Posted by kevlened 4 days ago
please refer to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45729809
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.
Despite any of my preferences, it was real work that deserved a chance. It cannot be denied that AI slurping their content contributed to less paying customers.
IMHO, this is content draught starting to appear. To an extreme, it should lead to no one having any real incentive (possible business, possible recognition, etc) to do new and original stuff.
I don't see a way of changing this. I think jobs will be fine, but content of all kinds (especially code) won't.
Frontend output from LLMs is (in my experience) subpar when compared to human-built components. However, I am not primarily a frontend dev. I would definitely pay for something that let me easily build frontends using vetted components, in ways they were designed to work together.
This seems like something that would sit solidly in the bailiwick of framework designers like Tailwind Labs. But it seems they primarily target frontend developers, so their focus is elsewhere.
It's really hard to run a company, especially when your product is mostly OSS... Tailwind has helped thousands of companies save (or make) millions of dollars, and AI almost by default uses it to generate beautiful websites. This is such a hard position to be in... to watch your product take off, but your financials plummet. It really sucks how affected the team is after all the good work they've done.
If I was considering that purchase in today's landscape, I would surely not buy it. At $299 USD I can have a decent model do the job of writing custom tailored components for me and iterate extensively on them.
Hard sell with a "UI Kit" versus a "UI Brain".
If I were Adam I would drop to $29.99 and accept the status quo, but not make it lifetime access to try and not piss off existing owners, and I would pivot to building a Frontend AI Agent and a Tailwind Labs Model.
OSS without founders having it's own managed software company is always a difficult position. (e.g. database vendors open source but also have their own company providing managed service and support allowing sustainable development). Hope of getting strong support from companies is unsustainable.
Curious what should be the business model for a library something like tailwind?
They could add a premium features but entry users not allowed to use certain features is a bad experience
