering team faster than
| they should have when the AI writing was on the wall in 2023.
| mpeg wrote:
| I think a problem is that tailwind has no moat compared to
| most of those. If it never received any further updates today
| it would still be effectively feature-complete, save for the
| occasional new css features.
| freedomben wrote:
| I don't disagree, but I think differentiating between
| Tailwind CSS (which is free) and Tailwind UI. Tailwind UI
| (Tailwind Plus) is a different story I think. It's
| extremely useful in its current form, but could benefit
| from more
| mpeg wrote:
| Apparently they were 8+ people, in 2024 team size was 6 and
| were hiring 2 more [0] and in 2020 they had $2m+ ARR [1].
|
| Honestly, while I feel bad for the people who lost their jobs
| the news aren't exactly surprising. Overhiring is a game for VC
| funded OSS like bun, not usually a good idea for bootstrapped
| companies.
|
| [0]: https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-
| st...
|
| [1]: https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-
| byproduc...
| TaylorOtwell1 wrote:
| Tailwind had several times more than 2M / ARR at their peak.
| bradly wrote:
| > 2020 they had $2m+ ARR
|
| You've got an extra "R" in there. In 2020 their only revenue
| from was non-recurring lifetime software purchases. Like SaaS
| if you had a 100% churn rate.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| On his morning walk/podcast thing about the topic he said 75%
| of the team = 3 developers
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I wonder if that includes him or not as the remaining 25%
| as 1 member.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| No it was the 3 co-founders, a part-time person and 4
| engineers. Now they are 3 engineers down.
| vips7L wrote:
| They have a right to decide what their product is. Just because
| someone sent a PR doesn't mean they have to consider it
| whatsoever!
| farhanhubble wrote:
| I use Tailwind for connecting dev machines across two continents
| and as a free user I think it's an amazing product. It breaks my
| heart to see people losing their jobs because there isn't enough
| revenue.
|
| I can empathize with the founder too because I was kind of in
| their shoes last year. Had been laid off and nearly exhausted my
| savings but I was more worried about having to let go of folks I
| employed.
| gf000 wrote:
| You might have mistaken tailwind and tailscale.
|
| I have done so on countless occasions, but this is about the
| css "framework".
| ramoz wrote:
| I think you mean tailscale
| cleaning wrote:
| You're thinking of Tailscale.
| avandekleut wrote:
| Tailwind is a UI styling and components company. Are you
| thinking of Tailscale?
| stevoski wrote:
| As a fellow business owner, I'll always feel bad when business
| owners need to make these types of decisions.
|
| I bought Tailwind UI - I always thought it was a critically bad
| business decision from their end to keep giving me additional new
| stuff for free. It seemed to me that it should have been a
| subscription.
|
| However, knowing nothing about the inside of their business, I
| have no idea how that would have affected their viability.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| I think it's simple that people aren't using CSS frameworks
| because the AI creates CSS on its own.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _I always thought it was a critically bad business decision
| from their end to keep giving me additional new stuff for free.
| It seemed to me that it should have been a subscription._
|
| Maybe. One data point isn't all that useful, but I never would
| have bought it if it weren't for the model he chose. I will
| never, ever do a subscription for something like that.
| stevoski wrote:
| Right, but you can do a one-off purchase to get the product
| as it existed at the time. Instead they offered all future
| improvements in the price.
|
| This is not sustainable once your customer growth dies down,
| as it eventually did.
| WA wrote:
| Not entirely true. They had one product at first. I think
| it was UI kit. The full app templates that came later were
| a separate product and they charged again. However, you're
| right insofar as they added more templates to the later
| product for free.
| shimman wrote:
| Their customer growth wasn't exactly dying down tho, it was
| massively disrupted. That is a key distinction that should
| be noted.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > It seemed to me that it should have been a subscription.
|
| The one time fee should have been for personal licenses, and a
| annual subscription for businesses.
| sbarre wrote:
| I like the approach of paying for major upgrades.. So you get
| free updates on your current version for as long as you want,
| but when the next major update comes out, you either stick
| with your current version at no cost (and ideally still get
| maintenance and security patches) but if you want the next
| major version, there's an upgrade cost.
|
| That feels fair to me.
| camdenreslink wrote:
| He goes into detail the motivation/decision to do lifetime
| pricing vs subscription pricing here:
| https://hackersincorporated.com/episodes/lifetime-pricing-is...
|
| The idea is that subscription businesses have churn, and if you
| can capture the lifetime value of a customer with your one time
| price, there isn't any difference (other than people feeling
| grateful when you add new content for "free").
| AstroBen wrote:
| This has been a long time coming I think. I remember listening to
| an interview with the creator maybe over a year ago now and him
| saying revenue is way down, presumably because of AI
|
| I do wonder though if the llms.txt could actually be used for
| their benefit? Why not literally recommend the paid upgrades
| within it?
| ambicapter wrote:
| I love the poster with the AI-generated avatar admonishing him
| for not making the software "easy to use" and suggesting that
| this will hamper his business, completely papering over the fact
| that LLMs will never be "potential monetization candidates" (ew,
| wording).
| bkorte wrote:
| When I saw this on HN, I instantly felt terrible for Adam & the
| team. Happy to see that these comments are mostly supportive,
| they could have easily piled on the pain.
|
| Listen to his podcast episode if you want his raw feelings on
| this - https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-
| six...
|
| Very happy Tailwind Plus and Insiders customer here.
| alangibson wrote:
| Anyone selling software components is going to get cooked by
| LLMs. People have been talking about that since ChatGPT 3 landed.
| It's just sad to see it actually playing out.
| chvid wrote:
| I would also say that the tailwind ui library is facing stiff
| competition from free offerings like shadcn.
| hexbin010 wrote:
| > The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial
| products
|
| I know nothing about marketing, but why would you rely on one
| single source? Or interpreted differently (as a statement of
| fact): allow that situation to occur?
| Ray20 wrote:
| I think in this case, just about everyone falls into the
| funnel. I think it's difficult to find a potential buyer of
| tailwind who doesn't visit the documentation.
| jameson wrote:
| As a avid user of Tailwind and one who purchased Tailwind CSS
| Plus, it's very sad to hear.
|
| OSS without founders having it's own managed software company is
| always a difficult position. (e.g. database vendors open source
| but also have their own company providing managed service and
| support allowing sustainable development). Hope of getting strong
| support from companies is unsustainable.
|
| Curious what should be the business model for a library something
| like tailwind?
|
| They could add a premium features but entry users not allowed to
| use certain features is a bad experience
| theturtletalks wrote:
| Tailwind Plus was always tricky since most people would use it
| for commercial products and that seemed like a grey area based on
| their licensing. Then shadcn came along and all the Tailwind Plus
| alternatives (many times recreating the same UI elements that
| plus has) and then people just copied and used those components
| and polished further using AI.
|
| Before Tailwind got big, Adam released an amazing book about
| UI/UX called Refactoring UI[0] and it really helped me become
| better and understand subtleties of design. I even considered
| printing a personal physical book for my coffee table. If you
| want to support Adam and don't need Tailwind Plus, this ebook
| could be a good way.
