Posted by kevlened 1/7/2026
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
Open source was not ready for this type of businesses that don't give a dam about rights or copyrights.
They can’t retroactively pull the license, and most people would just start using a OSS fork of tailwind if they did.
"I am happy to share that we (the @GoogleAIStudio team) are now a sponsor of the @tailwindcss project! Honored to support and find ways to do more together to help the ecosystem of builders."
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.
> And 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.
> 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.
NYT and other Billion dollar media house can sue the AI companies for copyright violations and get into cozy deals. But the individuals and small companies are left in lurch.
Instead of ganging up on developers for not making their product LLM friendly, they should force the AI companies to ensure that a part of their $20 or $200 goes to the sources of the data used in the LLM responses.
Something like Ad words, where people whose content is used by LLMs can register as a publisher and get compensated.
Oh it wouldn't be sustainable AI companies? Whose fault is that?
In this comment, he says that he had to lay off 3 people.
Not sure if this means it was him+4engs and now it’s just him+1eng or if he’s including himself and he’s working alone now.
But either way, can’t be fun
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.
I don't have paid ads, everything has been organic with the blog being the main funnel into everything. For quite a few years I tried creating a podcast and also have 5+ years of weekly YouTube videos but the traffic back to the courses from those are close to nothing.
Conversion percent rates haven't changed, they have remained consistent.
My figures almost track perfectly with StackOverflow's chart: https://i.sstatic.net/IY0g8JZW.png
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.
