[HN Gopher] Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS
___________________________________________________________________
Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS
Author : qwertyforce
Score : 334 points
Date : 2026-01-08 19:09 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| baggachipz wrote:
| On one hand, this is great as Tailwind can continue as a going
| concern. On the other, how long until Tailwind AI?
| mrgoldenbrown wrote:
| It's not clear how much Google is kicking in, it might not
| actually be enough to keep Tailwind going.
| baggachipz wrote:
| Well now that it's on the HN front page, it had better be a
| lot :). If it's 6k this will be a bit of a PR kerfuffle.
| andy12_ wrote:
| This is probably related to this [1] if anyone is wondering.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527950
| XCSme wrote:
| Most likely, as Adam directly "credited" their revenue issues
| to AI (which makes sense, tailwind was making money by selling
| pre-made components, but now the AI can generate those for
| you).
| jrjeksjd8d wrote:
| The AI issue was that their docs advertise their paid
| offerings. When AI plagiarizes the docs it doesn't include
| the ads.
| number6 wrote:
| And since AI knows every Tailwind page, you probably do not
| need the paid offer for a decent looking page.
|
| Well you always could just read the docs instead of using
| the paid offer. Took longer. Not anymore.
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| It's both.
| DoesntMatter22 wrote:
| When you say plagiarizes, do you mean they are publishing
| their own docs without ads? Or you mean when the AI is
| reading the docs instead of a person they ignore the ads?
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I think its the latter.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| It was a problem with their revenue stream, which was
| documentation website -> banner for lifetime payment.
|
| All customers already had lifetime access and couldn't pay
| more. Plus noone was reading the docs on the webpage
| anymore.
|
| Recurring subscriptions, ads in AI products (think Tailwind
| MCP server telling you about subscription features.) Those
| were just two things I pulled out of the hat in a minute.
| SockThief wrote:
| https://xcancel.com/OfficialLoganK/status/200933926325156690...
| DoesntMatter22 wrote:
| Ironic that you are posting a site that does exactly what
| Tailwind is complaining about lol
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I don't think I'm worried about defunding a trillionaire.
| Alifatisk wrote:
| I wouldn't use xcancel if Twitter was usable for guests
| behnamoh wrote:
| Doesn't matter to me, as I stopped using Google AI a few months
| ago because of their lack of respect for my time when creating a
| freaking API...
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| what do you mean?
| bibryam wrote:
| https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388
| lagniappe wrote:
| Will this change the situation of the 75% of engineers who just
| got laid off, or is this just to fund the framework, rather than
| the Tailwind Plus team?
| vinyl7 wrote:
| It's just a temporary PR move
| sigmonsays wrote:
| This is the real question
| sodapopcan wrote:
| Hopefully! Turns out 75% was of four total developers. Ideally
| Google would be giving them enough to re-hire three people.
|
| Source: https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-
| had-six...
| agumonkey wrote:
| man what a rollercoaster for them, i hope they can rejoin
| quick
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| If they have 3 left, that's 9 engineers. I doubt it'll bring
| them back unless this is a huge package. a few million only
| delays the inevitable by a year or 2.
| 306bobby wrote:
| From what I understand, 3 left and they had 4 total. Not 3
| are there and they had 9 total
| minimaxir wrote:
| Vercel is also now sponsoring Tailwind CSS:
| https://x.com/rauchg/status/2009336725043335338
| arcfour wrote:
| I was honestly surprised they weren't already, given how
| heavily they use and promote it! Good to see they are helping
| out now too, though.
| blibble wrote:
| I suppose this an attempt to try and head off the stories about
| "AI" killing open source
| atonse wrote:
| Google has poured untold millions into open source over the
| last couple of decades, not just by sponsorships, but also by
| employing contributors, etc.
|
| I don't think that'll change with AI. They just needed to be
| reminded about the financials of Tailwind and I'm sure it was
| an easy conversation internally.
| dust42 wrote:
| > Google has poured untold millions into open source over the
| last couple of decades, not just by sponsorships, but also by
| employing contributors, etc.
|
| And Google has profited untold hundreds of billions of open
| source over the last couple of decades. They just need to be
| reminded of it.
