Very sad to hear, I bought Tailwind UI years ago and although it was a lot more expensive than I wanted, I've appreciated the care and precision and highly recommend buying it (It's now called Tailwind Plus) even still (maybe even especially now).
Mad props to Adam for his honesty and transparency. Adam if you're reading, just know that the voices criticizing you are not the only voices out there. Thanks for all you've done to improve web development and I sincerely hope you can figure out a way to navigate the AI world, and all the best wishes.
Btw the Tailwind newsletter/email that goes out is genuinely useful as well, so I recommend signing up for that if you use Tailwind CSS at all.
Tailwind did a great job of building a fanbase. Even without LLMs I always thought they were on a collision course with market saturation, though. They generously gave lifetime access for a one-time payment, which was bound to run into problems as free alternatives became better and their core fanbase didn't have any reason to spend more money.
Their business model also missed the boat on the rise of Figma and similar tools. I can think back to a couple different projects where the web developers wanted to use Tailwind [Plus] components but the company had a process that started in Figma. It's hard to sell the designers on using someone else's component library when they have to redraw it in Figma anyway.
The lack of Figma integration or a first-party plugin was a huge bummer for me. I still use Tailwind almost religiously because it just clicked for me and I have been on enough projects with terrible SCSS organization that I want to leave that as far behind me as I can.
I do appreciate that even without an integration, it’s fairly easy to set up vim on one screen and figma on the other and be able to translate the css to TW without any issues or having to constantly look things up.
alternatively, Adam executed the superior pricing strategy. had he charged for recurring licenses, would fewer people have signed up? would his subscriptions also be drawing down?
i wouldn't have bought a sub, but i did pay for tailwind premium (and, frankly, didn't use it like i'd've hoped). however, it was a bit of a Kickstarter investment for me. i like Adam's persona, and was happy to see continued investment down this path.
as many a business knows, you need to bring new initiatives to the table over, or accept that your one product carries all your risk.
I believe he succeeding in convincing Sam and Ryan to adopt lifetime pricing for their UI course at https://buildui.com/pricing. I've purchased Build UI, and it was an excellent product, but unfortunately it appears to be completely dead for at least a full year now.
Neither the unannounced death of Build UI nor this apparently financial catastrophe for Tailwind bode well for the prospects of lifetime pricing! Although the problem might be more related to the entire market segment (frontend programming and design courses) than to the particular pricing model.
If Build UI was still making content, they would keep getting sales. There are also other ways to implement a "pay once" model that is sustainable, but it involves designing a much more thought out product roadmap and gatekeeping features behind new major versions where you need to pay for an upgraded license.
Jetbrains has done this for decades now with great success and is the standard sales model for most freemium WordPress plugins. Heck, even Adobe had a similar model until they were convinced they could squeeze out even more profit by charging monthly and trapping customers into subscriptions with high cancellation fees (my words, not theirs).
> alternatively, Adam executed the superior pricing strategy.
I'm not saying it wasn't a good choice at the time.
The problem with lifetime licensing only appears down the road if a company doesn't find a way to expand their offerings.
If you opened a local gym with reasonably priced lifetime memberships you'd probably have an explosion of new customers. You'd then hit a wall where you've saturated the market, can't sell any more memberships, but you have to keep paying employees and rent.
>had he charged for recurring licenses, would fewer people have signed up? would his subscriptions also be drawing down?
History says yes, and no. Much easier to retain periodic payment on a few engaged businesses than to continually look for people willing to make a one time payment. Especially in professional software.
The premium model just doesn't work unless you stay very lean. Workers need to be continually paid, even if you make your entire audience happy once.
As a small business that started with a one-time/upgrade based pricing policy, and moved to a recurring policy, I don't think it is too late for tailwind to do so for future upgrades/improvements. I am saddened that they laid people off before trying. I understand doing that is a leap of faith/risk, but that is what you need to do.
The key thing they need to recognize is that some percentage of their customers are serious businesses that want them to continue developing/maintaining the software, and that these businesses will be supportive as long as the deal is the same for everyone (you can't ask them to pay out of the goodness of their hearts, as then they feel they will be taken advantage of by people who don't pay).
When we switched to a recurring pricing model, I thought it was going to be a disaster. In fact, I got an angry call from exactly one customer (who then remained a customer despite threatening to leave). I got subtly expressed approval/relief from many more.
The book "How to Sell at Margins Higher than Your Competitors" was helpful to me, and might be helpful here as well. The key is to realize that you want to sell to people who really value your product and will pay for it. You don't want to maximize volume, you want to maximize revenue x margin.
You already have an installed base of people who value your product enough to pay for it once, you just have to create a system that enables them to sustain the technology they value in order to get ongoing support/upgrades/fixes/etc. The people who are going to complain on hacker news about recurring pricing aren't the people you want as customers anyway.
If the majority of your customers don't value it that much, then you are pretty cooked. But you may as well find that out directly. If people really don't want to pay for the software, don't waste time creating it for them.
We made the switch about 20 years ago. Since that time, about 70% of our lifetime revenue has come from recurring payments. Had I not had the courage to make the switch, I would be writing now that the business has been an unsustainable mistake, but that would have been false.
>If the majority of your customers don't value it that much, then you are pretty cooked.
cries in gamedev
Sadly my options are to either sell a few thousand copies on pc and deal with complaints on how my game isn't an 80 hour long timesink, or go into mobile and employ all the dark patterns I hate about marketing.
> Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever.
This is from Adam but I also suspect the same. LLMs has a bias toward tailwind css. I had Claude/GLM multiple times try to add tailwind css classes even though the project doesn't have any tailwind packages/setup.
This is a business model issue rather than tailwind becoming irrelevant.
I'll piggyback on this to highlight Refactoring UI as well. It's an ebook by Adam and Steve, though I'm not sure if it's technically part of Tailwind Labs or not.
This book taught me so much about modern UI design. If you've ever tried building a component and thought to yourself, "hmm something about this looks off," you might benefit from this book.
These days some of the examples might be a little bit dated (fashions come and go), but the principles it teaches you are rock solid.
FWIW I found Practical UI [1] a more actionable book than Refactoring UI. Both are similar but I found it covered the material in a more accessible way.
Did you read it cover to cover in one-(ish) sitting? I would argue it's more of a reference book that over time you can internalize into your own design language.
Tailwind Plus is great - I love the lifetime access, but I always wondered how sustainable that model was. Even without AI, how many of those memberships could they sell?
I thought the same, and yet on the other hand, how could they have done it differently? People don't want to pay a subscription just to write a DSL of CSS. Perhaps they could've done it per project like some companies, but I don't think it'd be as popular as their lifetime model. Ironic.
We can go back to how software was sold decades ago: you pay for version 1.0, and get bugfixes for the 1.x series. Then 2.0 is released, and if you want it, you pay again for the 2.x series. And so on.
I agree on not wanting a subscription for something like this. But I also acknowledge that if people are still doing work on something post-sale (beyond bugfixes for a pre-defined support period), I should maybe expect to have to pay for that continuing work.
I could never afford Tailwind UI but then again I don’t really use Tailwind. That said, as an open-source styling solution, they could be supported in other ways. A lot — and I really mean a lot — of websites are built with Tailwind, yet very few consider donating or buying what they have to offer.
Plenty of F/LOSS is in the same state: businesses extract all value they can from open-source, but put back nothing. That’s mining The Commons. LLMs are just accelerating this trend.
It’s never gonna work in the long run. Let’s go back to writing everything in house then, since we’re 100x more productive and don’t have to pay a dime for other people’s work.
My current take is that if you start an open-source project now, you should go full AGPL (or similar copyleft license), and require a CLA for contributors.
If your thing ends up actually good you now have a defence against exploitation, and a way to generate income reliably (by selling the code under a different license). afaik, organisations like the FSF even endorse this.
AGPL is my first choice of license, but its efficacy does not necessarily come from its teeth, but from the aversion legal departments have towards the license. It's similar to how the GPL used to be, or still is, treated. Along with compatibility with other AGPL projects, that's the reason I use the license.
There are situations that the AGPL does not cover that could be considered leeching from the commons.
I think we need stronger licensing, and binding contracts that forfeit code recipients' right to fair use in order to hinder LLM laundering, along with development platforms that leverage both to limit exploitation of the commons.
I agree, I'm quite curious on what feelings are about still putting it in a public GitHub repo?
AI models will train on your codebase, unethical actors will still take it and not pay. Others can give the .zip to Claude and ask it to reimplement it in a way that isn't license infringement. I think it really turns open source upside down. Is this a risk worth taking or best to just make getting the source something that's a .zip on a website which the models realistically won't train on.
Or maybe ask yourself why are you doing open source in the first place?
AI training on your code is success if you care about your code being genuinely helpful to others. It's a problem only if you're trying to make money or personal reputation, and abusing open source as a vector for it.
Just to add to this. Open source for money has been a dead end for a long time, except for the (increasingly rare) situations where people accidentally convert their open source _contributions_ into employment (I accidentally did this back in 2015). Open source for recognition/reputation makes a bit more sense, but it is also becoming increasingly rare. LLMs are super-charging the extinction, but this was also observable in 2021, when I wrote this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29714929 .
Even before LLMs, I have seen people (shamelessly) re-implement code from open source project A into open source project B, without attribution (IIRC, a GPL C++ project [no hate, I use C++ too these days] basically copied the very distinctive AVL Tree implementation of a CDDL C project -- this is a licensing violation _and_ plagiarism, and it effectively writes the C project out of history. When asked about this, various colleagues[1], just shrugged their shoulders, and went on about their lives.). LLMs now make this behavior undetectable _and_ scalable.
If we want strong copyright protections for open source, we may need to start writing _literate_ programs (i.e. the Knuthian paradigm, which I am quite fond of). But that probably will not happen, because most programmers are bad at writing (because they hate it, and would rather outsource it to an LLM). The more likely alternative, is that people will just stop writing open source code (I basically stopped publishing my repos when the phrase "Big Tech" became common in 2018; Amazon in particular would create hosted versions of projects without contributing anything back -- if the authors were lucky they would be given the magnanimous opportunity to labor at Amazon, which is like inventing dynamite and being granted the privilege of laboring in the mines).
The fact is, if we want recognition, we need to sing each others' praises, instead hoping that someone will look at a version control history. We need to be story-tellers, historians, and archivists. Where is my generation's Jargon File?
[1]: Not co-worker, which is someone who shares an employer, but colleague, which is someone who shares a profession.
That's a big reason why FOSS is going to crumble. If AI succeeds and decimates the tech labor industry, people won't have the luxury to "code for fun". Life isn't a bunch of comfy programmers working on stuff in their spare time anymore.
We already see a component of this with art, but art actually needs to be displayed unlike code to show its vslue. So they adapt. Tools to keep the machine from training on their work, or more movements into work that is much harder to train on (a 2d image of a 3d model does the job and the model can be shared off the internet). Programming will follow a similar course; the remaining few become mercenaries and need to protect their IP themselves.
I'd like to contribute to open source to help and empower people.
Your environmental mission feels moot if you do a lot to help with greenhouse emissions and then proceed to also dump all the waste in the ocean. Your mission is "accomplished" by your hands and you are recognized as a champion. but morally you feel like you took a step back and became the evil you sought to address.
Now apply that mentality to someone in FOSS who sees their work go into a trillion dollar industry seeking to remove labor as a concept from it, and the rest of society. Even of you are independently wealthy and never needed to make money to get by, you feel like your mission has failed. Even if people give you a pat on your back for the software you made.
It seems like you are very against open source not being an altruistic endeavor. Or that you should not make money with an open source project. I would like to challenge you on that.
Would you say that the Linux Foundation is a net positive on the software ecosystem? How about big open source projects like curl or QGIS? How about mattermost or nextcloud? All of these have full-time employees working on them (The Linux Foundation generated almost 300 million USD of gross revenue in 2024).