|
| [0]. https://www.refactoringui.com/
| freedomben wrote:
| (IANAL) Using it for commercial products isn't grey area at
| all, it's explicitly allowed. Pretty much all you _can 't_ do
| is create a component library based on it. You can also freely
| use it in open source as long as you aren't making a component
| library.
|
| If it wasn't usable in commercial products, I don't think
| anyone would pay for it.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| I should've clarified. My apps are all open source so it
| didn't feel right putting their UI for free out there. It
| does happen in some projects but it felt easier just to
| design components myself.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Sadly, selling pre-made components and templates was never a
| sound business model, especially in the wake of AI. One thing I
| learned being on HN for so long and launching my own products is
| that a _product_ is not a _business_. Don 't conflate the two, at
| your peril.
|
| Lots of people make great products but actually turning that into
| a business is fundamentally a different skill. It seems like
| Tailwind grew too fast, having 2 million ARR a few years ago and
| almost 10 employees (200k each is probably the all-in cost anyway
| for an employee if they're full time with benefits, so I suppose
| there was barely any profit), whereas they'd probably have been
| fine with running a Patreon like Evan You did for Vue, and
| cutting down the number of devs drastically, which I suppose is
| what they're doing now.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| It is a business. Envato was a billion dollar business in 2017.
| I agree that AI makes these kinds of businesses vulnerable, but
| it's overstepping to say that these things aren't businesses.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I never said Tailwind the company wasn't a business, when I
| said "a product is not a business" I meant that as advice to
| creators in general, not in specific to Tailwind; of course
| it is, it made millions in revenue. What I meant was that
| even though businesses may exist, having a long-term, durable
| business model is not always viable.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| "selling premade software assets" is a business, and it's
| the business both Tailwind and Envato were in. Both
| businesses got hit hard by AI. Check out Envato's homepage
| now. It's unrecognizable from what it was in 2017, and
| completely genAI oriented.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I think you're just repeating the same point I'm making.
| The point is they're not _good_ businesses, hence why
| Envato pivoted and Tailwind soon might need to as well.
| suyash wrote:
| You're shifting your argument, first you said it's not a
| business. Any business can be good/bad depends on climate
| and over time. It was a business and many busienss in the
| current era of AI will face such challenges. All business
| just need to constatly adapt over time aka innovate.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > _first you said it 's not a business_
|
| You're misunderstanding what I'm saying, I was not
| talking about _Tailwind Labs_ not being a business, I am
| saying that _in general_ , products are not businesses by
| default. In that case, my argument is the same as it has
| been, agreeing with your last 3 sentences.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| I don't even know what Envato is from looking at their
| own website. Maybe some companies don't need to exist if
| they can't even explain themselves.
| KallDrexx wrote:
| Telerik, DevExpress, and a lot of other companies have made
| profitable businesses that have lasted well over a decade on
| that business premise. Selling solid and easy to integrate pre-
| made components has been a pretty good business for a while.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| PrimeTek components (PrimeReact, PrimeNG) are MIT licensed
| open source.
|
| They also have a CSS utility library (like Tailwind).
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I wonder how they're doing too then, as we don't have public
| stats about them (Telerik was acquired by a public company
| Progress Software but they do not break down revenue by
| Telerik specifically). Ultimately, this business of selling
| components is not sound in the age of AI.
|
| Another thing to consider, it seems JS devs use more AI for
| work than .NET devs for example, which might be in more old-
| school companies and industries. I can't verify this but
| there seems to be a correlation between companies who use hip
| new CSS and JS frameworks, and their AI usage, thus
| accelerating Tailwind Corp's cannibalization by AI, as most
| vibe coders are building web apps from what I've seen and
| Tailwind and React are very well represented in the training
| set.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Definitely more than 200k per head. I remember seeing a job
| posting for Tailwind Labs for a (design?) engineer which was
| 250-300k TC.
|
| Seems like it was an insanely profitable product, but a risky
| business.
| f311a wrote:
| It's still pretty profitable, more than $100k a month
| TaylorOtwell1 wrote:
| Tailwind had several times more than 2M / ARR at their peak.
| onehair wrote:
| you have 2 comments in total and a super popular name :-(
| ctippett wrote:
| You can really feel the stress in Adam's comments. It must play
| absolute hell with your mental health, it's anxiogenic from the
| sidelines just thinking about it. Stay healthy and safe mate.
| 3rodents wrote:
| The biggest miss from Tailwind is ignoring the rest of the
| ecosystem. Rightly or wrongly, everyone has moved on to using
| shadcn's system for components. Tailwind hasn't. Tailwind has
| excellent components available through Plus which are worth
| paying for but they're not available where people are, which
| pushes people towards other libraries built on top of Tailwind. I
| have paid for Tailwind Plus and I like their Catalyst UI and I
| have used it on a project but it's a pain to use compared to
| alternatives, so, I don't bother.
|
| I'd go as far as to guess that their revenue isn't down due to AI
| but because of their lifetime access model combined with shadcn's
| registry system being much easier to use.
|
| Prediction: Tailwind acquired by Vercel.
| normie3000 wrote:
| > everyone has moved on to using shadcn's system for components
|
| This may be an exaggeration.
| jascha_eng wrote:
| I like this prediction and it would be a good fit. Vercel can
| also monetize existing traffic much more broadly than tailwind
| can with just tailwind plus.
| bilekas wrote:
| I can't get over the Author of the CR addi g his responses on
| TikTok.. What have we come to?
| katdork wrote:
| that's why I complained about it in the PR, mmm, I thought it
| was grossly unprofessional of him (besides the things he said
| in the discussion.
|
| e.g. Tech changes all the time, that isn't an excuse to be a
| dick. e.g. ok dude, don't expect any future free work from me
| in the future on any of your projects going forward. Rude AF.)
|
| also, I just realised, that PR is an excuse to get the library
| he made (https://github.com/quantizor/markdown-to-jsx) used
| within TailwindCSS :p
| akuchling wrote:
| Stray thought: adding a library the PR submitter controls
| would be a good starting point for an XZ/SSH-style supply
| chain attack: badger & threaten the maintainers to add the
| dependency, and then sneak something into a future library
| update.
| falloutx wrote:
| This seems like a huge red flag, there is no need to add
| any more dependencies to an already fully featured repo
| falloutx wrote:
| if the coding agents are already using Tailwind so much, I
| don't see why he is so adamant on add this to the repo.
| llms.txt is basically useless, and you need it you can add it
| to your user claude.md
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| It's peak brain fried slop that's for sure
| simonw wrote:
| Key comment is this one:
| https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
|
| > [...] the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering
| team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact
| AI has had on our business. And every second I spend trying to do
| fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not
| spending trying to turn the business around and make sure the
| people who are still here are getting their paychecks every
| month. [...]
|
| > Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite
| Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way
| people find out about our commercial products, and without
| customers we can't afford to maintain the framework.
| meken wrote:
| Thanks for that - the GitHub app "helpfully" collapsed this
| comment (along with most of the others in the thread), so I was
| confused how the headline related to this issue.