|
| Edit: Haha, getting downvoted! Never underestimate the power
| of tens of thousands of Googlers on HN... Look, I use Gmail,
| Google maps, Chrome and Android and occasionally Google
| search but without Linux, Java and webkit it wouldn't exist.
| Eridrus wrote:
| Google is actually kind of infamous for not using much in
| the way of OSS software.
|
| The list of things I can think of is:
|
| * Linux
|
| * LLVM
|
| * Webkit/Chrome (which they have done the majority of
| contributions to for a long time)
|
| * Java & a little bit of Python
| manmal wrote:
| Oh, only Linux? /s
| HeyMeco wrote:
| For Linux / ChromeOS: GPU drivers benefit heavily: -
| Freedreno for Qualcomm - Panthor for Arm Mali
|
| Lots of Linux contributions for Rust drivers
| dust42 wrote:
| So if you subtract linux and LLVM and Webkit and Java,
| what is left of Google? Absolutely nothing. Well, a
| mostly empty, dysfunctional mono repo lacking the main
| dependencies.
| tehlike wrote:
| Come on.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Oh yeah, manipulating users and monetary siphoning data
| with their advertising schemes.
| fooker wrote:
| There's a whole lot more, check `third_party/` if you
| work at Google.
|
| (disclaimer, used to work at google a long time ago)
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| Didn't they open source Kubernetes (aka probably the
| biggest OSS project since Linux itself)
| jeffbee wrote:
| Biggest in what sense? Certainly not in terms of the size
| of the code base. It is an order of magnitude smaller
| than Chromium.
| atonse wrote:
| V8 (covered in Chrome), Angular, Dart, Golang,
| Kubernetes, Android (remember Android???)
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Not surprising these days. HN community wants in on the
| riches too before the industry crashes.
| atonse wrote:
| And what's your point? When interests align, what's there
| to complain about?
|
| I'm not, nor have I ever been, a googler, btw. I did apply
| for a job there in 2006 but didn't make it past the first
| round (they were asking me obscure TCP/IP questions for a
| Java developer).
|
| They created V8, kickstarted the modern browser wars with
| Chrome. They've sponsored tons of Open Source projects via
| Google Summer of Code. They've done more than their fair
| share. Half the devops stuff like Kubernetes, probably a
| lot of the early work related to linux containers, who
| knows what else.
|
| There is always going to be someone who thinks they can do
| more. But they didn't have to do _any_ of it. Yet they did
| a ton.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I think you are getting downvoted because your claim that
| "without Linux, Java and webkit it wouldn't exist" doesn't
| pass the smell test. If Linux didn't exist, maybe Google
| will just use one of the BSDs. If Java didn't exist perhaps
| Google would just write more code in C++ instead; I'm
| pretty sure it still has more lines of C++ than Java. Or
| maybe Go would get invented a few years earlier. And if
| WebKit didn't exist maybe Google would just fork KHTML
| themselves rather than forking a fork of KHTML. A lot of
| open source software appeared at the right time to be
| dominant, but without them other different open source
| software might dominate. But your argument isn't about what
| if the entire OSS movement didn't exist. It's about what if
| specific OSS didn't exist.
| flowerthoughts wrote:
| Yes, but someone managed to get funding for an external
| sponsorship in a single day? I'm happily surprised.
| jsheard wrote:
| Well that and the fact that LLMs love using Tailwind, which
| puts the vendors in an awkward spot if the Tailwind project
| implodes.
|
| Makes you wonder how much ossification is going to happen
| because AI models are entrenched in 2023's tooling du jour.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| If your business can easily get destroyed by AI, then the
| problem is your business model.
| manmal wrote:
| Which business is 100% not at risk in the next 10 years?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| According to Peter Thiel, taking care of children. Gotta
| make sure the housewife is happy in the AI uprising after
| all.
|
| Very myopic thinking. Fallout New Vegas had its plutocrat
| of interest make sure to scan the brains of his biggest
| fancies before the Great War. A true visionary.
| evilduck wrote:
| Funeral Homes
| marcyb5st wrote:
| Elderly care? With an aging population in most of the
| western world it will become more and more important IMHO
| atonse wrote:
| Look up Humanoid Robots.
| spockz wrote:
| Farming, livestock, arms, school/nursery, medicine,
| construction, real estate, finance. Basically anything
| rooted in the physical world and elemental services.