I would argue that good monetization is paramount to a healthy open source ecosystem.
Both can be true:
- AI training on your code is success
- AI undermining the sustainability of your project by reducing funding is an issue
>Or maybe ask yourself why are you doing open source in the first place?
I, like everyone started work on OSS because it's fun. The problem comes when your project gets popular - either you try to make it your job or you abandon the project, because at a certain point it becomes like an unpaid job with really demanding customers.
That makes sense but doesn't answer "why do open source" though. In fact, it only shows that there is little incentive to pursue a serious open-source project and just stick to hobby projects while ackowledging it'll never go anywhere. I struggle to answer that myself.
Lol, I never in a million years expected my project to get 100 users never mind the tens of thousands it now has. Sometimes others make the decision for you ;) it's still your baby though.
> businesses extract all value they can from open-source, but put back nothing
This has always been the case. Sometimes they give back by opening one or more of their components. Other times they don't. I don't see it as a problem. It doesn't usually detract from what's already published.
In cases where it would detract, simply use an appropriate license to curb the behavior.
> LLMs are just accelerating this trend.
LLMs might not prove sufficiently capable to meaningfully impact this dynamic.
Alternatively, if they achieve that level then I think they will accomplish the long stated goal of FOSS by enabling anyone to translate constraints from natural language into code. If I could simply list off behaviors of existing software and get a reliable reproduction I think that would largely obsolete worrying about software licenses.
I realize we're nowhere near that point yet, and also that reality is more complex than I'm accounting for there. But my point is that I figure either LLMs disrupt the status quo and we see benefits from it or alternatively that business as usual continues with some shiny new tools.
As a question regarding Tailwind Plus, we / I exclusively use Angular but the templates are all React / Vue / plain HTML.
Are these components mostly just the HTML styling which would then be easily used in Angular as well, or would it be too much of a hassle to adopt to Angular?
I'm knee-deep in the tech newsletter niche and I've never seen an official Tailwind newsletter. The only one I subscribe to is a small, unofficial weekly newsletter by Vivian Guillen:
What most don’t realize is that this will happen to most businesses in all categories as more people rely on ChatGPT and Claude for discovery.
No discovery - no business.
And same with ads.if OpenAI decides not to add ads - prepare for even faster business consolidation. Those businesses preferred by llms will exponentially grow, others will quickly go out of business
I do SEO as a side gig to my 9-5 as a developer. All four of my freelance companies I work with have seen their traffic drop up to 40% since LLM's have effectively taken over and people are using search engines less and less.
We've had to pivot to short form social media advertising which seems to be closing the gap whereas before the majority of our leads were coming from organic search and being ranked high in their respective industries. It certainly takes more effort to craft a script, film it, edit it to add text overlays, animations and catchy effects, but its showing me its being effective in the leads we're generating.
I'm not sure if this is a sort of generational thing back when my parents were so engrained to use the yellow pages and then that stopped once the internet got into the advertising business - but it feels like a similar transition is taking place again.
As many have already told me, "Ignore AI at your peril"
Same where I work for 30% on some regions and for those where they put money only saw a minimum increase.
I honestly think the company is run by some good folks that are really trying to do some positive impact.
They refuse so all sorts of bs ad-tracking gray area stuff, yet, people don't give a dime.
We caught over and over anthropic and others using shade tactics to bypass bot protection. They get the content, plagiarise it and contribute absolute nothing back.
For weeks, openai was crawling our resources on DDOS levels of traffic.
F them. They just are just stealing and making businesses fail. This will be a catastrophe for many but yet, people think there is no relation.
>> The real question is, have your actual qualified leads decreased?
Yes.
>> So much traffic is bogus or looking for something adjacent to what they land on that I'm not entirely convinced AI is at fault here.
When I was reviewing our analytics, I noticed a huge uptick in traffic from IP addresses in Sigapore and Beijing. This coincided with spikes from Linux OS traffic that was higher than desktop and iOS traffic which has always been the two highest OS's for our traffic. Add in a huge spike in direct traffic all pointed in one direction - AI bots and crawlers.
The real signal is conversions. If the percentage of people who visit and then buy / sign up remains constant, while traffic goes down, you can conclude LLMs are part of the cause.
OTOH if traffic goes down but conversions goes up in percentage, then it's hard to say LLMs are having a negative consequence.
I'm not sure if this is comparable to the yellow pages vs the internet.
Google became profitable in 2001 whereas OpenAI et al are still operating at a huge loss. Even with ads it's not clear whether LLMs can be profitable unless they increase prices significantly.
Google was not profitable until they rolled out ads, either.
The scope of use of AI assistants in people's lives are significantly higher than google search, imo. People use it in far more scenarios already than just information retrieval. That's why some are betting there's a chance it's more valuable than present-day google search.
IIRC Google had no monetization at all until ads. Even then the cost of providing search with ads is orders of magnitude lower compared to running LLMs.
They made money by licensing their search technology to other sites, as well as selling physical search appliances for businesses. They were considered by some to be struggling to find a way to monetise well.
Computational cost is indeed higher than search (though remember, search has been heavily optimised for many years!), but search and web companies were one of the lowest cost, highest-margin businesses in human existence. Many higher-cost businesses have been supported by ads.
>Many higher-cost businesses have been supported by ads.
Not at the scale of a trillion dollars, though. You can't make that kind of money back with eyeballs. You either need government subsidies or insane vertical integration. And if your program threatens to neuter the GDP of a country, I don't know how long subsidies will last. At least not in a democracy. People are so mad about immigrants taking jobs, and this would be 10 times worse (and bipartisan, eventually).
Even then: we're quickly hitting a resource wall as well. Are we really going to go to war just so we can have some dude generate AI sheep memes? Something's got to give.
It's not only the computational cost though. Hardware requirements are much higher and GPUs need to be replaced every 2-3 years. Plus model training expenses which are considerable. I imagine it's easily 100x more expensive and the margins (if there's ever any profit) will be very low.
That would be short-termist though. So, quite unlikely.
In my usage (code) they are still better than everything else I have tried.
Point being that I am looking predominantly for the one llm that gives me the best code output.
If they risk losing that advantage for immediate profit, guess I will cancel like I did for claude... (I still got a gemini subscription, for some reason it has a good UI, fast for common non technical requests).
Seems to have been my pattern of behavior with all these tools.
Perhaps SEO will become a business to churn out large amount of digestable text with friendly robot.txt and hoping the next AI model learns it? This seem to be the solution, just having a slightly longer turn around time.
> as more people rely on ChatGPT and Claude for discovery
In my limited web dev experience with these tools, they suggest and push Tailwind CSS very often when asked for advice.
The Tailwind company wasn't selling that, though. They were selling premium packages of components, templates, and themes. The demand for that type of material has dropped off significantly now that you can get an LLM to do a moderately good job of making common layouts and components. Then you can adjust them yourself until they're exactly what you want.
Underscoring the parent comment and adding to it: watching technologists on a site called Hacker News cheer on the centralization of power is really something.
Last 3 years of discourse in a nutshell. Sinclair's quote rings true once again... Just a shame people don't think of the long term cost to this trend chasing.
But then again, it wouldn't be a trend if people thought long term, would it?
I don't think any power is as centralized as Google is to search about 10 years ago? Or Facebook is to social media in the same time frame? What has changed other than the players?
The dynamics. Discovery benefits all parties, and the middle man can take a cut in several ways (Google chose ads). The middleman never had to open up but that tube spread value instead of extracting it (at least, until they started renting seeking with the tube).
Being the one stop knowledge hubs that sucks from everyone else only benefits the leech long term.
Google still offered a path for business/individuals that allowed both sides to profit immensely via advertising. Google also guided people to sources of information once you look past the ads.
With the AI companies, they suck up all freely available and proprietary information, hide the sources, and give information away to consumers for mostly free.
I think this phase of centralising power is part of the never-ending cycle of centralisation and distribution - mainframes -> PCs -> websites -> apps, and so on round we go. We will get a "data centres -> Personal LLMs" phase of the cycle which distributes it again.
So my hope is that LLMs become local in a few years.
We've been sitting around 16Gb of RAM on a laptop for 10-15 years now, not because RAM is too expensive or difficult to make, but because there's been no need for more than that for the average user. We could get "normal" laptop RAM up to 16Tb in a few years if there was commercial demand for it.
We have processor architectures that are suitable for running LLMS better/faster/efficiently. We could include those in a standard laptop if there was commercial demand for it.
Tokens are getting cheaper, dramatically, and will continue to do so. But we have an upper limit on LLM training complexity (we only have so much Internet data to train them on). Eventually the race between LLM complexity and processing speed will run out, and probably with processing speed as the winner.
So my hope is that our laptops change, that they include a personally-adapted very capable LLM, run locally, and that we start to see a huge variety of LLMs available. I guess the closest analogy would be the OS's from "Her"; less typing, more talking, and something that is personalised, appearing to actually know the user, and run locally (which is important).
I don't see anything stopping Linux from doing this too (but I'm not working in this area so I can't say for sure).
Obviously we'll face the usual data thieves and surveillance capitalism along the way, but that's part of the process.
The better question is how well they do in a world where you have to pay OpenAI to be included. A local restaurant can likely survive on local advertising, neighborhood traffic, etc. but I’d bet a lot of categories further consolidate to favor larger companies who can negotiate LLM placement deals.
yeah this is so sad, I'm an early supporter of Tailwind since v1 and I also bought the tailwind UI as well to support them. I hope this era doesn't discourage the tailwind team or put them out of business
Early customer here too. Tailwind UI was one of my best purchases in the sense that it helped me learn and use Tailwind in the best way possible, by showing me, not telling me.
It was never sustainable as a product/business, as this pricing model requires constant growth. What I've seen along the way was a heavy pivot towards React (which left me wanting: I mostly use the Vue components & the HTML/JS components with Astro.js in the projects I work in) and even in the case of React, they haven't managed to arrive at a full, mature component library offering (while others have!).
TL;DR: I'd be struggling to justify it as a purchase for a new user now, even before factoring AI in.
Smells like unnecessary sycophancy: I grep'd Adam in every comment and every single. one. is positive and phrased like this.
I grew up on this site, from 20 year old dropout waiter in Buffalo to 37 year old ex-Googler. One of the things I'm noticing me reacting to the last year or two is a "putting on a pedestal" effect that's unnecessary.
I think context matters here. People are being kind to someone who just had to lay off most of their team because, despite their project’s popularity and success (maybe even because of it), a massive change in the ecosystem completely destroyed their business model.
I’ve never been a huge fan of using Tailwind personally, but I deeply appreciated that they were making a (mostly) non-enterprise FOSS model work in an interesting way. It’s a shame that it seems that’s likely dead in the water now.
This is madness. Some stories actually have good guys. I don't know Adam directly, but we have plenty of second degree connections. I've benefited immensely from his work, have never heard anyone say a single negative thing about him, and I genuinely believe he's done more to push the web forward with Tailwind than the larger players have done (certainly more than Facebook did with React and Google has done with Angular/AMP/etc).
Reflexively assuming that unanimous positive sentiment towards someone is itself an indication of a problem is exactly the reason people are writing posts as recently as (double checks) _yesterday_ titled "65% of Hacker News Posts Have Negative Sentiment, and They Outperform" https://philippdubach.com/standalone/hn-sentiment/
May I humbly suggest taking a breath or two? It is extremely taxing mentally to select strangers to tell you don’t trust them in an imaginary crisis. (Especially ones on a tech discussion board! Especially just because they noted there were no negative comments and only fawning ones! Especially when you think fawning feels fine in a crisis!)
> 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.
Adam is simply trying to navigate this new reality, and he's being honest, so there's no need to criticize him.
And this is why AI coding will eventually degrade into a mess. Enjoy it while it lasts.