| baxtr wrote:
| That traffic is down can have at least two separate AI related
| causes:
|
| 1) Lower amount of impressions on the google search pages due
| to the AI answers
|
| 2) Lower amount of searches since people are using code
| generators
|
| I wonder which one it is primarily.
| samiv wrote:
| After we've completed the knowledge transfer from the public
| domain, across all potential sources of information, from books
| to open source code to private data banks and LLMs then what
| comes next? Destroying the said works so that nobody else can
| access them ? Privatize knowledge, hoard all the data, limit
| access, sell ads?
| thrownaway561 wrote:
| Honestly I think that they should be putting Tailwinds Plus and
| consulting services first. Sucks that AI is making the web itself
| obsolete now.
| sreekanth850 wrote:
| Very sad. Any OSS project that depend fully on consulting will be
| on high risk. Platforms like deepwiki shrinks the knowledge gap
| massively.
| blibble wrote:
| there's no knowledge on deepwiki
|
| only slop
| gkoberger wrote:
| I love Tailwind, and I am really sorry Adam and co are going
| through this. They've built a great product, and it's brought joy
| back building again for me.
|
| It's really hard to run a company, especially when your product
| is mostly OSS... Tailwind has helped thousands of companies save
| (or make) millions of dollars, and AI almost by default uses it
| to generate beautiful websites. This is such a hard position to
| be in... to watch your product take off, but your financials
| plummet. It really sucks how affected the team is after all the
| good work they've done.
| wg0 wrote:
| While I'm a shameless freeloader with mostly backend skills -
| Adam has my utmost respect for out of the box innovation.
|
| I did buy some of this books. Not the Tailwind UI though.
|
| Adam, you gotta pay bills too. I understand that. And I respect
| that.
|
| The day a product of mine starts making money, I'll come knocking
| your door.
|
| Thank you.
| figassis wrote:
| Today, I wanted to add tailwind to a new project and realized I
| had purchased it back in 2022. So I went to the website and
| realized it had moved to tailwind plus. That's how distracted
| I've been. To my surprise my access worked and I could still
| download the full UI kit.
|
| I know they promised lifetime, but I did not expect updates
| forever. This looks like the first issue to fix. I would have no
| issues paying 20% of purchase price for an updated version, that
| gave me access to 12 months of free updates.
|
| Also, what about paid access to skills or MCP server for design
| systems and components?
|
| I know these may be things he already considered, so don't want
| to presume I have an answer. But as a customer, totally willing
| to support a good product that has supported me.
| falloutx wrote:
| Lovable while claiming they are making $250m ARR heaving using
| Tailwind, doesnt even pay to support tailwind at all. Although
| with the AI companies you can never trust the numbers as they
| play the giving free trials and counting as future ARR game.
| gervwyk wrote:
| Great point here, the only thing that feels greedy to me is
| that these larger companies do not contribute back to the
| foundational libraries that they are building on, even to a
| minor extent for ecosystem improvements. Perhaps greedy is a
| strong word.
|
| i've always felt that oss licenses needs to include
| responsible use terms or something. some orgs dont mind
| paying for value contributed but you need to provide a
| structure to do so, even if that is on a voluntary basis.
|
| If anyone from Lovable etc sees these comments, great
| opportunity for sponsorship where it can make a difference
| upstream.
|
| Some companies have done this well, at a stage Retool use to
| sponsor a number of open source libs which greatly helped
| them with exposure to devs. Surely a better way to spend ad
| revenue imo.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| If you give something away for free, don't complain when
| people take it for free. Make it AGPL instead then.
| nickjj wrote:
| I'm happy to see this, not because I wish Adam failure. I am a
| Tailwind user myself and use it in all of my projects. Generally
| am a fan of Adam and respect his business.
|
| The happy (in a bad way) part is seeing very successful projects
| like Tailwind get financially fucked by AI. It means it's not
| just me.
|
| I am a small tech course creator who was able to make a living
| for 10 years but over the last 3 years it has tanked to where I
| make practically zero. Almost all due to less traffic hitting my
| blog which was the source of paid course purchases. I literally
| had to shift my entire life around after 25 years of being a
| successful contractor because of this.
|
| I hope the world understands how impactful (both good and bad
| ways) having an unchecked AI scrape the world's content and
| funnel everything directly through their monetized platform while
| content creators get nothing in return is.
| okokwhatever wrote:
| Hey! you just discovered media piracy dude! Congrats!
| nickjj wrote:
| That's an interesting way to think about it.
|
| I discovered media piracy long ago, but it was very acute
| before AI because only a small amount of folks pirated this
| type of content. I ignored them and put 0% energy into it
| because I wanted to focus on the happy path of people not
| pirating the content.
|
| If you think of AI as pirating media, it's providing that
| media to everyone in a context specific form so yes it is a
| pretty interesting analogy. Not quite a 1 to 1 match but the
| end outcome is the same and that's all that matters here.
| damsta wrote:
| Companies like Vercel, Lovable, and Stackblitz should pay
| salaries to each of these engineers. Their business succeeded
| only because Tailwind exists.
| nickmonad wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment that companies should help fund open
| source they depend on, but I think it's a stretch to say those
| business succeeded "only" because of Tailwind. It's a great
| project, although I'm pretty sure they would have figured out a
| way to work with CSS without it.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Companies like Vercel, Lovable, and Stackblitz should dissolve
| because their existence is a net negative for humanity.
| Jonathanvw wrote:
| Why is there existence a net negative for humanity?
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Same reason as tobacco companies.
| suyash wrote:
| Welcome to the internet, most of it is build by unknown OSS
| developers, how many people will you go ask these companies to
| pay for?
| CafeRacer wrote:
| Just charge a bucks for every deployment or something. Most of
| will easily pay a dollar.
|
| Tailwind should not be free, its good.
| aiiizzz wrote:
| I think you're underestimating the composition.
| CafeRacer wrote:
| Explain please
| immibis wrote:
| Can someone explain to me the advantage of writing class="bg-
| blue" instead of style="background-color: blue;" and why anyone
| ever thought they could make meaningful money from enabling the
| former?
| nickmonad wrote:
| Narrowing in on background color is an extreme
| oversimplification of what Tailwind provides. I found it to be
| a great tool for working with CSS, especially for layout.
| Business viability can be debated, but the value is way beyond
| what you suggested.
| insin wrote:
| The advantage is in both the speed of the shorthand when
| transferring the CSS you know you need for a layout from your
| brain to the element (flex items-center gap-2 vs. display:
| flex; align-items: center; gap: .5rem; - just try typing them
| both out), plus all the stuff inline styles can't do, such as
| variants based on screen size, colour scheme, user preference,
| pseudo-classes, parent/sibling state, etc. which you can get
| done in one place in one file in one sitting.
|
| The money wasn't coming from that.
| devalexwells wrote:
| For your first question, IMO the purported advantage is mainly
| convention at scale. There's nothing inherently wrong with raw
| CSS in style tags or other authoring models (well, except CSS-
| in-JS at runtime...). Tailwind is one simple authoring model
| that works at scale without fuss and bikeshedding. Wrote up my
| experience with the advantages and disadvantages on this though
| a bit ago to be able to point to[1].