| nateb2022 wrote:
| I'd agree with medicine, school/nursery, real estate, and
| finance but mostly because in those industries the
| ability to connect with clients at a human level is often
| more valuable than sheer talent.
|
| With farming/livestock, pretty much all of that can
| become automated. And even in the previous human-centric
| sectors, there are definitely roles that will be replaced
| by AI, even if the sector as a whole continues to employ
| a lot of people.
|
| Take law, for instance. Due to the prevalence of bar
| associations (which will likely prevent AI from doing
| lawyers' jobs), AI will never be a lawyer. However, many
| lawyers have and continue to replace paralegals with AI.
| manmal wrote:
| I can't see a good reason real estate wouldn't go the way
| car dealerships are going.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Maybe there are also engineers at Google who saw the thread
| yesterday and wanted to help out? I agree that companies are
| self-serving, but (for now) they're made of people who are not.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| Damn that was fast. Github comments flamewar delivers.
| mdasen wrote:
| This is good, but it doesn't necessarily mean that Tailwind is
| out of the financial difficulty that we talked about yesterday.
| You can sponsor Tailwind for as little as $6,000/year. 29
| companies were already sponsoring Tailwind including 16 companies
| at the $60,000/year level. Maybe Google AI Studio has decided to
| shell out a lot more, but it could also be a relatively small
| sponsorship compared to the $1.1M in sponsorships that Tailwind
| is already getting. Google has deep pockets and could easily just
| say "f-it, we're betting on AI coding and this tool helps us make
| UIs and $2M/year is nothing compared to what we're spending on
| AI." It's also possible that the AI Studio team has a small
| discretionary budget and is giving Tailwind $6,000/year.
|
| It's good, but it's important to read this as "they're offering
| some money" and not "Tailwind CSS now doesn't have financial
| issues because they have a major sponsor." This could just be a
| 1-5% change in Tailwind's budget. We don't know.
|
| And that's not to take away from their sponsorship, but on the
| heels of the discussion yesterday it's important to note that
| Tailwind was already being sponsored by many companies and still
| struggling. This is a good thing, but it's hard to know if this
| moves the needle a bunch on Tailwind's problems. Maybe it'll be
| the start of more companies offering Tailwind money and that'd be
| great.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| I would think Tailwind could keep 3 engineers around if they
| are getting sponsorship of over $1m/yr.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| Not necessarily. We don't know what all their costs are, but
| it's a lot more than just salaries. I'm sure there was a lot
| of uncertainty in how long those sponsorships would last.
| There are any number of factors. Adam also stated in a
| podcast [0] that he laid people of now in order to ensure
| they he could give them generous severance packages. I'm sure
| people will have thoughts on that but whatever, I think that
| makes sense.
|
| [0] https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-
| six...
| manmal wrote:
| What costs could tailwind the OSS project have besides
| payroll and SaaS subs of max 20% the payroll?
| sodapopcan wrote:
| Hosting, marketing, other promotional stuff (conferences,
| maybe other?), there are still three people on the
| payroll and otherwise I don't know (which was part of my
| point) as I've never run a business like this before
| myself. Oh, subscriptions to AI services... that's pricey
| I hear ;)
| perks_12 wrote:
| Hosting for their documentation would only be a
| noteworthy amount if they chose to host on Vercel. Other
| than that it's a Hetzner box at $100 per month tops.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| What marketing? Their only marketing is a link in their
| documentation.
| lysace wrote:
| Obviously, yes. Even in the SV area. We all know engineers'
| capabilities triple or more if they work from there. /S
| zamadatix wrote:
| I've seen wildly different takes assuming how many people
| worked at Tailwind and what they did because "3/4 of the
| engineering team" is confusing without more context, so I
| decided to go through the podcast episode about it
| https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-
| six... to see what the full picture was.
|
| Remaining:
|
| - Adam (cofounder/owner/original author of tailwind)
|
| - Jonathan (cofounder/owner/product/engineering/early co-
| author of tailwind)
|
| - Steve (owner/design lead)
|
| - Peter [part time] (partnerships/ops/support)
|
| - Robin (engineer)
|
| There were 3 other engineers who worked with Robin to make up
| the 4 person engineering team before being laid off. The ones
| laid off were claimed to be given a good severance. It did
| not seem to clarify if the 3 owners are collecting a full
| salary or not. Importantly, that there is only 1 person
| remaining on the engineering team doesn't mean they only have
| 1 person who can fill the role of an engineer on the product.