AI eats up users caring about $company which makes library, library degrades because nobody is paying, $company goes insolvent, library goes unmaintained and eventually defunct, AI still tries to use it.
Vibe coding with libraries is a fad that is destined to die.
Vibe coding your own libraries will result in million line codebases nobody understands.
Nothing about either is sustainable, it’s all optics and optics will come crashing down eventually.
That is one take and certainly possible and negative but I think people create libraries for different reasons.
There are people who will use AI (out of their own pocket for trivial costs) to build a library and maintain it simply out of the passion, ego, and perhaps some technical clout.
That's the same with OSS libraries in-general. Some are maintained at-cost, others are run like a business where the founders try to break even.
AI is destined to destroy software industry, but not itself.
Software does not decay by itself (it's literally the whole point of using digital media over analog). Libraries do not "degrade". "Bit rot" is an illusion, a fictitious force like centrifugal force in Newtonian dynamics, representing changes that happen not to a program, but to everything else around it.
The current degree of churn in webshit ecosystem (whose anti-patterns are increasingly seeping in and infecting other software ecosystems) is not a natural state of things. Reducing churn won't kill existing software - on the contrary, it'll just let it continue to work without changes.
You’re mostly right, libraries thrive by adapting to their surroundings. Mostly.
But after just months of being unmaintained, even the best libraries start to rot away due to bugs and vulnerabilities going unfixed. Users, AI included, will start applying workarounds and mitigations, and the rot spreads to the applications (or libraries) they maintain.
Unmaintained software is entropy, and entropy is infectious. Eventually, entire ecosystems will succumb to it, even if some life forms continue living in the hazardous wasteland.
Bit rot isn’t some mystical decay, it’s dependency drift: APIs change, platforms evolve, security assumptions expire, build chains break. Software survives because people continuously adapt it to a moving substrate.
Reducing churn is good. Pretending maintenance disappears is fantasy. Software doesn’t decay in isolation, it decays relative to everything it depends on. And it sounds like you don’t know anything about Newtonian dynamics either.
I struggle to fully grasp everything you postulate. Please help me understand.
Your original point was that libraries do not need companies behind them. From what you have written here a reason for that is that (web) libraries mostly create churn by introducing constant changes. What I think you follow from that, is that those libraries aren't necessary and that "freezing" everything would not do any harm to the state of web development but would do good by decreasing churn of constantly updating to the newest state.
What I struggle to understand is (1) how does AI fit into this? And (2) Why do you think there is so much development happening in that space creating all the churn you mention? At this point in time all of this development is still mostly created by humans which are likely paid for what they do. Who pays them and why?
It's just interesting because most of the talk is programmers talking about AI taking their job by replacing them not taking their job because it's taking away revenue from the business.
Reminds me of the problem with Google & their rich results which wiped out and continues to wipe out blogs who rely on people actually visiting their site vs. getting the information they seek without leaving Google.
I expect a lot of business disruption because of AI. Agree it's not the same as employee replacement, but it adds to the sort of fog of war around what effect AI is really having.
Anything open source will be turned against its authors and against ICs.
We thought it would give us freedom, but all of the advantage will accrue to the hyperscalers.
If we don't build open source infra that is owned by everyone, we'll be owned by industrial giants and left with a thin crust that is barely ours. (This seems like such a far-fetched "Kumbaya, My Lord" type of wishful thinking, that it's a joke that I'm even suggesting this is possible.)
Tech is about to cease being ours.
I really like AI models, but I hate monopolies. Especially ones that treat us like cattle and depopulate the last vestiges of ownership and public commons.
it's a real shame no one warned us this would happen when a bunch of corporatists and opportunists wrested the term "open source" from the advocates of true freedom in the late '90s.
Also the FSF squandered its opportunity being RMS’ hobby / support organization and skipped a lot of important discussions, even before the skeevy behavior they’d been ignoring came to light. I used to donate in the 90s but … really feels like that was just flushing cash.
ChatGPT came into the picture long after the open source issues we’re talking about were apparent. AI companies are making it even worse but solid advocacy in the 2010s or 2000s would’ve been helpful.
I'm just not sure how to connect this rhetoric to the facts of the source link, where a hobbyist attempted to extend some source-available code to support a new technology, and the CEO of the for-profit company who owns the license said he's not allowed to for business reasons.
You can be and I am sympathetic towards the CEO! I wouldn't accept a PR for cannibalize_my_revenue.txt either. But if we insist on analyzing the issue according to the categories you're describing, it seems undeniable that the CEO is a corporatist, and that he put an unfree license on his repository to stop people from freely modifying or redistributing it.
There were more-or-less two original spheres of OSS. There were the academics who were too "pure" and holier than thou for everyone else, and then there were commercial FOSS that OS'ed because something already reached its reasonable lifetime potential and it was cool to give away the plans to a cult classic to let it live on in some other mostly permanent, mostly released form. When OSS becomes a mindless pattern, an absolute prerequisite to investment, and/or ceases to be released without regret, resentment, and/or strings attached, then it's not cool anymore and becomes toxic.
There's no such thing. Even if on paper "everyone" has an ownership share, in practice it's going to be a relatively small number of people who actually exercise all the functions of ownership. The idea that "everyone" can somehow collectively "own" anything is a pipe dream. Ownership in practice is control--whoever controls it owns it. "Everyone" can't control anything.
> I really like AI models, but I hate monopolies. Especially ones that treat us like cattle and depopulate the last vestiges of ownership and public commons.
I would dispute whether the tech giants are "monopolies", since there's still competition between them, but that's a minor point. I agree with you that they treat individual coders like cattle--but that's because they can: because, from their standpoint, individual coders are commodities. And if automated tools, including AI models, are cheaper commodities that, from their standpoint, can do the same job, that's what they'll use. And if the end result is that whatever they're selling as end products becomes cheaper for the same functionality, then economically speaking, that's an improvement--we as coders might not like it, but we as customers are better off because things we want are cheaper.
So I'm not sure it's a consistent position to "really like AI models" but also not want the tech giants to treat you like cattle. The two things go together.
> we as customers are better off because things we want are cheaper
Why privilege that side of the equation over "we as workers"? Being a customer isn't all there is to life. I happen to spend quite a bit more time working than shopping.
It's not a matter of "privilege". It's simple economics: if the same functionality can be provided more cheaply, that's a gain to everyone. The gain to customers is the most obvious gain, and it's what I focused on in my previous post--but it's also a gain to producers, because it frees up resources to produce other things of value. But the producers have to be willing to change how they make use of resources in order to take advantage of those opportunities.
> I happen to spend quite a bit more time working than shopping.
Then you should be a lot more worried about AI providing the same functionality you were providing as a coder, but more cheaply--because that makes you, or at least you as a coder providing that functionality, a commodity that's no longer worth its cost. So if you want to avoid being commoditized and treated like cattle, you have to change what you produce to something that AI can't do more cheaply than you can.
IMO, the only ethical and legal way to build LLMs on the entire output of all human creativity, that still respects rights and won't lead to feudalism, is conforming to the actual legal requirements of fair use that are being ignored.
According to fair use doctrine, research models would be okay. Models used in education would be okay. Models used for public betterment by the government would be okay, etc
Pie in the sky version would be that models, their output and the infrastructure they run on would be held in a public trust for everyone's benefit. They wouldn't exist without consuming all of the public's intellectual and creative labor and property, therefore they should belong to the public, for the public.
> Tech is about to cease being ours.
On the hardware side, it's bad, as well. Remote attestation is here, and the frog is just about boiled when it comes to the idea of a somewhat open and compatible PC as the platform for general computing.
It was kinda cool while it lasted, glad I got to see the early internet, but it wasn't worth it to basically sign away for my great grandchildren to be peasants or belong to some rich kid's harem.
They commoditized their complement to their hardware/infra, that being software. Good for them and the value of tech will shift to what is still scarce relatively.
Stop enabling corporations' theft and exploitation.
Don't FOSS by default, unionize, embrace solidarity, and form worker-owned co-ops that aren't run by craven/unrealistic/non-business founders if you want any sort of stability.
It does give us freedom. In fact, it arguably gives more people freedom, as non-programmers can create now simple tools to help themselves. I really don't see any way that it reduces our freedom.
Some of the critics in the thread are… odious. I’ve written down some of the GH handles, because if I’m ever hiring again, I wanna make sure I’d never hire some of these folks.
I don’t understand how someone can display such contempt towards the maintainer of a thing they’ve used for free.
> I’ve written down some of the GH handles, because if I’m ever hiring again, I wanna make sure I’d never hire some of these folks.
You can block accounts on GitHub and add a note as to why. Might be simpler and more accessible later on than a random TXT (plus, it probably updates if they change their username).
Note that blocking also means they can’t contribute to your repos. Which you may not care about anyway.
Thank you, that’s indeed much cleverer. Unfortunately I’ve closed my account this year, trying to put my money where my mouth is and not furthering the goals of GitHub or Microsoft.
What's wrong with microsoft and github? I can't lie, between this comment and the "writing down people's github handles out of spite just in case" you are coming off as someone with a lot of grievances.
Understandable, but I’m definitely a lot less bitter than it seems.
Well, Microsoft is vile. I won’t expand because there’s plenty online on the topic. And I don’t like their acquisition of GitHub, which has turned into an ecosystem for laundering open-source code through LLMs.
"Sorry, we cannot give you the job because even though you're qualified and passed our interviews, you were such a meano to Adam! That is a no-go at this organization"
Half the people in that thread have this mentality that just using tailwind is enough contribution, so therefore GiVe mY oPuS MoRe InFo
I thought we learned years ago that exposure doesn't keep the lights on. That mentality is nothing but entitlement
One comment stated that "it's not our fault the founder was unable to manage his finances to pay his people" well if open source worked the way people try to act like it does, he shouldn't have to pay anyone, right? But here we are
You can use a product and still be critical, especially when layoffs happen, truth is there are a lot of things we don't know about their finances – tailwind definitely is successful by any metrics, they have corporate sponsors that alone give them a healthy MRR (I count at least $100k/month from the sponsors page alone)
I sympathise that it sucks having to fire people, been there. But it sucks more to get fired.
Nice, nothing like a little personal bias to inject into an interview process. If you can't handle criticism and you're just looking for sycophants, you're probably not the type of employer or hiring manager most people want to work for anyway.
I am one of those critics, but I never used Tailwind. A layoff of that magnitude is horrific, but if what they are describing as their business model is true, they really really need to rethink it. I wonder what the size of their marketing team is like, and if they were involved in the layoffs. Seems like they need some help there. I found the "downvote" spam in that thread, for reasonable posts, to be quite off-putting, and that led me to my remarks.
I am not 100% sure about that - I usually find AI written CSS to be slightly visually flawed and almost always logically flawed.
The way you write websites that actually work imo, is you understand how your chosen CSS layout engine works roughly, and try to avoid switching between layout modes - traditional to flexbox to grid to flexbox again down the tree can drive the most brillant devs utterly mad .
But seriously, after a certain complexity threshold, it becomes impossible to tell what's going on and why.
And if you don't think about it in advance, it's very easy to reach that threshold, especially if you don't get to write the whole page from scratch, but have to build on the work of others.
AI (and many frontend devs) do write-only CSS - they add classes until the code they write looks right.
But code like that tends to fall apart under multiple resolutions, browsers, screen sizes, devices etc.
I am not a frontend dev, and came pretty late to the frontend party. That said I felt that anything that obscures the raw CSS makes it much harder to deliver UI that works right, as it peppers hidden side effects across your code.
That's why I wasn't too keen on CSS frameworks like Tailwind - I found that when writing frontend code the writing part takes up the minority of the time, it's producing a well thought out layout flow is what is actually the biggest sink of time and effort.
That said, I'm not a frontend dev, and I'm to too good at CSS - but not horrible either - so I defer to the judgement of others who are pros at this, its just my opinion and experience.
