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Posted by kevlened 3 days ago

Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team(github.com)
1438 points | 832 commentspage 4
geenat 3 days ago|
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 3 days ago||
Sounds shady.
b34r 3 days ago||
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dogleash 2 days ago||||
>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.

lifetimerubyist 2 days ago|||
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b34r 2 days ago||
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lifetimerubyist 2 days ago||
The “community” doesn’t decide what goes into the project, TailwindLabs does. Tailwind is not a community developed project. It’s a project that sometimes accepts outside contributors when they feel like it and the are under no obligation to do so. You did work that nobody from the project asked for and you’re throwing a fit because they have different priorities and said they don’t want it. They don’t owe you anything.

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.

b34r 2 days ago||
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lifetimerubyist 2 days ago||
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vips7L 3 days ago||
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!
pikdum 3 days ago||
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 3 days ago|
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?

zapnuk 2 days ago||
Seems like their whole business model was based on the fact that tailwind was difficult to use, and now with llm we have a simple way to use it in a good-enough way.

They, and other companies, should rather depend on corporate users. Don't let multi-billion revenue companies use your tech for free.

Seems like many companies leaned it a bit late, we always have the same news every fewe years (docker, mongodb, terraform, elastic).

hbn 2 days ago|
> Seems like their whole business model was based on the fact that tailwind was difficult to use

Uhhh no... People already struggle with CSS. No one would use Tailwind if it made it even more difficult. I've used and loved Tailwind for 5 years and some without ever having any components written for me. At worst it's as difficult as CSS (centering a div is not any easier, you just write it in a different place), and in some areas like responsiveness (media queries like screen size breakpoints) the syntax is way easier to read and write.

The problem their business model was solving is first that good design is hard, and second that even if you can design something that looks good, you might not be good at implementing it in CSS. They did those things for you, and you can copy-paste it straight into your app with a single block of code thanks to Tailwind.

You're right that LLMs essentially solved this same issue in a more flexible way that most people would prefer, and it's just one feature of many.

zapnuk 2 days ago||
Nah. Plenty people struggles with the use of tailwind or at least were interested in shortcuts. Thats the whole what tailwind plus offers. In some ways tailwind is like matplotlib/pandas/numpy. Increadibly powerfull but some methods/classes are difficult to remember to you keep googleing the same things.

Doesn't matter anyways wether their customers are people who search for shortcuts or people who search for "the best designs".

Their problem was and is that tailwind is used by many of the most profitable companies in the world for free.

Thats so unbelievable stupid. You have corporations paying millions for MS 365 subscriptions, confluence, and other software and basically nothing for a totally optional ui library. If the use of tailwind saves 10 engineering hours per month then it's worth it to pay a few hundred $ for a licence.

Given that their team isn't big they don't even need that many customers. Add a bit consulting for a decent hourly rate and they should be golden.

The more I think about it the more I blame the CEO for poor decisions.

lovlar 2 days ago||
What about exploring new, AI-native ways to monetize?

For example, creators behind libraries like Tailwind could sell Claude skills or MCP server solutions.

If I could pay $20 to make my AI agents significantly better at writing state-of-the-art Tailwind code — while knowing that my purchase directly supports the Tailwind community and its long-term sustainability — I would happily do so.

prodigycorp 3 days ago||
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 3 days ago||
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).

graeme 3 days ago|||
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.
NitpickLawyer 3 days ago||||
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 3 days ago|||
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 3 days ago||
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.
aaronbrethorst 3 days ago||
Make Tailwind Plus an annual subscription, not a one-time purchase.

Corporate sponsorships.

In-person training focused on big corps.

Acquisition.

aaronbrethorst 3 days ago||
Just to build on this, Vercel would be an obvious acquisition candidate. It feels up their alley and they make heavy use of Tailwind.
kayo_20211030 3 days ago||
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.
system2 3 days ago||
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 3 days ago||
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 3 days ago||
It solved a problem, people will pay for that.

Now LLMs have removed the problem, so there's declining interest in solutions.

tannhaeuser 3 days ago||
> 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 3 days ago|
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.

acabal 3 days ago|
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 3 days ago|
They had 8 employees
acabal 3 days ago|||
Sure, but to maintain a CSS framework? Seems like they way overhired.
hu3 2 days ago||
They have some rust tooling, no?
f311a 3 days ago||||
With TC of $250k. There is a lot of room for optimization.
dbbk 3 days ago|||
They shouldn’t
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