|
| No guarantees this is 100% accurate or exhaustive (or names
| spelled correctly - apologies in advance!), but hopefully it
| should be a lot better a reference than guessing what the
| company structure looks like based on the percentage laid off
| alone.
| Arcuru wrote:
| For others, the page where this info comes from is
| https://tailwindcss.com/sponsor
| red_trumpet wrote:
| Thanks. If I understand correctly, Google AI Studio is listed
| as a Partner, which means they provide (at least)
| 60000$/year.
| northern-lights wrote:
| It seems to be in Google's interest to keep Tailwind CSS
| afloat.
|
| Tailwind CSS is alive -> New / existing projects keep using
| Tailwind CSS -> more code for Gemini to train upon -> better
| and fancier UIs being created through Gemini -> popularity and
| usage of Gemini doesn't go down
|
| Of course this applies to any other LLM provider too but I
| guess Google saw this opportunity first.
| spankalee wrote:
| I think it'd be better for AI and web dev if AIs generated
| real CSS instead.
|
| The supposed difficulty of tracking from elements to classes
| to rulesets is something that AIs can easily handle, and
| being able to change a ruleset once and have the update apply
| to all use sites is really good for AI-driven changes.
|
| Plus, humans and AIs won't have to wait for Tailwind to adopt
| new CSS features as they are added. If the AI can read MDN,
| it can use the feature.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| I'm not a fan of Tailwind, but I can see that it's probably
| reasonable for code gen to be able to write / extend
| projects that use Tailwind, since it's in pretty widespread
| use. For a new project, maybe it could ask if you want to
| use Tailwind or just keep things vanilla?
| DoesntMatter22 wrote:
| Totally agree with this, and I think it's what will likely
| happen. IMO Tailwind got to the point where you are adding
| dozens of classes to the tag and it gets a little unwieldy.
| There are some options to get around it but if AI just
| does't need it it's even better.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| The thing is LLM generate token by token and if you have to
| write entire css before writing the html, the quality could
| be worse.
| derefr wrote:
| You could prompt the LLM to define styling using inline
| `style` attributes; and then, once you've got a page that
| looks good, prompt it to go back and factor those out
| into a stylesheet with semantic styles, trading the style
| attributes for sets of class attributes.
|
| Or you could tell the LLM that while prototyping, it
| should define the CSS "just in time" before/after each
| part of the HTML, by generating inline <script>s that
| embed CSS stanzas as string literals, and which
| immediately inject those into the document using
| CSSStyleSheet.insertRule(). (This can, again, be cleaned
| up afterward.)
|
| _Or_ , you can keep your CSS and your HTML separate, but
| also keep an internal documentation file (a "style
| guide") that describes _how and when to use_ the CSS
| classes defined in the stylesheet. This is your in-
| context equivalent to the knowledge the LLM already has
| burned-in from training on the Tailwind docs site. Then,
| in your coding agent 's instructions, you can tell it
| that when writing HTML, it should refer to the "style
| guide", rather than trying to reverse-engineer the usage
| of the styles from their implementation in CSS.
| nosefurhairdo wrote:
| AI is great at any styling solution via system prompt +
| established patterns in codebase. Tailwind is just slightly
| more convenient since it's consistent and very popular.
| spockz wrote:
| I really don't understand this idea that seems to be
| prevalent to let the LLM generate everything from scratch
| instead of using existing battle tested frameworks. Be it
| for css or backend code.
|
| Good modular design of software and separation of concern
| are still important for debugging and lifecycle. For
| (instructing) the llm it will also be easier if it uses
| frameworks as the resulting code of the project itself will
| remain smaller, reducing the context for both llm and
| human.
| baq wrote:
| Supply chain risk is real. Granted in CSS it's probably
| less of a concern than in code, but it cannot be denied.
| LLMs make the proposition of supply chain reduction not
| irrational at the very least.