If you want a bunch of tailwind class slop, then yes. Otherwise, A lot of context engineering is needed if you want it to write modular tailwind components properly for large projects where consistency is important.
> Otherwise, A lot of context engineering is needed if you want
I am not seeing that. I have a few AI-assisted projects using tailwind and scrolling through it now 99% of it looks... completely modern and professional. I had previously asked it to "completely refactor, a rewrite if needed, all the tailwind/css/app styles. ensure visual and code consistency across pages".
Modern coding tools add tons of their own content, but none of the above was "a lot of context engineering".
Isn't that an article about using a frontend aesthetics prompt in order to avoid the AI tells? A lot of the with-aesthetics pages look pretty good imo.
It's describing the problem and also giving a solution. The problem of vibe coded sites all looking the same is very real however, if you don't consciously and actively guide the LLM towards being different, as described in the article.
And design too. I shouldn’t be able to tell Claude designed your site/app, but it is too often the case. Good taste still remains an advantage thankfully.
"You should learn how to vibecode and ship whatever works enough, as fast as possible, to get bought for a wildly disconnected from fundamentals valuation." This may sound flippant, or low quality, but it I assure that it is not intended to be. It is derived from observations of the current tech macro. Quality does not appear to matter, ethics do not appear to matter, sustainability and engineering rigor do not appear to matter; it appears that all that matters is "Start up. Cash in. Sell out. Bro down."
I would love to be proven wrong, truly, because this is a path to the death of craftsmanship, deep knowledge, and to some extent, curiosity, in the domain.
It satisfies the dream of a business with no people. As Doctorow illustrates it, like plugging the Fisher-Price steering wheel into the drive train of the business.
> Quality does not appear to matter, ethics do not appear to matter, sustainability and engineering rigor do not appear to matter
I don't know why people keep saying this, as if quality, ethics and sustainability mattered before and every developer was a pure artisan of their craft. In reality, having been in many companies and looking at their codebases, it has always been slop, with very few exceptions.
Yeah, no kidding. I was alive 20 years ago, this isn't like talking about the 1800s, what exactly was different with the craftsmanship and ethics back then?
You might be right but even then this feels fundamentally really immoral
The sell out is the biggest fundamental issue in this equation because it is the part of the equation which doesn't reward Quality,ethics,sustainability and engineering rigor overall.
Welcome to the AI bubble fueling it.
I genuinely don't know but I think AI prototyping/using it for personal use cases are fine but when we completely start to vibecode, if your project is complex enough, you will reach problems and all the other factors/researches point out. In my opinion, for longevity, vibecoding is not the deal.
But as you said, longevity isnt rewarded. I really hate how the system has become of just selling businesses.
I feel like as such the businesses who are truly passionate about their product (because they faced the problems themselves or are heavily interested in it/passionate about it) might win "long term"
To me trust feels the biggest resource in this day and age. Information era has now been sloppified. Trust is what matters now.
I don't know but I will take the slow but overall steady route. There is a sense of commitment with human trust which I feel would set apart businesses and I will try to create side projects with that initiative
One of the ways I feel like acheiving it while still getting the shipfast aspect is that I just build things for myself, vibe coding in this case can help and I launch it for public, if there is interest in any product or smth, I will try to respond and try to add feedbacks fast (perhaps still using vibecoding) but in long term, I try to promise to keep the code lean (usually approx 2-3k lines of code at max) and then if I see prospect and interest about the idea, I have tried to think that a middle way is either rewriting or completely understanding AI generated code to its core and having a very restrictive AI access afterwards any product feels good and then the trust aspect of things can be gained.
I don't know too much about side hustles. I just build things for myself in whatever I want mostly I must admit using vibe code and end up usually sharing it online/deploying it for others as well if it might help.
I disagree, the only real issue with UBI is the amount of inflation it will cause. Germany has something nearly approaching UBI and they are doing fine.
That’s unproven, but suppose it’s true: what’s your alternative? If we are in fact facing widespread unemployment, what’s going to be better than UBI at avoiding societal collapse? Billionaires paying private armies to contain poor people is a straight-up sci-fi dystopia but even that depends on enough people having money to buy things from their companies.
If we truly hit the point where we have more people than jobs. That we hit AI improving at miraculous paces that we cant even reskill people. I think it would be better to essentially have make work programs. Have basic qualification programs where you are guaranteed a job. People need a purpose. Throw every person capable of getting an engineering or science degree into labs. Massively expand teaching, nurseing and medicine so there is extremely personal care just by the sheer numbers.
This is so fucking dumb. I hate when software engineers try to solve problems. You are good at one thing, do that.
The rest of us will struggle without your help because that's what we been doing. We are literally struggling to fulfill our purposes because we have jobs.
Then use it to pay for services like healthcare and education so that everyone has a safety net and opportunity to thrive without just giving everyone enough cash so that they are incentivized to slack.
DDT has been banned, cigarettes are all but banned, leaded fuel has been banned. Nuclear energy has been banned in Germany.
The industry wanted all of that and did not get its way after some time. You can ban "AI", make companies respect copyright. You can do all sorts of things.
Since "AI" can only plagiarize, countries that do the above will have an edge (I'm not talking about military applications that can still be allowed or should be regulated like in treaties for nuclear weapons).
Did you read the expanse? The earth of the expanse is full of crime and destitution. People apply in the tens of thousands for every lottery slot of school or jobs. People just wallow in nothingness. The people fleet earth for mars and the belt just to have a basic sense of purpose.
If we are to just have UBI. Have basic sustenance for no effort, while we have unlimited entertainment and porn at our finger tips. It would be a disaster. I would literally we rather have make work programs.
Agreed, it's one of the only ways forward I can think of while still maintaining markets in some part of the economy...that is, if you care about the human condition at all. Plenty of these tech leaders seem to want to replace humanity though, so this will be an uphill battle.
What is your alternative, when the price humans can sell their labor at dips below what is necessary for them to survive? All these takes about "UBI will demolish the human spirit" or whatever are just ridiculous when the alternative is "starve to death".
Just doing nothing isn't great for the "human spirit", but UBI doesn't mean people can't find their own goals to pursue. The idea of something where people are not longer required to work to survive is hard to accept since many people haven't seriously considered how they could meaning outside of their careers
counterpoint : my father had realistic expectations for what he wanted to do post-retirement.
what actually happened was that he sat around purposeless because it turns out that the motivation of producing a paycheck or product was actually the reason he did things. He stopped showering, became depressed, and neglected his health.
And this isn't an uncommon reaction to the open-ended 'free-form' life post-retirement. Some people very realistically need to have some level of structure imposed on their life or otherwise be taught how to create that structure themselves. I think this will be a very real problem whenever UBI gets closer to reality.
I see two alternatives, one that people find new ways to do productive work with or in the presence of LLM, or massive social unrest, rebellion, war and/or starving to death, followed by a reset. I.e. the way human nature has responded to similar imbalances in the past.
Funded by an automation tax as proposed by Martin Ford. Not holding my breath on either count. We mustn't upset the 1,000 or so billionaires in this country in any way for they are wise and they are kind and only bad things will happen if we do.
But chin up, peasant, each and every one of us can dream of one day being a billionaire as well if only we act as wise and as kind as they do.
> But chin up, peasant, each and every one of us can dream of one day being a billionaire as well if only we act as wise and as kind as they do.
(I know this was written satirically) but this is a nice example of doublespeak and I immediately got reminded of it.
I wouldn't say that we have reached 1984 level, there is still some decentralization where you can get hosting and then self host from small vps providers as well etc.
Not that most people do such things tho. Internet is still heavily centralized but overall, there are still outlets of escape legally and you are able to sometimes even talk to vps provider owners themselves directly in some cases if they are small enough.
But still, each year although we get away from 1984 the year, we get near to 1984 the book.
As much as I am pro AI and I really am very pro AI, there is definitely an emperor's new AGI vibe amongst the tech bro and billionaire classes. I can only attribute it to a compulsive need to oversell everything and then deliver 25 to 50%, a state everyone is so used to now that if you try to be honest and make claims that state what you can really deliver, they will assume you can only deliver 25 to 50% of what you are claiming and therefore the guy promising twice as much gets the funding.
This makes me happy that I'm nearing retirement but that switch flipping is being delayed by my hourly rate going up for possessing forgotten knowledge. Sigh...
Yes, I have no idea who's this magical "we" in your "We can simply". To me this seems like a textbook coordination problem leading to a tragedy of the commons- even if you got 99.9% of the world into your "we", the remaining "defectors" would have a massive benefit from using AI to replace human labor.
Not only can we not just do that (you did not even define what you mean), but China is coming out with models that are good enough for this purpose - and they are, because they are open, everywhere.
Indeed we need to revolt against AI and force every other big powerful nation to do the same thing. Yet unfortunately that seems like a big joke until AI has destroyed their society too.
The reality of UBI in the United States is that it's going to go from being something freely given to being something that is a full time job to maintain, and then it will be cut or replaced with services that are specifically designed to be as cheap as possible. Until we're all living in terrafoam, birth-controlled and warehoused until we die.
Is it that mass unemployment will lead to caring more for one's family again, resulting in proper family structures that take care for their elders like in the past? I hope so.
When you talk in meaningless terms like "traditional workers" and "tech bros", all it tells me is that you have divided the world into people you like and people you dislike and mourn / celebrate accordingly.
If ones position for "other people" was "they should pull themselves up by their bootstraps" then the same applies. If your position was we should stop/slow/consider the march of progress - well you lost to 30 years of moving fast and breaking things.
I suggest and ask for nothing but consistency, irrespective of if you like or dislike the people who are affected.
> It is "progress" when class traitors displace labor, but it is "heartbreaking" when a class traitor gets displaced by other class traitors.
it becomes clear that the original comment was a pointless strawman of a position that nobody holds. A class traitor wouldn't be expressing sympathy about displacement in the first place. It only seemed to make sense because, when you say "tech bro", people superimpose the general category of technologists who think they can make the world better on top of one specific stereotypical guy who believes all the worst things they've ever heard a technologist say.
unfortunately, it doesn't seems like tech bro gets displaced by other tech bros at all and more like corporates running costly ephemeral branding as tech bro by abusing other tech bros works.
What's the difference between tech bros and corporates? Isn't being a tech bro almost by definition about getting to the point where your can sell out your company and your principles?
Well, I never read the artcicle because paywall, but there is a WSJ headline today about a $160k mechanic job at Ford that can't be fulfilled because no labor
I don't buy it. They failed to build a sustainable business model and are now suffering the consequences. Everybody is leaning into AI because it works (in the sense that it pays the bills). Saying the layoffs were because of AI offloads the blame.
oh, come the fuck on. it's "AI made us do it" drivel that companies began to justify layoffs with in 2023 (!!!).
Tailwind is just another FOTM frontend thing. I saw dozens of them come, gain some popularity, then abruptly disappear once the marketing budget ran out.
He mentions that tailwind is more popular than ever before but their revenue is down 80% so unless he’s lying about that it makes sense rather than tailwind going out of style.
However, why is that even surprising? Tailwind is essentially a frontend css stylesheet. What business could there possibly be around that?
I understand, they have UI kits, books, etc. but just fundamentally, it was never going to be easy to monetize around that long term, with or without AI.
Tailwind also has a compiler of sorts (so you only include in the bundle the exact styles you need) and a bunch of tooling built around it. In an alternate universe it could have been a fully paid enterprise tool, but then it might not have caught on.
The comment you are responding to said their revenue is down 80%. So they did monetize training and services, and I don't see how that would have been a problem long term if AI didn't come along and make all of that unnecessary.
Yes. The point I was trying to make was that after the initial hype disappears, sales in those categories would probably taper off regardless. But it is purely my opinion.
Just posting the "75%" without context is a bit of an odd choice. He explains why in the podcast, but it still feels like he should have specified immediately to avoid assumptions about scale.