|
| For the second question, depends on your definition of
| "meaningful" I guess. I doubt the original goal was to make
| money. There's OSS less prolific than Tailwind that makes
| money. Is it unreasonable for those projects to seek ways to
| compensate their projects?
|
| [1] https://wlls.dev/blog/on-tailwind
| Terretta wrote:
| > _why anyone ever thought they could make meaningful money
| from enabling the former_
|
| A better question might be why buyers thought it was worth
| paying for that "advantage" you want explained. When buyers
| think a thing like that, someone will fulfill their ask.
|
| If LLMs are eating the revenue stream, that likely gives the
| answer:
|
| Buyers thought Tailwind meant they didn't have to learn or do a
| thing in order to achieve an outcome. And someone built a niche
| around that.
|
| Is it true, and if not, why does it persist? Also not hard to
| explain given today's approaches to learning and the abysmal
| state of the ad delivery sites that used to be web search.
|
| It's almost impossible today to find the very few sites that
| show the standard component lib rendered as web components with
| modern CSS as supported cross browser -- no single party stands
| to profit from making that case. You'll see it in parts from
| other frameworks that aren't trying to do the UI saying "our
| framework drives native HTML/CSS/JS/WASM" with a few examples,
| but that's surprisingly unlikely to find from Google with "How
| do I make my web app look good?" if you don't know which terms
| to use.
|
| One could probably make a niche living giving modern web-native
| training for corporates. (Plenty firms purport to offer this,
| but generally don't really teach past the days of bootstrap.)
| Price against their recurring licensing costs, and a $10K to
| $30K class (the type enterprise SaaS products like Hashicorp
| offers for e.g. Terraform ecosystem) for modern web might even
| pay better than Tailwind.
|
| Generally, though, arbitrage plays can't be expected to last
| unless the value-add is actual work others don't want to do, so
| business model decay is likely to happen to things like
| Tailwind that have their ideas become standards that get
| implemented by the browser industry (see Apple and
| "Sherlocking":
| https://appdevelopermagazine.com/sherlocked:-the-controversi...
| tylerchilds wrote:
| I'll be honest.
|
| I'm a contributor to this.
|
| I've been CSS since the mid 2000s and I have a lot of it
| memorized by heart.
|
| My team uses tailwind, therefore I use tailwind
|
| But I don't want to reconfigure my mental model to think in
| esoteric shorthand, when I already have vanilla web tech
| memorized.
|
| So I just write some code to match the design and then I let an
| llm transform it into what my team expects.
|
| I'm sharing in the hopes that the tailwind team can figure out a
| middle ground because I think a service that can take any valid
| styled content and output the same result in tailwind would be a
| niche small language model that solves the use case for why I
| don't go to the docs.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Every project I worked on that used CSS was a mess. It's always
| 1000 line SCSS files and nobody knows what is going on there.
| tylerchilds wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not advocating for css or against tailwind
|
| Just sharing that the root cause is most developers don't
| want to pick up an additional syntax when they already have
| the fundamentals
|
| The main problem is the premise of tailwind
|
| Every single web design on earth is a compound opinion on
| like a few hundred popular properties and values
|
| They put all that in one style sheet
|
| Which became the one style sheet on earth
|
| Which made it possible to summon all those styles directly
| from within our apps
|
| Tailwind is like the chess of utilities. There's only so many
| opening and closing moves that running a business on it is
| incredibly difficult, given supply and demand.
| jsk2600 wrote:
| >Just sharing that the root cause is most developers don't
| want to pick up an additional syntax when they already have
| the fundamentals
|
| IF they already have the fundamentals. What I see is that
| more and more developers don't know CSS at all or very
| little; they only use Tailwind and haven't worked with CSS
| extensively before.
| pier25 wrote:
| > _It 's always 1000 line SCSS files and nobody knows what is
| going on there_
|
| It's been 15-20 years since I last saw that.
|
| There are tons of solutions on how to easily organize CSS
| code these days that don't involve TW.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| You mean CSS-in-JS?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| CSS modules is the native solution. But yes, compile-time
| CSS in TypeScript like PandaCSS or Vanilla Extract or
| StyleX (not run-time like Emotion) are also great
| alternatives.
| spoiler wrote:
| > and nobody knows what is going on there.
|
| For what its worth, I had the same experience with Tailwind.
| I regularly see classes that don't have an meaningful
| outcome.
|
| I don't think the problem is Tailwind or CSS (well, I guess
| Tailwind is CSS with extra steps but you get the idea) syntax
| (or any of the CSS preprocessors), but the fact that styling
| in browsers has accumulated a lot of cruft, and people who
| haven't "grown up" with it over the years don't fully
| understand it (I am more competent than most with it and
| there's still times I screw up).
|
| One thing that's kinda nice about Tailwind is that it made
| copy-pasting components easier. So people can get something
| decent without fully understanding what's happening
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| > I regularly see classes that don't have an meaningful
| outcome.
|
| You mean custom classes?
| another_twist wrote:
| Where's the 75% layoff number from ? This thread is about making
| docs llm friendly.
| sumedh wrote:
| Scroll down
| arccy wrote:
| if you actually read the thread:
| https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
| another_twist wrote:
| Missed this bit, thank you.
| mucha wrote:
| Adam added a comment to that thread with the 75% number and
| more context.
| magician2229 wrote:
| I listened to his podcast this morning where he mentions 75% of
| their four person engineering team was laid off (only the
| founders and one engineer remain)
|
| https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
| bakies wrote:
| 75% is a lot more dramatic than 3 people geez
| system2 wrote:
| Welcome to the age of clickbait and fake drama.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| He said he wanted to state it like that because he thought
| just saying "3 people" undersold the impact.
| 8note wrote:
| the impact of which seems a lot like its changing from
| company into side-project
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Yea this feels kind of unecessary from him and makes him
| look a bit full of himself.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| ctrl+F 75%
| schlap wrote:
| Tailwind UI could be the missing piece for AI generated frontend
| to have consistency, but it seems that shadcn took that place in
| the last 3-5 years.
| katdork wrote:
| although I've mentioned this in a subcomment, I want to highlight
| that the PR itself also seems to be an excuse to get the library
| he made to be used by TailwindCSS
| (https://github.com/quantizor/markdown-to-jsx)
| b34r wrote:
| Nope. Started with regex but it was brittle so I used my
| library which parses to AST which is easier to work with. It's
| a docs site, so I'm getting one more download woohoo.
| system2 wrote:
| Why would a CSS library turn into a company? How do they even
| make money while there are hundreds of alternatives?
|
| Bootstrap is more than enough for 99.99% of the projects, and it
| is free.
| devalexwells wrote:
| How does their stewardship of a CSS library exempt them from
| being a valid company? The fact that the market is competitive
| alone isn't justification.
|
| I agree that it's not obvious to me how or why Tailwind should
| turn a profit as a business, but there are examples of other
| similar companies turning profits, no?
|
| I think of Motion (formerly framer motion) for example, which
| is primarily an animation library: https://motion.dev/
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It solved a problem, people will pay for that.
|
| Now LLMs have removed the problem, so there's declining
| interest in solutions.
| throwaway2026-2 wrote:
| I feel like you don't need engineers anymore. Bad news for all of
| us, but its just a fact of life.