| spankalee wrote:
| CSS simply doesn't need a framework - there's no "from
| scratch". For humans or LLM authors.
|
| Tailwind is a lot of overhead conceptually and tooling
| wise to just not have to write classnames, and it's
| actually anti-modular.
| vehemenz wrote:
| Can you explain? Tailwind massively reduces overhead for
| abstraction, classing, documentation, and maintenance.
| wrs wrote:
| AFAICT, Tailwind is largely (not entirely) a different,
| shorter syntax for writing inline styles. (E.g., "class:
| 'bg-white'" = "style: 'background-color: white'".)
|
| If you've rejected structural CSS to begin with, I sort
| of get the point that it saves a lot of typing; otherwise
| I don't see how it helps all that much over SASS or just
| modern plain CSS.
| gedy wrote:
| I don't really like Tailwind, but it's a really good fit
| for LLM tools because there's basically no context needed
| like you get with normal CSS inheritance, etc. What you see
| is what you get.
| Klonoar wrote:
| Counter-argument: the cascade in CSS was a massive design
| mistake and it shows even more in this particular case.
|
| With LLM-assisted development you spend more time reading
| and reviewing the generated code. The cascade in styles is
| nowhere near as readily apparent as something like
| Tailwind.
| eterm wrote:
| If you're arguing down that route, LLMs can bulk-apply
| style attributes exactly where they're needed. Every
| element precisely described, no need for CSS and style-
| sheets at all.
| spankalee wrote:
| I haven't seen cascades be a problem since the days of
| monolithic, app-wide stylesheets, and no project I
| personally know of works that way anymore.
|
| Just about everyone uses component-specific styles with a
| limited set of selectors where there are very few
| collisions per property, and pretty clear specificity
| winners when there are.
|
| If the alternative to the cascade is that you have to
| repeat granular style choices on every single element,
| I'll take the cascade every time.
| vehemenz wrote:
| Tailwind is almost too simple to bother using an LLM for.
| There's no reason to introduce high-level abstractions
| (your "real" CSS, I imagine) that make the code more
| complicated, unless you have some clever methodology.
| slashdave wrote:
| The problem is training data. How many modern web sites use
| raw CSS?
| 8note wrote:
| another guess could be "gemini tends to write code using
| tailwind css, so if it goes down, gemini will be writing a
| lot of out of date code"
| politelemon wrote:
| I'm not really seeing or buying this connection. LLMs are
| capable of generating CSS which is untethered to finances. If
| tailwind went away it would be in Gemini's interest to not
| generate it.
| _puk wrote:
| I think that keeping tailwind alive means that Gemini Studio:
|
| * Likely gets preferential access to new features and changes
| in tailwind, keeping it cutting edge
|
| * Keeps a framework alive that Gemini is already good at
|
| If a new framework becomes popular then the amount of
| training material / material already trained into the model
| essentially starts from 0.
|
| The mature Frameworks that had plenty of openly available
| data to train on before everything became locked away are the
| ones we'll be running with for the next few years. It makes
| sense to keep it alive.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >Tailwind is out of the financial difficulty
|
| Tailwind is not under financial difficulty, like, at all.
| graeme wrote:
| It clearly was if you look at forward trends. In his podcast
| mentioned revenue was going down by a fixed amount per month,
| meaning an increasing percentage per month, and they had
| crossed the line to six months of runway before layoffs.
|
| With layoffs they can meet costs but that might be true if
| the revenue decline trend keeps going for 18 months or so.
| throwaway-aws9 wrote:
| The lesson here is to always offer a larger tier than what your
| largest subscribers have.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yes, you should always have a "batshit insane" tier as
| someone, somewhere, has enough that it appears cheap.
|
| This is why enterprise software is "call for pricing".
| ricardobeat wrote:
| No ill will towards the team, but isn't it almost absurd that a
| CSS library is funded to the tune of 1m+ _yearly_ and is still
| in financial difficulty? It is technically complete. There is
| no major research work or churn like in React, no monstruous
| complexity like Webpack.
| birken wrote:
| What kind of headcount do you estimate $1MM/year can reliably
| support?
|
| That's like ~2 engineers at FAANG.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Lots of great engineers will work for way less than a FAANG
| salary as long as it means not having to work for FAANG.