What? He could have said 3 if he wanted, but he wanted it to sound worse so he said 75. I know its inferrable how many people it is, but if the guy laying them off doesn't care to say the number, why should someone else when posting this?
Both of those numbers in isolation dont tell the whole story. Saying firing 3 people sounds like a wednesday at a big company. Saying firing 75% of the staff indicates the impact that those changes will have on everything about the company. The latter is more useful.
The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such things.
While I understand that this has been difficult for him and his company... hasn't it been obvious that this would be a major issue for years?
I do worry about what this means for the future of open source software. We've long relied on value adds in the form of managed hosting, high-quality collections, and educational content. I think the unfortunate truth is that LLMs are making all of that far less valuable. I think the even more unfortunate truth is that value adds were never a good solution to begin with. The reality is that we need everyone to agree that open source software is valuable and worth supporting monetarily without any value beyond the continued maintenance of the code.
Having worked on a design system previously I think most people, especially non-frontend developers, discount how hard something like that is to build. LLMs will build stuff that looks plausible but falls short in a bunch of ways (particularly accessibility). This is for the same reason that people generate div-soup, it looks correct on the surface.
EDIT: I suppose what I'm saying is that "The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such thing." is wrong. My hunch is that AI has the appearance of eliminating the need for such things.
Accessibility testing sounds like something an LLM might be good at. Provide it with tools to access your website only through a screen reader (simulated, text not audio), ask it to complete tasks, measure success rate. That should be way easier for an LLM than image-based driving a web browser.
But accessiblity on the frontend is to a large extend patterns - if it looks like a checkbox it should have the appropriate ARIA tag, and patterns are easy for an LLM.
It's just… a lot of people don't see this on their bottom line. Or any line. My awareness of accessibility issues is the Web Accessibility Initiative and the Apple Developer talks and docs, but I don't think I've ever once been asked to focus on them. If anything, I've had ideas shot down.
What AI does do is make it cheap to fill in gaps. 1500 junior developers for the price of one, if you know how to manage them. But still, even there, they'd only be filling in gaps as well as the nature of those gaps have been documented in text, not the lived experience of people with e.g. limited vision, or limited joint mobility whose fingers won't perform all the usual gestures.
Even without that issue, I'd expect any person with a disability to describe an AI-developed accessibility solution as "slop": because I've had to fix up a real codebase where nobody before me had noticed the FAQ was entirely Bob Ross quotes (the app wasn't about painting, or indeed in English), I absolutely anticipate that a vibe-coded accessibility solution will do something equally weird, perhaps having some equivalent to "As a large language model…" or to hard-code some example data that has nothing to do with the current real value of a widget.
I think perhaps the nuance in the middle here is that for most projects, the quality that professional components bring is less important.
Internal tools and prototypes, both things that quality components can accelerate, have been strong use-cases for these component libraries, just as much as polished commercial customer-facing products.
And I bet volume-wise there's way more of the former than the latter.
So while I think most people who care about quality know you can't (yet) blindly use LLM output in your final product, it's completely ok for internal tools and prototyping.
It's not that people care about quality, but that people expect things to "just work".
Regarding the point about accessibility, there are a ton of little details that must be explicitly written into the HTML that aren't necessarily the default behavior. Some common features of CSS and JS can break accessibility too.
None of this code would obvious to an LLM, or even human devs, but it's still what's expected. Without precisely written and effectively read-only boilerplate your webpage is gonna be trash and the specifics are a moving target and hotly debated. This back and forth is a human problem, not a code problem. That's why it's "hard".
I use the web every day as a blind user with a screenreader.
I would 100% of the time prefer to encounter the median website written by Opus 4.5 than the median website written by a human developer in terms of accessibility!
That's really interesting. Are you speaking from experience with websites where you know who authored them or from seeing code written by humans and Opus 4.5 respectively?
So I have been using the human-authored web since well... 1999 or so, starting with old AOL CDs. I've obviously seen a lot of human content.
Back in the old days you might have image links and other fun stuff. Then we entered the era of flash. Flash was great, especially the people who made their whole site out of it (2004 + not being able to order ... was it pizza? something really sticks in my memory here.)
Then we entered the era of early Bootstrap. Things got really bad for a while -- there was a whole Bootstrap-Accessibility library people ended up writing for it, and of course nobody actually used the damn thing. The most frustrating thing at this point (2010?) was any dropdown anywhere. Any bootstrap dropdown was completely inaccessible using typical techniques, and you'd have to do something tricky with ... mouse routing? Gods it's been 15 years.
CAPTCHAs for stupid things became huge there for a brief moment -- I remember needing to pass a CAPTCHA to download ... was it Creative drivers? That motivated me to make a service called CAPTCHA-Be-Gone for other blind people for a while.
Then we see ARIA start to really come into its own... except that's a whole new shitshow! So many times you'd get people who thought "Oh to add accessibility, we just add ARIA" and had no fucking idea what they were doing, to the point where the most-common A11y advice these days has become "Don't use ARIA unless you know you need it."
Oh then we had this brief flash (~10 years ago?) of "60 FPS websites!" -- let's directly render to the fucking canvas, that'll be great. Flutter? ... Ick!
Nowadays the issues are just the same as they ever were. People using divs for everything, onclick handlers instead of stuff that will be triggered with keyboard... Stuff that Opus just doesn't do!
I guess I've only been using Opus 4.5 for about a month but just ... Ask it to build something? Use it with a screen reader? Try it!
> Then we see ARIA start to really come into its own... except that's a whole new shitshow!
I am not blind, but my experience trying to write accessible web pages is that the screen readers are inconsistent with how they announce the various tags and attributes. I'm curious what you think about the screen readers out there such as NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver, TalkBack, etc. and how devs should be testing their web pages.
Many of the larger corporate clients tend to standardize on the exact behavior of JAWS and I am not sure that is helpful. It's like the Internet Explorer of screen readers.
If you want to know why a page ends up riddled with ARIA overriding everything, that's why. In even the best cases, the people paying for this dev work are looking for consistency and then not finishing the job. It's never made the highest priority work either since testing eats up a ton of time.
To reinforce my original point, I just don't think LLMs can write anything but the most naive code and everyone has opinions and biases completely incompatible with standardization. It's never "done" and fundamentally fickle and political just like the rest of the web.
Satisfying constraints like these isn't merely about knowing the spec and having lots of examples. Accessibility requirements are even more subjective than ordinary requirements already are to begin with.
The Tailwind Team's Refactoring UI book was a big eye opener for me. I had no idea how many subtle insights are required to create truly effective UX.
I think people vastly underestimate just how much work goes into determining the correct set of primitives create a design system like Tailwind, let alone a full blown component library like TailwindUI.
While I believe you, its an argument that artists bring forward since the beginning of art, so even many hundred years before the internet on average humankind did not value this work.
It's not really a refutation of my point about how building a good component library is hard, to suggest using another component library. Of course, if you use one it's easier, that was my entire point.
shadcn ui is not a component library but the basis for a component library that has great accessibility built-in from the start, so yes, it is a refutation.
Maybe we're arguing semantics, but I think calling shadcn a "basis for a design system" is more accurate than a traditional component library. The difference to me is that shadcn lives inside your codebase and you can fully customize it as you please. You cannot customize a component library like MUI nearly to that extent.
> The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such things.
Or more cynically that it eliminates the need to pay for such things. Claude and friends were no doubt trained on the commercial Tailwind components, so the question becomes whether those models could have done the job of Tailwind UI without piggybacking on the unpaid labour of the Tailwind UI developers. If not then we clearly have a sustainability problem here - someone still has to do the hard work to push things forward, but with the knowledge that any attempt to profit from that work will be instantly undercut by the copyright laundering Borg.
I bought a Tailwind Plus trial a few years ago and I've been using AI tools since they came out. I typically find the block or template I want to use via the Tailwind Plus site and then feed it into Claude Code and ask the agent to modify them as required. This has been working well for me. I think the problem is that the Internet is absolutely full of people who expect free shit and never even consider paying for it to support the devs. I don't really know how you fix that. In a sane world, we'd be funding the most popular/useful projects using government grants, since our entire fucking economy sits atop a pile of OSS.
I think AI has come as the industry was somewhat maturing and most frameworks/software had previous incarnations that mostly did the same thing or could be done adhoc anyway. The need for libraries as the models get better probably declines as well.
Not all open source but a lot of it is fundamentally for humans to consume. If AI can, at its extreme (still remains to be seen), just magic up the software then the value of libraries and a lot of open source software will decline. In some ways its a fundamentally different paradigm of computing, and we don't yet understand what that looks like.
As AI gets better OSS contributes to it; but in its source code feeding the training data not as a direct framework dependency. If the LLM's continue to get better I can see the whole concept of frameworks being less and less necessary.
Mostly. I had the "AI bot tsunami" problem on my own personal site and blocked a bunch of bot user agents in robots.txt. Most of them were from companies I had never heard of before. The only big AI name I recognized was GPTBot from OpenAI.
https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs/5025624008 - "Research Engineer – Cybersecurity RL" - "This role blends research and engineering, requiring you to both develop novel approaches and realize them in code. Your work will include designing and implementing RL environments, conducting experiments and evaluations, delivering your work into production training runs, and collaborating with other researchers, engineers, and cybersecurity specialists across and outside Anthropic."
https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs/4924308008 - "Research Engineer / Research Scientist, Biology & Life Sciences" - "As a founding member of our team, you'll work at the intersection of cutting-edge AI and the biological sciences, developing rigorous methods to measure and improve model performance on complex scientific tasks."
The key trend in 2025 was a new emphasis on reinforcement learning - models are no longer just trained by dumping in a ton of scraped text, there's now a TON of work involved designing reinforcement learning loops that teach them how to do specific useful things - and designing those loops requires subject-matter expertise.
That's why they got so much better at code over the past six months - code is the perfect target for RL because you can run generated code and see if it works or not.
The funny part is how they think this will give them the power to take control of what is the defacto standard and circumvent standards.
It will instead further distinguish what is AI slop because it doesn't work and be siloed off to people who don't care about the code so can't fix it.
If people want good interoperable production ready code that can be deployed instantly and just works and meets all current standards and ongoing discussions, we've had it for many decades and it's called open source.
Well, you can tell from the tone of his post that he isn't blaming anyone directly. They monetized convenience, and something more convenient came along.
I think it's more shocking to everyone how quickly something like that happens.
Exactly the business model wasn't strong enough, just upselling templates for hundreds of dollars which AI can churn in few tokens was easy to disrupt.
The business model is strong. AI is stealing traffic/money from creators. That's not a problem with the business model, it's a problem with AI. AI hyperscalers shamelessly monetize other people's work without compensation. Truly an awful dystopia.
The output of AIs that is "churned out" wouldn't exist without templates like this being used as an input to the training. But that isn't "Copyright Infringement", according to the AI companies.
You and I would not get away with this no matter how much lawyering we buy.
This has nothing to do with the actual facts or arguments of the case. Our "Justice" system has openly and capriciously emphasized corporate rights over individual rights for at least 50 years now.
I disagree. The bare minimum they could have done in all these years was build a proper high quality, tightly coupled component library instead of riding this "copy paste your way to a result" trend.
Not stuff like shadcn and Tailwind Catalyst, but a proper versioned, tightly coupled UI library with rich theming capabilities made for the 99% of users who aren't skilled enough at design to be cobbling together their own design systems or editing a Button component directly.
Instead they rode the wave (despite being best positioned to redirect the wave) and they're paying the price.
If it wasn't AI it'd be the first version of MUI that moves on from Material Design 2 as a default. Or Hero UI v3. Or literally anyone who brings sanity back to the space of component libraries and leaves "copy and paste code snippets" behind
If a business model can't withstand being disrupted, it is no longer viable. It's like Uber putting cabs out of business with something better. Selling templates is now no longer viable, and blaming AI will not do anything. As Darwin would say, adapt or die.
