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.

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.

Where's the 75% layoff number from ? This thread is about making docs llm friendly.

Sad to hear. I have a Tailwind Plus license (when it was previously Tailwind UI). They are fantastic components and to be honest they keep me writing React even though I would rather not. Catalyst UI is too good.

I nearly always use Tailwind, had no idea there was even a Plus offering. Checking the site I see it now but it’s a subtle link. Also wonder if shad/cn had something to do with the reduced usage of plus.

Eventually AI agents will have to pay to access libraries.

> 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?

> 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.

Man, you can really feel the anxiety and desperation in Adam's reply.

Part of me wants to say "look what evil VC money does to devs", but that's only a harsh critism of a bystander.

Monetization is a normal path that the successful OSS projects would take. Tailwind went big on the startup route, took a bunch of VC cash a couple of years back, but despite the massive impact on the dev world, they clearly didn't hit the revenue numbers investors expected. Now the valuation bubble popped, and they're forced into massive layoffs. Though to be fair, maintaining a CSS library probably doesn't require that many people anyway.

I really feel for Adam here. He didn't really do anything wrong. Eagering to build a startup after your project blows up is a totally natural ambition. But funding brings risks. Taking other people's money makes you go from being the owner to just another employee real quick. And once you hop on that VC train, you don't really call the shots anymore. Sometimes you can't stop raising or scaling as your own will.

If you find a solid business model, that's great. But if not, well, honestly, a 75% layoff is getting off lightly. At least they still have a chance to keep on.

But he obviously didn't foresee this coming. He’s getting torn between being an OSS maintainer and a CEO who have to be responsible for stackholders and employees. That internal conflict must be brutal. It’s pretty obvious he didn't reject the PR for technical reasons. It's just because the reality hit him hard, and he has to respond to it, even if it goes against his mind as a developer.

Really hope Tailwind pulls through this. Also, this is a lesson worth noting for the rest of us. As indie devs, if you ever get the chance to take VC money, you really gotta think hard about whether you're truly ready for the strings that come attached.

If the business model had evolved together with artificial intelligence, we wouldn’t be talking about a 75% layoff today we might be talking about a 75% hiring spree instead.

So, is it AI or a problematic business model that caused this?