| $1m/year still won't get you all that much though.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| Realistically if you can work on a small and high profile
| project like tailwind you're gonna be snatched up by
| someone willing to pay you at or near FAANG levels
| SXX wrote:
| Lots and lots of people work for much less or for free on
| whatever they like.
|
| Problem is that doing "boring" parts of open source
| project maintenance is not very exciting for many top
| tier developers so it should pay at least competetively
| for experience or people will just burn out.
|
| And while you can obviously fund a team of 20 on $1M/year
| outside of US whatever said team will manage to keep up
| to the level of quality is another question.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Having worked on design system teams before people can burn a
| lot of time and money doing overly nuanced stuff. I have been
| in meetings discussing removing/adding a property on a React
| component before.
|
| That said 3 motivated developers and a designer should be
| more than sufficient to build a css library, but you could
| 100% have a team of 20 and they would find stuff to do.
| codegeek wrote:
| Not $6000/Year but $60,000/Year. Not sure if you missed a 0.
| Google AI is listed as a Partner sponsor which costs
| $5000/Month or $60,000/Year. Since Adam's audio and twitter
| post went viral, he has aded about 5 partner sponsors netting
| total of additional $300k/Year right there. And a few other
| smaller sponsors as well.
|
| Overall, this has been a win for Adam and Tailwind.
| leecommamichael wrote:
| How did a CSS library make any money at all? How did a CSS
| library have employees?
| agosta wrote:
| The business is this: Tailwind is free. Everyone uses it.
| People visit their docs and eventually buy some of the things
| they actually sell (like books, support, etc).
|
| With LLMs, almost nobody visits their docs anymore just like
| folks barely visit Stackoverflow anymore (SOs traffic is down
| +80%). Fewer people see things they may want to buy from team
| Tailwind so they make less money so they implode. Plus LLMs
| just directly compete with their support offering.
| chews wrote:
| they had over 2M in revenue in 2024... then AI happened and it
| likely dried up, they staffed up during the boomtime and now
| are rightsizing based on the change of landscape.
| benbristow wrote:
| Doesn't make much sense to me. It's literally a conversion of
| CSS rules to classes. Bootstrap already had a few of these as
| utility classes. I know it does a bit of magic in the
| background.
|
| They made money off selling preset components and documentation
| etc, but as others have said, AI has pretty much ripped this
| off.
|
| One of those things trying to monetise out of nothing because
| it became popular.
| dabinat wrote:
| This should be standard industry practice. Any company above a
| certain size should contribute financially to all software it
| depends on.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| if this was industry practice, licenses like GPL wouldn't have
| needed to be created.
| nullorempty wrote:
| that's a great point. and make it proportional to how much they
| make off it. looking at you aws for all the great oss software
| you sell.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| Which for AI companies would be every public GitHub page to
| start.
| kristofferR wrote:
| Not to mention GitHub/Microsoft itself.
| bibryam wrote:
| For every Tailwind, there will be 1000x other projects affected
| by AI's use of OSS that will not get sponsored.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Perhaps an acquisition is in the works, and the happenings from
| yesterday were part of/the start of it?
| kevinsync wrote:
| This is just a half-baked thought, partially because I have no
| clue how major LLM providers track output metrics for tokens
| returned (in the context of, "Claude used Tailwind for this
| solution instead of XYZ"), but it seems to me like it would be a
| mutually-beneficial scenario for OpenAI, Anthropic, etc, to
| actively engage with large OSS project maintainers and
| sponsor/pay for "licensed"/"official" "expert" agents/sub-models
| that the main models can engage for higher-quality results when
| the tools are chosen.
|
| Easier said than done obviously, and probably would become more
| expensive than it's worth, but imagine if the output was
| demonstrably better and exclusive deals were in place ("Claude
| Code has the expert Tailwind agent that's trained and maintained
| by Tailwind, Codex doesn't") -- it would create certain kinds of
| paying-subscriber mini-moats for specific LLMs.
|
| I dunno. By the time I was done typing that I started to become
| skeptical of the idea but gonna hit "add comment" anyways lol
| desireco42 wrote:
| Look, Google is getting recognized as a leadership role in AI
| space, as it is a leader and Tailwind gets more time to figure
| things out. Doing a Firefox would not be good, just to coast and
| spend money on random projects.