| system2 wrote:
| Maybe they don't, since CSS is the easiest to tap into in terms
| of programming. Database-driven software still heavily relies
| on seasoned engineers and cannot be messed with AI.
|
| For something basic like CSS, it is true. Ask ChatGPT or Claude
| Code to come up with any Tailwind template, and it will spit
| out within seconds for free, and even integrate it into the
| project effortlessly. This approach does not apply to heavy
| software such as a comprehensive CRM or another type of CRUD
| platform.
| timeon wrote:
| You need engineers but they have to pay for tokens now. Paying
| subscription just to have ability to do the job.
| saos wrote:
| > our revenue is down close to 80%.
|
| Damn
| legitster wrote:
| It's insane how much AIs use Tailwind and yet the companies
| aren't contributing anything. It would be trivial for Anthropic
| or Cursor to pay _something_.
|
| Would it work to have a new free-use license that explicitly
| excludes LLMs? Make them pay royalties - you'd have to use
| something like public license keys. But if Spotify pays a trivial
| license payment for every stream - Claude could contribute
| something when it recommends a project.
| quaintdev wrote:
| If they tailwind, it sets a precedent for others. They can't
| pay everyone.
| dafelst wrote:
| So you're saying that just because they can't pay everyone,
| they should pay no one?
| massimoto wrote:
| For what it's worth, Cursor does support Tailwind, see their
| sponsors page. But certainly agree.
|
| https://tailwindcss.com/sponsor
| chuckadams wrote:
| How would you possibly enforce this? I can disconnect my laptop
| from the internet and the local LLM will still autocomplete TW
| classes. Does JetBrains therefore owe TW every time it does
| this? What if it was actually completing UnoCSS class names
| that happen to overlap? How about when it's just simple
| autocomplete based on what classes are visible and what I've
| used within the same file?
|
| These might sound like snide rhetorical questions, but when you
| start demanding payment, they're very real.
| legitster wrote:
| > How would you possibly enforce this?
|
| The legal system.
|
| If you see a bunch of Tailwind markup on websites without a
| license key, you can enforce your license. The LLMs can write
| the code for you, but they either have to negotiate their own
| license or instruct users to get their own.
|
| The comparable I am familiar with is Font Awesome. Even if
| you want a free plan, you still have to create an account and
| get a key.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Sounds like full employment for IP lawyers. Not a world I'd
| prefer.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Then pretty soon people will stop using Tailwind and use
| another OSS atomic CSS library instead, like UnoCSS. You
| can't stop the hydra.
| humanlity wrote:
| In my mind, there are two types of businesses in the world: one
| is not particularly challenging but rather trivial, and the other
| is very high-tech.
|
| Today, LLMs make the first type of business much harder.
| hexbin010 wrote:
| No way the author of the PR created a TikTok to moan and
| mentioned it in 2 separate comments and accused Tailwind devs of
| "throwing a tantrum" ahaha.
|
| Oh my days, how cringeworthy.
| deadbabe wrote:
| The truth is, business opportunities are rarely eternal, usually
| they are just an opportunity to make money within a short window
| of time, such as a decade or two. Sometimes even shorter than
| that, perhaps even only a year or two.
|
| For Tailwind, time's up.
|
| If the engineering team could not be directed to build new
| products that bring in revenue, then there is no need for them
| anymore, the opportunity has been exhausted for its maximum
| yield. Are you going to squeeze blood from a stone?
| porker wrote:
| > The truth is, business opportunities are rarely eternal,
| usually they are just an opportunity to make money within a
| short window of time, such as a decade or two. Sometimes even
| shorter than that, perhaps even only a year or two.
|
| Agreed, and Adam and Steve made a life-changing amount of money
| from Refactoring UI and then Tailwind UI. That's a great
| outcome on its own.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| really surprised tailwind didn't get ahead of this by providing
| some sort of mcp interface and custom agent for designing design
| systems and autogenerating ui code directly based on the user's
| project. if it worked out of the box or with a few clicks via en
| extension, it would be a killer feature.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| > _But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering
| team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact
| AI has had on our business._
|
| Not a Tailwind user but I really appreciate the honesty. Is the
| brutal impact of AI as a cause established though? It appears
| creation of new web sites is down, but that doesn't mean the
| business has gone to LLMs like suggested; it could as well mean
| that there are simply no sites being created at all.
|
| Especially as
|
| > _Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite
| Tailwind being more popular than ever._
|
| and
|
| > _the docs are the only way people find out about our commercial
| products_
|
| ie. data is lacking.
| albroland wrote:
| I believe a lot of this expectation is that as people replace
| Google searches with LLMs, or even enriched LLM results pushed
| at the top of Google results, far less click through to the
| actual sources happens.
|
| This is happening across a lot of web verticals that previously
| relied on excellent SEO ranking and click through performance
| to drive ad revenue/conversions/sales. I have direct knowledge
| of some fairly catastrophic metrics coming out of knowledge
| base businesses; it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest that
| something like Tailwind is suffering a similar fate.
| robinhood wrote:
| It was probably inevitable. Building a commercial offering
| (mostly templates) around code which could be considered as
| "commodity" is extremely hard to do. I'm glad Adam and his team
| have had a lot of success already with this, but for sure it was
| not sustainable on the long run. If you are reading this, thanks
| Adam for having created Tailwind. It's not for everyone, but it's
| for some people, and that's good enough for me. We need options,
| and you were a solid one of them.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Something's wrong when a key piece of foundational web tech is
| staring down unsustainability. Tailwind is almost ubiquitous
| these days. It needs to continue to exist.
|
| Small businesses being eaten by AI is a net negative, because
| they're in a unique position whereby they need to actually have
| to listen to customers vs just optimizing for a rando middle
| manger's promotion in BigTech.
| threetonesun wrote:
| You could go back in time and say this about jQuery. Tailwind's
| future was always questionable because CSS is growing in new
| and amazing ways, and wrapping the complexity of new CSS
| features into helper classes isn't really a sustainable model.
|
| That said if someone wants a business model, figure out a way
| to get paid to get AI to make UIs using newer CSS features,
| because right now it's quite terrible at it.
| arnvald wrote:
| The difference is that jQuery was replaced by other
| libraries, while Tailwind grows in popularity, but due to AI
| its creator doesn't benefit from this popularity as much as
| before
| threetonesun wrote:
| jQuery was essentially replaced by JavaScript (and browser
| compatibility) getting better, but it continued to exist
| and grow because it was the de facto way to DOM
| manipulation, especially if you had to copy and paste off
| of Stack Overflow, or roll out a framework based UI.
|
| Tailwind being the default choice for AI UIs is not that
| different, it can continue to grow in usage but the
| fundamental need for Tailwind has passed.
| yCombLinks wrote:
| The difference is jquery went away because better things
| replaced it (in javascript). If the fundamental need for
| tailwind has passed why is it's usage growing? It's more
| that the problem solved by the paid portion of tailwind
| is now solved by AI.
| conrs wrote:
| As an engineer, I want to believe this, but really - does it?
|
| Most folks use frameworks because it's easier than learning how
| to build it all yourself - things are done for you instead.