Just like piracy isn't theft, so too isn't AI scraping. Personally I think copyright should be abolished and I think it's wild to see people on HN turn from hackers to copyright hawks literally supporting massive corporations which are the primary beneficiaries of long copyright laws, like Disney and their Mickey Mouse laws.
Now is not the time to take a principal stance on copyright. The harsh reality is that trillion dollar companies are taking the word of individual creators like Tailwind for free and monetizing it without any form of compensation. That feels incredibly unjust and needs to be fixed. I don't care what the fix is called.
I'm not a fan of copyright either but big corporations have abused them for so long, either enforce them to punish these companies or abolish them so these companies die, either one is fine with me. But don't just selectively enforce them to the benefit of these corpos but ignore them when they punish them, that's the worst of both worlds.
I think the era of buying templates is over, when you can get a tool that listens to you patiently, iterates again and again till you're satisfied for pennies, why would you pay hundred's for a template that is there for anyone else to buy as well.
The selling feature is that it's more polished (and has good accessibility etc), they're still intended to be customised, which you could use AI for. Why use Tailwind itself when you could generate one with AI? Because it's solidly tested and polished, similarly.
But the broader, more important point: an open source project previously could be funded by using attention to sell other services or add-ons. But that model might be gone if users no longer visit or know the creators.
Is AI making component libraries redundant? Or is it just making it really easy to use free component libraries?
(Or is it really more about traffic to the documentation site and thus eyeballs on the sales pitch?)
I'm making an app using ShadCN, which is pretty good and free -- maybe Tailwind Plus would be significantly better, I don't know, I had to consider the possibility that this project never makes any money so I wanted free for the first shot. And the LLMs turn out to know it pretty well.
Once I get it built using ShadCN, it's hard to imagine when I'd have time to go redo all the component hackery with another library, even if it were way better.
I guess my point is just that "paid UI components" is a really tough business when there are so many people willing to make components just for the fun/glory/practice. Same with a lot of UI stuff it seems -- I highly respect icon designers, but I'm probably just going to use Lucide.
I think all kinds of libraries are becoming redundant. Unless the library solves significant technical problems its likely AI will generate whatever you need. Even tailwind itself is kind of unnecessary, I've used it a lot, but recently been just using AI to generate raw css on side projects, I feel it works pretty well. Tailwind is really a developer convivence, it made things pretty fast to style, but now I don't really think it has anywhere near the advantages it did. If you aren't writing tailwindcss but generating it, almost all the advantage is gone. Only thing it kind of provides is a set of defaults / standards
Fwiw I don’t even think shadcn is good, but our app is built on top of those components already, so we can’t change it without changing everything, so we’re stuck with it.
Does it matter whether it's been obvious that it would be a major issue? It's not unlikely that he did realise this a long time ago, and if he did, it's also not unlikely that he still hasn't found a solution, because there might not be one.
> I think the even more unfortunate truth is that value adds were never a good solution to begin with.
This is the money quote for me - charging for a different thing than the one that brings the value is unsustainable, and AI is accelerating that realization.
Unfortunately, without free distribution, Tailwind would never gain anywhere close to its current mindshare, so there just might not be an opening there (save for a "this year is a year of Linux on desktop" dream of bots and pnpm install paying with micropayments for each download).
> The reality is that we need everyone to agree that open source software is valuable and worth supporting monetarily
The reality is that you need to figure out is that if you want people to pay when they make a ton of money from your code, you should put that in the license.
Well.. there are many fast growing companies that provide UI + APIs for certain components of your app. Sure you can build things easier in-house, but the opportunity cost of doing so also went up. Supabase, Stream, Clerk, Stainless all growing very well.
How does it eliminates the need for simple templates and components? Templates and components are always gonna be more cost effective, back in the day we used to buy simple jQuery components for like 5*$ and even LLMs cant beat that, you will quickly end up with a shittier component with 0 accessibility and end up paying more to the Claude Opus
I think we just need better platforms for enterprise procurement.
The issue is that currently you either publish as free & open-source and get tons of traction and usage but little funding, or you publish as paid and get no traction.
The blocker for paid software isn't actually the money itself (this is solvable by just pricing it reasonably), it's all the red tape that someone has to go through to get their company to purchase a license to begin with.
Maybe a marketplace that preemptively does audits, provides insurance, code escrow, licensing, etc ahead of time, that vendors can put their software on it proactively and companies can have accounts where their employees can just open an "app store" and just buy/license software directly? Similar to the AWS marketplace but for libraries.
Meanwhile Evan You of Vue JS was making something like 200k just from Patreon before starting void(0) which is venture backed, it's all a marketing problem because I don't think anyone knew their GitHub sponsors even existed, people just don't seem to use it in general.
I don't know why Tailwind needed anyone more than Adam, I understand that more people makes the work go faster such as for their Rust compiler but then you run into money problems like this.
I'm sorry but it simply does not cost a million dollars to maintain Tailwind, a CSS library that has no compelling reason to ever change at this point.
> [...] 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. 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. [...]
> Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework.
>The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products
Wall that's the problem, and it's tractable problem. Seems like tailwind needs a sales strategy beyond hoping people read the docs. And that it gives rise to a perverse incentive--making a less intuitive product to drive the need for documentation--is bound to affect the product.
If LLMs are really the problem, and it seems possible that they are, then you might need to lean in. Maybe selling access to mcps and skills. I'd still bet on hiring someone to chase down some contracts is going to be the easiest way out of the hole though.
Agreed. If Tailwind could give you a paid subscription to a service that plugs into your agent and will recommend component compositions, styles, etc. (basically how those web app generators companies work but targeted at experienced devs) they have a chance to survive the transition.
Presumably the MCP could also be aware of the commercial products, which ought to coax the agent to apply those patterns. That'd be more useful than actually have the library.
This isn't novel either. Expo offers an MCP with its paid subscription, for instance. It's helpful. In fact, I wish the tamagui crew would get on that...
I feel like if their docs are their only funnel into their commercial product, they need to fire their marketing staff and find people who are competent. There are so many other ways they could be reaching potential customers, even those only familiar with Tailwind's free product.
> There are so many other ways they could be reaching potential customers
Like what, exactly, now that most people interact with tailwind purely via AI agents?
I started work on a front end project React/Astro/Tailwind project for the first time in about a year, building out with CLI agents, and one things that's changed compared to a year ago is that I have the entire UI basically working and I haven't even looked at the tailwind classes. I just say yes that's fine but can you improve the width for the sidebar on mobile (obviously paraphrasing here, I write the requirements for the agent carefully) and within a couple of iterations it's working. I keep expecting to have to jump in to manually fix things but so far I haven't needed to.
I worked in FE for years and I know tailwind and CSS quite deeply. But the entire extent of what I've needed to know for this project so far can be summed up as "it's some kind of styling tool". I never had to look at the docs, I never went to their website, or or Twitter or anywhere else that might have worked for marketing.
I did make an informed decision in choosing this stack, but it's equally likely that the AI could have recommended it to me, and the AI entirely set up the project scaffolding and config for me.
So where in this could they possibly have marketed paid components to me? And even if they did, why would I have paid for them when Shadcn is free and was added automatically by the AI?
> I did make an informed decision in choosing this stack, but it's equally likely that the AI could have recommended it to me, and the AI entirely set up the project scaffolding and config for me.
I'm not a web dev, I've heard of Tailwind CSS but my actual knowledge is "I know what the CSS in that name means, therefore it's some kind of styling tool".
One of my experiments before Christmas with Claude Code, was to see what it does in pure vibe-coding mode, where I just say "yes" and then see what kind of mess (if any) it made.
It did not use Tailwind CSS. There was a lot of… if a human had done it I'd say "copy-paste" CSS, but I think it just regenerated it all fresh each time rather than actually using the pasteboard? And it was raw CSS, no dependencies that I noticed.
They maintained professional etiquette in their marketing and I don't blame them. If you annoy people, they will not recommend you.
I've watched open source projects get lambasted because their developers dared to make a buck. Being conservative with their marketing is what is expected of them even if it isn't fair.
Thanks for that - the GitHub app “helpfully” collapsed this comment (along with most of the others in the thread), so I was confused how the headline related to this issue.
Sadly, selling pre-made components and templates was never a sound business model, especially in the wake of AI. One thing I learned being on HN for so long and launching my own products is that a product is not a business. Don't conflate the two, at your peril.
Lots of people make great products but actually turning that into a business is fundamentally a different skill. It seems like Tailwind grew too fast, having 2 million ARR a few years ago and almost 10 employees (200k each is probably the all-in cost anyway for an employee if they're full time with benefits, so I suppose there was barely any profit), whereas they'd probably have been fine with running a Patreon like Evan You did for Vue, and cutting down the number of devs drastically, which I suppose is what they're doing now.
It is a business. Envato was a billion dollar business in 2017. I agree that AI makes these kinds of businesses vulnerable, but it's overstepping to say that these things aren't businesses.
I never said Tailwind the company wasn't a business, when I said "a product is not a business" I meant that as advice to creators in general, not in specific to Tailwind; of course it is, it made millions in revenue. What I meant was that even though businesses may exist, having a long-term, durable business model is not always viable.
"selling premade software assets" is a business, and it's the business both Tailwind and Envato were in. Both businesses got hit hard by AI. Check out Envato's homepage now. It's unrecognizable from what it was in 2017, and completely genAI oriented.
I think you're just repeating the same point I'm making. The point is they're not good businesses, hence why Envato pivoted and Tailwind soon might need to as well.
You're shifting your argument, first you said it's not a business. Any business can be good/bad depends on climate and over time. It was a business and many busienss in the current era of AI will face such challenges. All business just need to constatly adapt over time aka innovate.
You're misunderstanding what I'm saying, I was not talking about Tailwind Labs not being a business, I am saying that in general, products are not businesses by default. In that case, my argument is the same as it has been, agreeing with your last 3 sentences.
Telerik, DevExpress, and a lot of other companies have made profitable businesses that have lasted well over a decade on that business premise. Selling solid and easy to integrate pre-made components has been a pretty good business for a while.
I wonder how they're doing too then, as we don't have public stats about them (Telerik was acquired by a public company Progress Software but they do not break down revenue by Telerik specifically). Ultimately, this business of selling components is not sound in the age of AI.
Another thing to consider, it seems JS devs use more AI for work than .NET devs for example, which might be in more old-school companies and industries. I can't verify this but there seems to be a correlation between companies who use hip new CSS and JS frameworks, and their AI usage, thus accelerating Tailwind Corp's cannibalization by AI, as most vibe coders are building web apps from what I've seen and Tailwind and React are very well represented in the training set.
> Another thing to consider, it seems JS devs use more AI for work than .NET devs for example, which might be in more old-school companies and industries.
Speaking from years of .NET work in state and federal government, the sort of dev groups that lean on Telerik or DevExpress have less leverage to build new things for themselves than you would expect, so the use of AI inside of them is predominantly for maintaining existing software. Decisions on how things get built at most public agencies still revolve around MS Access and WebForms due to a whole bunch of BS ordinances that legislators put in place; for those sorts of places a reliable vendor can absorb the blame if concerns surrounding accessibility, compliance, or security of your ancient web services crop up, while Claude and Codex put the liability back on your org.
Yeah I don't disagree that selling components is going to be hard business in the age of AI. Just mostly pointing out that it was a good business previously.
While I'm sure AI is partially to blame, I feel like the real problem is that (1) they don't have a sensible business model and (2) they have saturated their market.
There are relatively few individuals and organizations out there with products that are worth spending vendor money on, especially for something like a CSS library. Companies that do have this need are ready to spend BIG.
Tailwind charges a one-time fee in the hundreds of dollars range and pledges lifetime support.