|
| It would be nice for Adam to figure things out and find ways to
| make things happen.
| blintz wrote:
| Google (and Vercel) are great for doing this! I would like to see
| Anthropic and OpenAI do something similar, since they too greatly
| benefit from Tailwind CSS.
| pembrook wrote:
| I love tailwind, but I think it's disingenuous for Adam to claim
| that "AI" killed the tailwind UI kit business.
|
| Ultimately it was Radix/Shadcn (which uses tailwind for styling
| of course) that killed the need to buy Tailwind's UI kits by
| offering all these primitives with good default styling for free.
|
| Also, the tailwind UI stuff feels pretty dated at this point in
| comparison to what's offered in other free UI libraries these
| days.
| nateb2022 wrote:
| Agreed. Also if they had really been trying to drive ARR, they
| would have made Tailwind UI a subscription/yearly licensing
| thing instead of a one-time purchase.
|
| There's a reason companies like Adobe/Microsoft switched away
| from one-time purchase software, and that reason is that it is
| exhausting and eventually impossible to sustain a business
| where you have to hunt for brand new customers every single
| month just to keep the lights on.
| codegeek wrote:
| Yea I agree that free UI kits like ShadCN basically blew
| everyone else away. I mean ShadCN has over 100k Stars on Github
| which is more than even Tailwind. So you can imagine the
| popularity. Having said that, I do think that AI is a factor as
| well because most of these components can now be coded by AI as
| well.
|
| For example, I now routinely use AI to create UI components and
| my prompt usually includes "use ShadCN like component here" and
| even give them specific shadcn component names. The result is
| usually 90% good enough to start with.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I hope things work out for Tailwind. I think it is very decent of
| Google to do this. Obviously Google takes some heat for their
| business model but when I was invited to work at Google in 2013 I
| thought the company had a definite vibe of trying to do the right
| thing in several dimensions (e.g., renewable energy for data
| centers).
| Ameo wrote:
| My perspective on this is that maybe Tailwind Labs shouldn't have
| been a for-profit business, or at least not one of the size that
| it grew to be.
|
| I was reading a writeup on this history of Tailwind[1] made by
| Adam Wathan (who created Tailwind).
|
| It seems like he was working on a variety of different business
| ideas including "Reddit meets Pinterest meets Twitter" and "a
| developer-focused, webhook-driven checkout platform". He created
| the basis of Tailwind just to help him build these projects, but
| it kept getting attention when he would post about his progress
| building them online.
|
| Here's an important quote from the doc:
|
| "Now at this point I had zero intention of maintaining any sort
| of open-source CSS framework. It didn't even occur to me that
| what I had been building would even be interesting to anyone. But
| stream after stream, people were always asking about the CSS"
|
| It seems like Adam's main goal was to start a software business,
| and Tailwind just happened to get popular and became what he
| pivoted his efforts into. There's obviously nothing wrong with
| wanting to start a business, but trying to take an open-source
| CSS framework and turn it into a multi-million dollar business
| feels unnatural and very difficult to maintain long-term.
|
| To his credit, he did pull it off. He built a seemingly quite
| successful business and hired a sizable team, and apparently made
| a decent amount of revenue along the way.
|
| But now, for AI reasons or otherwise, that business is struggling
| and failing to sustain the scale it was before. To me, it seems
| like the business is more or less completely separate from the
| open-source Tailwind project itself. It's, as far as I can
| understand, a business that sells templates and components built
| with Tailwind, and it uses Tailwind's popularity to bootstrap
| customers and sales.
|
| If it were me who ended up building Tailwind, there's no way I
| would have pursued turning it into a big business. Maybe I would
| have tried some kind of consulting style, where I'd offer my time
| to companies evaluating or integrating Tailwind.
|
| Now that Tailwind is getting hundreds of thousands (millions?) of
| dollars a year in sponsorships, it feels weird to have this for-
| profit business on the side at the same time.
|
| Maybe it's just my own sensibilities and worldview, but I feel
| like Tailwind should just be what it is: an extremely popular and
| successful open-source CSS framework.
|
| [1] https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-
| byproduc...
| chocoboaus3 wrote:
| Stockholm syndrome
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