| This niche is now getting eroded by AI and low-code
| substantially.
|
| Couple that with my experience maintaining frontends that are
| far too complex for their use cases - e.g. do we really need
| SPA's, state sync, and reusable components for our admin tool
| that doesn't reuse components?
|
| This leads me to think there's been bloat here for at least a
| decade. So, while vibe coding will also lead to bloat, it's
| easier to work with, and arguably higher value than paying for
| a specific framework.
|
| It's a tragedy in life that things that are useful don't always
| get valued, instead being used as a stepping stone for
| progress, but I'm not sure that has a solution.
| wiseowise wrote:
| CSS is foundational.
|
| Tailwind is not.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| I'm sorry for what's happening to Tailwind, it clearly sucks,
| but a library like that is definitely not a key piece of
| foundational web tech the same way bootstrap and jquery
| weren't.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > _key piece of foundational web tech is staring down
| unsustainability_
|
| This must be satire. CSS is what's actually foundational;
| literally, a foundation upon which Tailwind was built.
| ukprogrammer wrote:
| This is what you get when you sell a lifetime product
|
| Tailwind UI is a phenomenal product, but, there's a simple
| mathematical reason you cannot sell code like in this way to
| create a sustainable business
| didip wrote:
| How does Tailwind make money?
| paradite wrote:
| I was downvoted to oblivion for posting this comment.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42439059
|
| But I'm merely telling the truth. The fact that people don't like
| it doesn't change the fact that software engineers are largely
| replaceable with AI now.
|
| We are seeing the second order effects now that people using AI
| are not buying software products anymore, leading to layoff of
| software engineers.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| I wonder if this is all due to AI, or whether shadcn/ui's
| popularity (and blocks, and themes, and registry of paid
| component libraries) has also impacted them. That's my personal
| go to, and not Tailwind UI paid, and that's not because of LLMs.
| asattarmd wrote:
| > And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the
| community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn
| the business around and make sure the people who are still here
| are getting their paychecks every month.
|
| Then step aside as the maintainer of the project then and better
| yet, make something like Tailwind-foundation etc. which is truly
| open source. Go spend your time building your business, but you
| can't become the bottleneck and not do anything for something
| that has become so foundational for Web Dev.
| marginalx wrote:
| I urge you to understand what he is going through, he started
| the project, made it available freely, as more effort was
| required he added a premium offering to keep the whole thing
| running and hire more help. Please pause to think before coming
| to a rush judgement. How would you react if you had done
| exactly the things he had done, and you just had to lay off
| most of your team yesterday. We are humans and not robots, for
| all he has done, he has certainly earned the right to some
| times focus on what's affecting him first before he can focus
| on OSS.
|
| Be Kind, we are all born billionaires with billions of
| "kindness tokens" in the bank, don't use them sparingly.
| geenat wrote:
| I recently had a similar junk PR on my 1,700 star repository:
| https://github.com/gnat/surreal/pull/56
|
| I'm fairly convinced these are bot / LLM generated; the content
| is nonsensical garbage.
|
| PS: If an LLM needs a whole seperate fork to understand your
| content, the LLM is failing at it's job.
|
| PS PS: I want to highlight that the PR itself also seems to be an
| excuse to get the library quantizor made pulled in as a new
| dependency. Nasty.
| aiiizzz wrote:
| Sounds shady.
| b34r wrote:
| Yes, pulled in on a single docs site. A library with zero
| dependencies and full CommonMark compliance so I can manipulate
| the markdown as AST easily and then recompile back to markdown.
| What a horrible thing to do. So sorry I wasted my own personal
| time on this. People like you drive others out of open source.
| dogleash wrote:
| >What a horrible thing to do. So sorry I wasted my own
| personal time on this. People like you drive others out of
| open source.
|
| Pot, meet kettle.
| nsmog767 wrote:
| not the most important point here, but llms.txt won't have any
| impact on anything anyway.
| geenat wrote:
| I'm fairly convinced these are bot / LLM generated PR's in the
| first place; the content is nonsensical garbage.
| b34r wrote:
| No, I spent many hours of my personal time on it.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| Maybe you don't need a massive engineer team developing Tailwind
| and "monetizing it" You, Tailwind, don't get to collect ALL the
| rent. You were made "successful" because you created something
| that was OPEN SOURCE and the community chose to adopt your
| technology because of that. You wouldn't even exist had you not
| had the foundation, made the implicit statement that, I am
| willing to share rent by open-sourcing. You wouldn't even have
| ONE engineer!! You're now crying because you over-sold your
| success and improperly scaled your business. Your fault. IF all
| you need is two engineers that's fine. That's your piece of the
| rent. Other business are hiring far more than the 75% you laid
| off and building and creating value on top this open source
| technology. No jobs lost, just your ego and the empty promises
| you made to investors.
| moralestapia wrote:
| 100%.
|
| Also, https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-
| byproduc...
|
| "Boo hoo, I only made eight figures from this :'("
| MrFurious wrote:
| My surprise is that the tailwind creator could have a engineering
| team based in a css framework that basically was used for people
| that didn't knew real css. Is normal that this people now use
| other products more effective how AI for this task.
| normie3000 wrote:
| I know CSS and was quite sceptical about tailwind before I used
| it in anger.
|
| I was going to write a longer response, but instead I keep
| reading your last sentence:
|
| > Is normal that this people now use other products more
| effective how AI for this task.
|
| I think it's too early to tell on that.
| okokwhatever wrote:
| How many of us understood the scale of the problem when music
| creators were ranting because the piracy was destroying their
| business?
|
| We'll have to adapt mates. Sadly (i dont say this happily) this
| is a new reality we cant decide on.
| fuddle wrote:
| They have the UI Blocks, Templates and UI Kit in
| https://tailwindcss.com/plus. I think they are in a good position
| to build an AI website builder similar to lovable.dev if they
| wanted to.
| motbus3 wrote:
| This GitHub conversation is disgraceful. Lots of complaints and
| no support to the devs.
|
| The company I work for is going through the same. It is not a
| product for dev though. We ceased support for many countries now
| because people see no reason for paying, but after it was gone
| they said they would pay. If you wait too much for supporting
| good folks those projects will be gone and only greedy corps will
| exist
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| That sucks. I'm not a big fan of Tailwind, but at least it helps
| non-designers make somewhat decent user-interfaces.
|
| It's hard to run a software business.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| This is the actual comment that it's mentioned:
| https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
|
| However, the whole conversation is worth reading (but it's sort
| of heartbreaking).
|
| Sounds like fairly decent folks, all around.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Pretending like this is some Google-level apocalypse when it's a
| garage band downsizing? Spare me.
| re-thc wrote:
| As an early Tailwind Plus / Tailwind UI customer I don't think it
| has anything to do with AI. The product and technicals are there
| but from a business and user perspective Tailwind the paid
| product was trash and still is. It tried to do everything and
| lacked direction.
|
| There were originally snippets but it's not reusable in a proper
| sense based on components like a design system. Each snippet may
| have overlaps but you can't get it together properly.
|
| Next there was catalyst, a react component library but it was
| barebones and doesn't tie into the snippets.
|
| And then there were templates, which again is another direction.