When they say revenue is down 80%, it's because everyone already bought their library in its first few years of existence. And looking at their site there is nothing else to spend money on. So how are they planning to sustain their revenue?
They were selling HTML templates. Not even anything else, literally just HTML with Tailwind classes. That wasn't a sustainable business even before AI.
i remember listening to Adam in one of the podcast he was in (I think it was either the Hackers Inc, or the Art of Product, but could've been something else where he was a guest) - and I remember that he mentioned that idea that there are always a new wave of new developers that they can sell the product to.
I still think he was correct. I myself bought tailwindUI as an aspirational purchase, and i doubt people would pay for it as a subscription.
But I think a lot has changed in the last few years. There arent probably as many new developers given the market, and among those there are probably even less that are willing to pay $100+ for a UI library, not when there are competitions like shadcn or radix or many others as free alternative, or when you could just ask an LLM to generate them for you.
Tailwind Labs definitely need to explore new revenue streams, but i dont think UI components is the way to go. Without knowing their internal data, this is just a guess, but I doubt traffic to docs or pipeline to premium products is much of a factor in the decline.
I believe the new UI libraries hit hard more than the AI impact. AI is not always that accurate so eventually if you want to deep dive in, you still have to turn around to the doc. But the new libraries though, they give the market another good choice, especially when shadcn came out, it's so huge that I personally even feels there's no need to go for the raw Tailwind experience, and what's worse is that shadcn is still evolving fast.
I believe the only way to let Tailwind survive is changing the business model.
Today, I wanted to add tailwind to a new project and realized I had purchased it back in 2022. So I went to the website and realized it had moved to tailwind plus. That’s how distracted I’ve been. To my surprise my access worked and I could still download the full UI kit.
I know they promised lifetime, but I did not expect updates forever. This looks like the first issue to fix. I would have no issues paying 20% of purchase price for an updated version, that gave me access to 12 months of free updates.
Also, what about paid access to skills or MCP server for design systems and components?
I know these may be things he already considered, so don’t want to presume I have an answer. But as a customer, totally willing to support a good product that has supported me.
Lovable while claiming they are making $250m ARR heaving using Tailwind, doesnt even pay to support tailwind at all. Although with the AI companies you can never trust the numbers as they play the giving free trials and counting as future ARR game.
And that's totally fine what Lovable is doing. Tailwind offers an MIT-licensed library that anyone is free to use without paying for it. Tailwind's paid offering is optional, and many businesses won't need it. Just as non-paying users of OSS are not entitled to anything from the maintainers, maintainers are not entitled to revenue from users who are complying with the license terms of their free offering.
As an open source developer myself, it concerns me that so much of what we do us under- and un-funded, but that's the licensing model Tailwind chose. If you want something different, then release it under the AGPL (or something else that businesses aren't comfortable using, or cannot use), and charge for commercial licensing for any use of your product. Yes, you'll have fewer users, but that may be the trade off you need to make in order to build a sustainable business.
Great point here, the only thing that feels greedy to me is that these larger companies do not contribute back to the foundational libraries that they are building on, even to a minor extent for ecosystem improvements. Perhaps greedy is a strong word.
i’ve always felt that oss licenses needs to include responsible use terms or something. some orgs dont mind paying for value contributed but you need to provide a structure to do so, even if that is on a voluntary basis.
If anyone from Lovable etc sees these comments, great opportunity for sponsorship where it can make a difference upstream.
Some companies have done this well, at a stage Retool use to sponsor a number of open source libs which greatly helped them with exposure to devs. Surely a better way to spend ad revenue imo.
As a fellow business owner, I’ll always feel bad when business owners need to make these types of decisions.
I bought Tailwind UI - I always thought it was a critically bad business decision from their end to keep giving me additional new stuff for free. It seemed to me that it should have been a subscription.
However, knowing nothing about the inside of their business, I have no idea how that would have affected their viability.
The idea is that subscription businesses have churn, and if you can capture the lifetime value of a customer with your one time price, there isn't any difference (other than people feeling grateful when you add new content for "free").
My takeaway from this thread is: his theory’s great until you discover that your customers are wiling pay *so* much more.
On a more positive note, I’ve been blown away by the (largely, one conspicuous troll-like annoyance aside) positive thoughts in the comments. Maybe it’s not too late?
It is true, I paid the lifetime fee for the premium tailwind offering, and they probably could have gotten double that from me with an annual subscription instead.
I like the approach of paying for major upgrades.. So you get free updates on your current version for as long as you want, but when the next major update comes out, you either stick with your current version at no cost (and ideally still get maintenance and security patches) but if you want the next major version, there's an upgrade cost.
> I always thought it was a critically bad business decision from their end to keep giving me additional new stuff for free. It seemed to me that it should have been a subscription.
Maybe. One data point isn't all that useful, but I never would have bought it if it weren't for the model he chose. I will never, ever do a subscription for something like that.
Not entirely true. They had one product at first. I think it was UI kit. The full app templates that came later were a separate product and they charged again. However, you’re right insofar as they added more templates to the later product for free.
I guess this is what makes marketing so tricky; I myself would’ve bought a $10/mo subscription so much sooner given the chance, which by now - and happily, incidentally - would’ve brought in way more dosh than my one-off payment.
i bought Tailwind UI years ago and have barely used it outside of like a couple of abandoned side projects. I bought it knowing that is going to happen because it is a one-time payment, and the idea of supporting the project/Adam is prob a bigger factor that the product.
I definitely wont even consider it if its a subscription.
Selling UI components is a hard sell to begin with - i think they made the right decision with a one-time point payment at that higher price point. If it were a subscription, i probably would've cancelled it within 2 or 3 months.
if the coding agents are already using Tailwind so much, I don't see why he is so adamant on add this to the repo. llms.txt is basically useless, and you need it you can add it to your user claude.md
I'm not normally one to do armchair psychology but from the way he posts I'm pretty sure he's just on the spectrum, obviously smart but total inability to read the room or understand other people's perspectives
that's why I complained about it in the PR, mmm, I thought it was grossly unprofessional of him (besides the things he said in the discussion.
e.g. Tech changes all the time, that isn't an excuse to be a dick.
e.g. ok dude, don't expect any future free work from me in the future on any of your projects going forward. Rude AF.)
Stray thought: adding a library the PR submitter controls would be a good starting point for an XZ/SSH-style supply chain attack: badger & threaten the maintainers to add the dependency, and then sneak something into a future library update.
Wow. This is wild. I have a mix of empathy for the guy and also a feeling like he has no idea what he's doing running a business.
> Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework.
So his idea is to make Tailwind less modern than competitors by throwing a wrench in this tool that makes it easier to write tailwind with AI, simply because he thinks the only way Tailwind can make money is if actual human beings come to read the docs site? If that's the case, your income is based on products that's are not high enough value to potential customers, or you're marketing it poorly, or both.
> 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.
I get priorization but this isn't really that. He's not saying "I'll get to this when I find some time. Busy with high-priority business-related things right now.". He's saying "AI is going to be the end of profits for tailwind and instead of coming up with an alternative income stream I'm going to just block anything making tailwind easier to use with tailwind. And also stop complaining about it."
It sucks to fire people, but that doesn't mean you have to spread the flames out to open source contributors trying to make tailwind better for everyone. Look for new income streams, ideally ones that can be sold to people that control the money in companies (that isn't often the devs that are in your docs).
> I get priorization but this isn't really that. He's not saying "I'll get to this when I find some time. Busy with high-priority business-related things right now."
I don't really understand how you can find a difference between your sentence with what he wrote:
> I totally see the value in the feature and I would like to find a way to add it.
> 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. 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.
This is the most pragmatic, non-conformist and rational comment here.
Exactly, when the Renaissance was happening, the printing machine(s) were spreading across the Europe rapidly, priest(s) were trying to prevent the spread of machines because they were copying the books, by hand, which was their income stream.
So they were against it, in the end, they learned their lesson the hard way. It was inevitable, it's the same thing with the LLM(s).
> 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.
Yeah, that is a quite depressing situation, but saying "trying to do fun free things for the community..." is quite contradictory.
Isn't that how that community is created in the first place?
I also don't understand the logical thinking that made them think that, if we make it harder to gather information with LLM(s) or if we do not improve it, people will keep coming to our website, NO!
They would just simply grab something similar, or ask an LLM to use something else, there are hundreds of alternatives, no one, literally no one has moat in the today(s) world.
I believe that if they focused solely on open source, improving the developer experience, creating more libraries, abstraction(s) over the abstraction(s), open source component libraries like shadcn/ui, DaisyUI, Radix etc, their income today would have been much higher than from what they currently have I believe.
There are many, like so many action items that Adam could do, instead of throwing tantrums at people, easiest could have been the sponsor-first business model, which would have scaled out much better I mean, they don't have recurring revenue, OSS sponsorships are mostly recurring, unlike the current model.
Good analogy but it feels a bit different, in a sense that the LLMs index all your content and then you don't benefit from any of that outcome. You essentially had no saying to the process of indexing, whether it's MIT licensed or else.
I'd say that this is a very interesting situation, I would not blame it on the founder. Nobody saw this coming ...
1. The contribution actually made something useful
2. He actually said anything to the note of "I'm going to just block anything making tailwind easier to use with ai."
3. The contributor was not adding an external library that he authored without mentioning it in the comments
I defer 100% to maintainers of a project if an external contributor drops a pr that they are now in charge of maintaining with no evidence that it is useful, or that the author of the change will maintain.
The biggest miss from Tailwind is ignoring the rest of the ecosystem. Rightly or wrongly, everyone has moved on to using shadcn's system for components. Tailwind hasn't. Tailwind has excellent components available through Plus which are worth paying for but they're not available where people are, which pushes people towards other libraries built on top of Tailwind. I have paid for Tailwind Plus and I like their Catalyst UI and I have used it on a project but it's a pain to use compared to alternatives, so, I don't bother.
I'd go as far as to guess that their revenue isn't down due to AI but because of their lifetime access model combined with shadcn's registry system being much easier to use.
> everyone has moved on to using shadcn's system for components
I played around with shadcn for a new project a year or so ago, decided I really didn't like their fundamental approach of copying code (that now I have to maintain) into my code base. So I ended up using something else (DaisyUI), which has been reasonably nice so far.
I'm just one person (and one not super plugged into the frontend scene), but "everyone" feels like a gross overestimation. I would guess it's not even a majority.
I tried ShadCN then quickly ported everything over to Mantine. A bit of config magic later, I can quickly whip out functional UIs faster than I can think of features.
I like this prediction and it would be a good fit. Vercel can also monetize existing traffic much more broadly than tailwind can with just tailwind plus.
I wish Adam had addressed the impact of competition in a bit more detail.
Shadcn has definitely taken a big chunk, the premium ecosystem around Shadcn is absolutely exploding. I know. I run https://www.shadcnblocks.com and we saw huge month on month growth in revenue for the entire year.
Even with strong headwinds from AI, I expect our revenue to continue increasing throughout 2026.
I’ve been CSS since the mid 2000s and I have a lot of it memorized by heart.
My team uses tailwind, therefore I use tailwind
But I don’t want to reconfigure my mental model to think in esoteric shorthand, when I already have vanilla web tech memorized.
So I just write some code to match the design and then I let an llm transform it into what my team expects.
I’m sharing in the hopes that the tailwind team can figure out a middle ground because I think a service that can take any valid styled content and output the same result in tailwind would be a niche small language model that solves the use case for why I don’t go to the docs.
The shorthand makes inline style more ergonomic, so you can see the wood for the trees, rather than long strings of style attributes in your markup.
Inline style is the thing. That's what tailwind is enabling in a readable way. And inlined style is what makes style more maintainable and less susceptible to override rot.
The separation between form and function is always a bit illusionary, but particularly so with CSS. Almost all markup is written to look a specific way, not a configurable way.
