Posted by kevlened 1/7/2026
Cool, in a way! But this feels like just going back to normal.
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...
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.
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.
You don't get rich by paying people what they deserve.
These might sound like snide rhetorical questions, but when you start demanding payment, they're very real.
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.
This isn't rocket science. If your business can't exist within the law, it doesn't get to exist.
If ChatGPT answers a law question for you that you’d have to ask an expensive lawyer, are they supposed to pay the lawyer too?
Paying someone fairly for its contribution to society? This won't pass here in the free world as it sounds like a dangerous communist idea. How are we supposed to become richer than our neighbor that way?
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
This must be satire. CSS is what's actually foundational; literally, a foundation upon which Tailwind was built.
Replaced by what exactly? Also, when was the last time a foundational piece of tech powering of the web got replaced by something entirely different?
Also who has decided that CSS is a "terrible foundational standard"?
There's plenty of alternative CSS frameworks.
I can absolutely see why it's difficult to monetize.
Tailwind is not.
AI is disruptive technology - like other tech innovations before it, there will be casualties to incumbents. If anything, this just shows how small businesses with need to be more creative when establishing moats and sustainability in this new landscape.
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.
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.
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.
Pot, meet kettle.
It seems you have fundamental misunderstanding of how open source works and now you’re throwing a fit because you’re an entitled brat.
Take the L. Learn a lesson. Grow and be better.