|
| It would have been better if it was thought out. Design system.
| Component library. Snippets built on a solid base.
| arewethereyeta wrote:
| Create a license that prevents AI companies that generate html
| based on tailwind from doing it without being in a commercial
| package. Let them know of the license change and give them 3
| months to adjust. Keep tailwind accessible and allow that llm
| instruction to make it's way into the codebase so it gets picked
| up by multiple "AI" businesses that output code. This is your new
| business model.
|
| Open source was not ready for this type of businesses that don't
| give a dam about rights or copyrights.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| It's open source under an MIT license, I wouldn't use Tailwind
| if it wasn't open source but there is nothing stopping them
| from future releases being non-open source.
|
| They can't retroactively pull the license, and most people
| would just start using a OSS fork of tailwind if they did.
| acabal wrote:
| Taking their sponsors page at face value and doing the math,
| they're bringing in close to $100k/month with corporate
| sponsorships alone... how much money could maintaining a
| framework possibly cost?
| everfrustrated wrote:
| They had 8 employees
| acabal wrote:
| Sure, but to maintain a CSS framework? Seems like they way
| overhired.
| f311a wrote:
| With TC of $250k. There is a lot of room for optimization.
| dbbk wrote:
| They shouldn't
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Before you shame the creator over this, read the thread
| thoroughly. I don't know what the solution here is tbh.
|
| Frankly, I haven't visited the tailwind page in over six months
| as well. The AI just does things. Clearly the upsell path for the
| company is not sustainable.
|
| What would the solution be?
| mmcnl wrote:
| Wow, this is a grim reality check: AI hyperscalers taking in
| billions of revenue, while at the same time putting honest
| business like Tailwind out of work, without any form of
| compensation. What happened to "you wouldn't steal a car" etc.?
| It's only illegal if you're not a trillion dollar company?
|
| I have trouble expressing how terrible unjust it feels that AI
| companies are stealing money from the common people. I have no
| other way to put it.
|
| Also: this will definitely limit the use of AI. People will stop
| publishing valuable content for free on the internet, if AI
| scrapers will steal and monetize it.
| agentifysh wrote:
| this whole "ai is theft" argument is just pure cope. tailwind
| was always just a thin abstraction over css standards and they
| only became the industry standard by playing the seo game and
| dumping docs on the open web for everyone to see. you dont get
| to claim theft when a model actually learns the patterns you
| basically forced onto the world for free to build your brand.
| tailwinds business model was essentially rent seeking on the
| fact that css is tedious to write manually and now that the
| marginal cost of production has dropped to near zero they are
| suprised they cant sell 300 dollar templates anymore.
|
| the car comparison is honestly embarassing for this community
| to even bring up lol. its not theft to recognize a pattern and
| its definately not illegal for a company to do what every
| junior dev has been doing for years which is reading the docs
| and then not buying the paid stuff. adam built a business that
| relied on human inefficiency and now that inefficiency is gone.
| its not a tragedy its just a market correction. if your moat is
| so shallow that a llm can drain it in one pass then you didnt
| really have a product you just had a temporary advantage.
| honestly tailwind should of seen this coming a mile away but i
| guess its easier to blame "scrapers" than admit the ui kit
| gravy train is over. move on and build something that actually
| provides value.
| imiric wrote:
| > this whole "ai is theft" argument is just pure cope.
| tailwind was always just a thin abstraction over css
| standards
|
| Both of those can be true.
| omnimus wrote:
| Both are true. And thin abstraction doesn't mean it's not
| valuable abstraction.
| mmcnl wrote:
| It doesn't matter what Tailwind your opinion is. It matters
| that they built something which definitely has market
| validation that people were willing to pay for. AI took their
| lunch AND their lunch money.
| chuckadams wrote:
| The ad was "You wouldn't download a car." To which my response
| was always a loud "HELL yes, I would!"
| gnarlouse wrote:
| I'm not sure this is such a reality check. I remember figuring
| this out maybe a month or so after October 2023, when
| ChatGippity first dropped. Like, if it's a "do anything
| platform" won't the first anything be to cannibalize low
| hanging anything's, followed by progressively higher hanging
| anything's until there's no work left?
|
| Like play out AI, it sucks for everybody except the ones
| holding the steering wheel, unless we hold them accountable for
| the changing landscape of stake-in-civilization distribution.
| Spoiler: haha, we sure fucking aren't in the US.
| codeptualize wrote:
| Never been a fan of tailwind, but this is kinda sad. Given it's
| popularity what a sad situation that they aren't getting able to
| get properly funded.
|
| I think the solution is one of the big companies with lots of
| money to acquire tailwind. Specifically Vercel. They use it,
| their v0 thing uses tailwind allover, they have bought a bunch of
| open source companies in the past, and they should have deep
| enough pockets. Last year they acquired tremor blocks, which is a
| UI library, that uses tailwind!
|
| Makes perfect sense, lets get it done.
| tin7in wrote:
| I bought the Refactoring UI book years ago and it taught me so
| much about simplicity and good design!
| snihalani wrote:
| My takeaway from this: If LLM can eat your lunch, you should
| remove your cash cow from crawler avenues and gatekeep it to
| humans only
| dostick wrote:
| 75% it's 3/4, and plural "we have let go" means 6 people was let
| go. Or three if that's a royal "we".
| o_m wrote:
| It says 75% of the engineer team. There might be other roles
| not affected.
| hmokiguess wrote:
| I bought their Plus thing a while back and not I can't find
| myself a reason to use it.
|
| If I was considering that purchase in today's landscape, I would
| surely not buy it. At $299 USD I can have a decent model do the
| job of writing custom tailored components for me and iterate
| extensively on them.
|
| Hard sell with a "UI Kit" versus a "UI Brain".
|
| If I were Adam I would drop to $29.99 and accept the status quo,
| but not make it lifetime access to try and not piss off existing
| owners, and I would pivot to building a Frontend AI Agent and a
| Tailwind Labs Model.
| antonymoose wrote:
| Im currently considering buying it actually. I've landed a
| decent side-project building out a CRM for a small business
| that wants to ditch Salesforce. It's all internal tooling so
| the customer has no care or need for a highly customized fancy
| UI and that $299 is peanuts relative to the time saved and my
| hourly rate. While I could just use Bootstrap it's starting to
| feel a bit too dated (subjective).
| pikdum wrote:
| Only an anecdote, but I was working on a side project with
| another dev who wanted to use Tailwind Plus components. It wasn't
| immediately obvious whether this was allowed under his personal
| license or if we'd have to get a team license instead, though.
|
| We decided to go with a FOSS component library instead to avoid
| any potential issues down the road. After re-reading the license
| page now, I'm still not sure.
| ohnoesjmr wrote:
| I actually emailed about this after reading this thread, got a
| warm response from a person, which did not make this any
| clearer.
|
| I want to use it in an OSS project, does that mean every drive
| by contributor needs a license?
| retrocog wrote:
| Licensing hasn't caught up yet. It probably wouldn't be the worst
| idea to have a simple content copyright license protocol or
| standard that works for LLMs?
|
| Something simple and obvious, like sticking a license file that
| has certain expected fields in /.well-known. I wouldn't be
| surprised if this is already being discussed because it would
| easily allow agents to check for special license requirements
| that only apply to them, directing them how to share content
| while remaining in compliance.
| trinix912 wrote:
| That's no better than robots.txt, it's simple to bypass and
| with the current LLM tech there's lots of plausible deniability
| regarding the output.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| Specific link to actual comment:
| https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
|
| I think that the OP should update link to this comment
| mjwhansen wrote:
| Nothing but love to Adam and the Tailwind team (including now-
| former team members) today. They've made huge contributions to
| web development and it just sucks, sucks, sucks that things have
| turned out this way. I know he'll find a way forward, though.
| ozim wrote:
| If I were mtsears4 - after such reply I would dig a deep hole,
| hide there and cry for a week.
|
| Dude thought he is smart but ended up being an entitled brat.
| thedangler wrote:
| Tailwind is nice and all be it's crazy verbose, I still am a fan
| of bootstrap. In the days of AI and tokens. Tailwind classes and
| styling cure through tokens. lol
| willio58 wrote:
| Wow. This is wild. I have a mix of empathy for the guy and also a
| feeling like he has no idea what he's doing running a business.
|
| > Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite
| Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way
| people find out about our commercial products, and without
| customers we can't afford to maintain the framework.
|
| So his idea is to make Tailwind less modern than competitors by
| throwing a wrench in this tool that makes it easier to write
| tailwind with AI, simply because he thinks the only way Tailwind
| can make money is if actual human beings come to read the docs
| site? If that's the case, your income is based on products that's
| are not high enough value to potential customers, or you're
| marketing it poorly, or both.
|
| > And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the
| community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn
| the business around and make sure the people who are still here
| are getting their paychecks every month.
|
| I get priorization but this isn't really that. He's not saying
| "I'll get to this when I find some time. Busy with high-priority
| business-related things right now.". He's saying "AI is going to
| be the end of profits for tailwind and instead of coming up with
| an alternative income stream I'm going to just block anything
| making tailwind easier to use with tailwind. And also stop
| complaining about it."
|
| It sucks to fire people, but that doesn't mean you have to spread
| the flames out to open source contributors trying to make
| tailwind better for everyone. Look for new income streams,
| ideally ones that can be sold to people that control the money in
| companies (that isn't often the devs that are in your docs).
| ncallaway wrote:
| > I get priorization but this isn't really that. He's not
| saying "I'll get to this when I find some time. Busy with high-
| priority business-related things right now."
|
| I don't really understand how you can find a difference between
| your sentence with what he wrote:
|
| > I totally see the value in the feature and I would like to
| find a way to add it.
|
| > But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering
| team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal
| impact AI has had on our business. And every second I spend
| trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a
| second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around and
| make sure the people who are still here are getting their
| paychecks every month.
|
| Pretty sure those are the same picture
| andruby wrote:
| It seems like every (coding) AI model out there is generating
| html with TailwindCSS styling.
|
| @adam: this is just an idea. Have you tried reaching out to
| OpenAI, Anthropic et al to become sponsors of tailwind? Could
| that be a viable revenue path?
|
| Maybe you could offer LLM friendly docs to them, or access to
| something valuable for them? Or maybe they're just happy to
| sponsor.
|
| Tailwind and its popularity make LLM's more valuable, so I'm sure
| the model makers want Tailwind to thrive.
|
| Any other monetization ideas to help Adam?
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >making it easier for LLMs to read our docs just means less
| traffic to our docs which means less people learning about our
| paid products and the business being even less sustainable.
|
| This tells me the problem wasn't AI but the overall business
| wasn't healthy. Docs don't drive sales.
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| Doesn't matter. Even if people were for some reason still going
| to their docs there would simply be no need for the types of
| paid products they offer - prebuilt template components.
|
| Why pay for a template when AI's can shit out your entire
| design system and multiple templates in 5 minutes, not to
| mention competition from other template systems like shadcn
| that are completely free.
|
| And yes they might not be the best quality but you just prompt
| it until you like it and then use it as a reference.
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| Before LLMs, Google was showing highlights which took crawled
| content and displayed it on google search results, meaning
| they'd get less traffic on their site while google stole their
| content.
|
| It's unfortunate that google helped kickstart the world wide
| web but now they're extracting everything while polluting
| search results with ads
| johnpaulkiser wrote:
| Tailwind should have bought shadcn and started pushing a better
| subscription model. Shadcn & vercel ate tailwind's lunch imo.
| vhiremath4 wrote:
| I will be honest. I love open source. But something that really
| annoys me about the open source community is that the developers
| take this holier-than-thou approach to backing up maintainers in
| circumstances like this, but obviously they are not paying with
| their own money. They are just complaining, and it feels a lot
| like virtue signaling at worst and pure naivety at best. It feels
| extremely disengenous at this point, and it's annoying.
|
| What do we actually know?
|
| 1. People are inherently selfish. If you give me this shit for
| free, I'm gonna use it for free. Obviously everyone is doing
| this. Spare me the "but I go to this conference or that
| conference".
|
| 2. Code is cheap. Why would I ever pay for something that is not
| gated behind a service with API limits and costs?
|
| 3. Coding as we know it is getting commoditized. That's correct.
| We are all going to lose our jobs as we know it today. Clearly
| that's the future. Wake up!
|
| But when making these points, open source devs (and honestly a
| lot of people on hacker news) whine and complain. I don't really
| know why I'm leaving this comment - I just feel like I'm at an
| annoyance breaking point. This guy is obviously struggling to
| pivot and all the grandstanding and virtue signaling just feels
| like additional noise and wanting to feel good with very little
| action.
| StrauXX wrote:
| The PR author posted a TikTok link [1] the thread later
| explaining their position. Their behaviour seems very
| unprofessional to me. Mayve the just want to increase engagement
| to their accounts. Tailwind definetly made the right call here.
|
| [1] https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZThLjg284/
| pixelsort wrote:
| I never appreciated tailwind until AI models revealed it as such
| a token-efficient way transport styles between models and other
| use-cases. AI aruably hurts demand for their premium offering the
| same way it hurts demand for junior devs.
| molaaoonao wrote:
| That's rough. Respects to the honesty.
| cjk wrote:
| I'm a Tailwind Plus customer in spite of not being the world's
| biggest Tailwind fan. Even though it really grinds my gears how
| unreadable markup can be when littered with Tailwind classes, I
| appreciate the quality and variety of the templates and
| components available in Tailwind Plus and the constant (free!)
| updates. So this is a bummer to hear. Many thanks to Adam and the
| team.
| hakanensari wrote:
| I bought Tailwind UI, now Plus a couple of years ago. I've also
| dabbled with a Claude skill that scrapes a "UI block" source from
| the site and transforms it into a Rails view component. Maybe
| there's a way to make Plus and LLMs work together rather than
| compete?
| ibejoeb wrote:
| Multiple tiktok self-promotions in github comments is nuts
| racl101 wrote:
| We should have Telethons for all the companies on whose products
| we build our products but whose livelihood depends on the
| goodwill of others lest can't keep the lights on OR they get sold
| to some soulless corp and turned to crap.
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