CSS modules is the native solution. But yes, compile-time CSS in TypeScript like PandaCSS or Vanilla Extract or StyleX (not run-time like Emotion) are also great alternatives.
For what its worth, I had the same experience with Tailwind. I regularly see classes that don't have an meaningful outcome.
I don't think the problem is Tailwind or CSS (well, I guess Tailwind is CSS with extra steps but you get the idea) syntax (or any of the CSS preprocessors), but the fact that styling in browsers has accumulated a lot of cruft, and people who haven't "grown up" with it over the years don't fully understand it (I am more competent than most with it and there's still times I screw up).
One thing that's kinda nice about Tailwind is that it made copy-pasting components easier. So people can get something decent without fully understanding what's happening
Yeah, I’m not advocating for css or against tailwind
Just sharing that the root cause is most developers don’t want to pick up an additional syntax when they already have the fundamentals
The main problem is the premise of tailwind
Every single web design on earth is a compound opinion on like a few hundred popular properties and values
They put all that in one style sheet
Which became the one style sheet on earth
Which made it possible to summon all those styles directly from within our apps
Tailwind is like the chess of utilities. There’s only so many opening and closing moves that running a business on it is incredibly difficult, given supply and demand.
>Just sharing that the root cause is most developers don’t want to pick up an additional syntax when they already have the fundamentals
IF they already have the fundamentals. What I see is that more and more developers don't know CSS at all or very little; they only use Tailwind and haven’t worked with CSS extensively before.
After we've completed the knowledge transfer from the public domain, across all potential sources of information, from books to open source code to private data banks and LLMs then what comes next? Destroying the said works so that nobody else can access them ? Privatize knowledge, hoard all the data, limit access, sell ads?
i just gave my favorite LLM a screenshot of one of those components and it recreated it perfectly. i paid $0.
i dont see how any business model can compete with free. maybe they can focus on branding like Pepsi or Coke and see if developers will make their decisions based on that.
Y'know, this is the one time that i thought lawyers wouldn't let it slide. I still don't understand why apparently there aren't _massive_ class-action (or similar) lawsuits worldwide against AI companies. LLMs are full on copyright-removal machines.
how do you know it recreated perfectly. Is it equally customizable? Is it equally accessible? And your LLM models cost money too. If you use the API keys, you can quickly see the cost.
Being 100% honest even though it sucks to be the truth - it doesn't matter if its customizable or accessible or not because you just ask the LLM to do that for you.
Or ask the LLM to customize it to your specific use case since most people really only really care about their situation - not for it to be customizable to everyones use case.
Even with AI, I'd still use a component library. It reduces the surface area you have to maintain and keeps your look consistent. The same reasons to use them before AI.
When I saw this on HN, I instantly felt terrible for Adam & the team. Happy to see that these comments are mostly supportive, they could have easily piled on the pain.
Tailwind Plus was always tricky since most people would use it for commercial products and that seemed like a grey area based on their licensing. Then shadcn came along and all the Tailwind Plus alternatives (many times recreating the same UI elements that plus has) and then people just copied and used those components and polished further using AI.
Before Tailwind got big, Adam released an amazing book about UI/UX called Refactoring UI[0] and it really helped me become better and understand subtleties of design. I even considered printing a personal physical book for my coffee table. If you want to support Adam and don't need Tailwind Plus, this ebook could be a good way.
(IANAL) Using it for commercial products isn't grey area at all, it's explicitly allowed. Pretty much all you can't do is create a component library based on it. You can also freely use it in open source as long as you aren't making a component library.
If it wasn't usable in commercial products, I don't think anyone would pay for it.
I should’ve clarified. My apps are all open source so it didn’t feel right putting their UI for free out there. It does happen in some projects but it felt easier just to design components myself.
>>Adam released an amazing book about UI/UX called Refactoring UI[0] and it really helped me become better and understand subtleties of design.
In the age of AI, if you have Table of Contents. ChatGPT can write the book for you.
Only books I buy these days are in fiction genre. Everything else is derived from facts that already exist some where and AI can derive and write the whole book.
Wow, this is a grim reality check: AI hyperscalers taking in billions of revenue, while at the same time putting honest business like Tailwind out of work, without any form of compensation. What happened to "you wouldn't steal a car" etc.? It's only illegal if you're not a trillion dollar company?
I have trouble expressing how terrible unjust it feels that AI companies are stealing money from the common people. I have no other way to put it.
Also: this will definitely limit the use of AI. People will stop publishing valuable content for free on the internet, if AI scrapers will steal and monetize it.
I’m not sure this is such a reality check. I remember figuring this out maybe a month or so after October 2023, when ChatGippity first dropped. Like, if it’s a “do anything platform” won’t the first anything be to cannibalize low hanging anything’s, followed by progressively higher hanging anything’s until there’s no work left?
Like play out AI, it sucks for everybody except the ones holding the steering wheel, unless we hold them accountable for the changing landscape of stake-in-civilization distribution. Spoiler: haha, we sure fucking aren’t in the US.
> Like play out AI, it sucks for everybody except the ones holding the steering wheel
Not true. Models don't make owners money sitting there doing nothing - they only get paid when people find value in what AI is producing for them. The business model of AI companies is actually almost uniquely honest compared to rest of software industry: they rent you a tool that produces value for you. No enshittification, no dark patterns, no taking your data hostage, no turning into a service what should've been a product. Just straightforward exchange of money for value.
So no, it doesn't such for everyone except them. It only sucks for existing businesses that find themselves in competition with LLMs. Which, true, is most of software industry, but it's still just something that happens when major technological breakthrough is achieved. Electricity and Internet and internal combustion engines did the same thing to many past industries, too.
> they only get paid when people find value in what AI is producing for them
The people "finding value in them" are other people with money to throw at businesses: investors, capital firms, boards & c suites. I'm not sure anybody who has been laid off because their job got automated away is "finding value" in an LLM. There's a handful of scrappy people trying to pump out claude-driven startups but if one person can solo it, obviously a giant tech company can compete.
blank stare they're not taking my data hostage, but they're sure as shit taking my data
I think we just fundamentally disagree on all of this. You may be right, and I hope you are. I go back and forth on whether it's going to be a gentle transition or a miserable one. My money is on the latter.
this whole "ai is theft" argument is just pure cope. tailwind was always just a thin abstraction over css standards and they only became the industry standard by playing the seo game and dumping docs on the open web for everyone to see. you dont get to claim theft when a model actually learns the patterns you basically forced onto the world for free to build your brand. tailwinds business model was essentially rent seeking on the fact that css is tedious to write manually and now that the marginal cost of production has dropped to near zero they are suprised they cant sell 300 dollar templates anymore.
the car comparison is honestly embarassing for this community to even bring up lol. its not theft to recognize a pattern and its definately not illegal for a company to do what every junior dev has been doing for years which is reading the docs and then not buying the paid stuff. adam built a business that relied on human inefficiency and now that inefficiency is gone. its not a tragedy its just a market correction. if your moat is so shallow that a llm can drain it in one pass then you didnt really have a product you just had a temporary advantage. honestly tailwind should of seen this coming a mile away but i guess its easier to blame "scrapers" than admit the ui kit gravy train is over. move on and build something that actually provides value.
It doesn't matter what Tailwind your opinion is. It matters that they built something which definitely has market validation that people were willing to pay for. AI took their lunch AND their lunch money.
I'm not going to dogpile criticism on Tailwind or Adam, whose behavior seems quite admirable, but I fundamentally agree with the thrust of the parent comment. It's unfortunate for Tailwind and anyone who was invested in the project's pre-2022 trajectory, but no one is entitled to commercial engagement by unaffiliated third parties.
Here's a similar example from my own experience:
* Last week, I used Grok and Gemini to help me prepare a set of board/committee resolutions and legal agreements that would have easily cost $5k+ in legal fees pre-2022.
* A few days ago, I started a personal blog and created a privacy policy and ToS that I might otherwise have paid lawyers money to draft (linked in my profile for the curious). Or more realistically, I'd have cut those particular corners and accepted the costs of slightly higher legal risk and reduced transparency.
* In total, I've saved into the five figures on legal over the past few years by preparing docs myself and getting only a final sign-off from counsel as needed.
One perspective would be that AI is stealing money from lawyers. My perspective is that it's saving me time, money, and risk, and therefore allowing me to allocate my scarce resources far more efficiently.
Automation inherently takes work away from humans. That's the purpose of automation. It doesn't mean automation is bad; it means we have a new opportunity to apply our collective talents toward increasingly valuable endeavors. If the market ultimately decides that it doesn't have sufficient need for continued Tailwind maintenance to fund it, all that means is that humanity believes Adam and co. will provide more value by letting it go and spending their time differently.
Laws are not intellectual property of individuals or companies, they belong to the public. That's a fundamentally different type of content to "learn" from. I totally agree that AI can save a lot of time, but I don't agree that the creators of Tailwind don't see any form of compensation.
It does not feel not right to me that revenue is being taken from Tailwind and redirected to Google, OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic without 0 compensation.
I'm not sure how this should codified in law or what the correct words are to describe it properly yet.
I see what you're getting at, but CSS is as much an open standard as the law. Public legal docs written against legal standards aren't fundamentally dissimilar to open source libraries written against technical standards.
While I am all for working out some sort of compensation scheme for the providers of model training data (even if indirect via techniques like distillation), that's a separate issue from whether or not AI's disruption of demand for certain products and services is per se harmful.
You're clearly not a fan of Tailwind, and that's fair enough.
However, stating that Adam Wathan (AW) "basically forced [Tailwind] onto the world" is nonsense. People chose to adopt it because it solved a problem.
In case you're not familiar with the origins of Tailwind, AW was building a SaaS live on stream, and everyone kept asking about the little utility CSS framework he'd built for himself (rather than the short-lived SaaS).
That's how it all started. Not through a big SEO campaign, or the mysterious ability to force others to choose a CSS framework against their will, but because people saw it, and wanted to use it.
When I started working on one of my side projects a year or so ago, I realized I didn't have time to figure out how to style each and every component, so I paid for Tailwind Plus. It was pricey, and I definitely had to think about it for a few days, but I'm so glad I did. It saved me way more time than the dollar value of the product, and it has continued to get better.
If you are using Tailwind, I highly recommend Tailwind Plus. You'll learn so much about what Tailwind can do using that library, and it is so easy to adapt into your own offerings. It is 100% worth it.
Hearing that they're struggling, I may have to also bite the bullet and pick up Refactoring UI.
Note: I am in no way connected to the Tailwind folks other than through my credit card.
I love the poster with the AI-generated avatar admonishing him for not making the software "easy to use" and suggesting that this will hamper his business, completely papering over the fact that LLMs will never be "potential monetization candidates" (ew, wording).
It's insane how much AIs use Tailwind and yet the companies aren't contributing anything. It would be trivial for Anthropic or Cursor to pay something.
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.
How would you possibly enforce this? I can disconnect my laptop from the internet and the local LLM will still autocomplete TW classes. Does JetBrains therefore owe TW every time it does this? What if it was actually completing UnoCSS class names that happen to overlap? How about when it's just simple autocomplete based on what classes are visible and what I've used within the same file?
These might sound like snide rhetorical questions, but when you start demanding payment, they're very real.
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.
> It's insane how much AIs use Tailwind and yet the companies aren't contributing anything. It would be trivial for Anthropic or Cursor to pay something.
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?
Apparently they were 8+ people, in 2024 team size was 6 and were hiring 2 more [0] and in 2020 they had $2m+ ARR [1].
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.
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.
Very good point, and I imagine part of the issue here... everything they sell is one-time payment, more of a reason they should have been preparing for the music to stop
I believe you, I'm just going out of the figures they have published. If they had "several times more" annual revenue, then not having a warchest for situations like this is puzzling.
A lot of open source projects attempt to become a business in some form or another (or vice versa). Great examples of this include Astral (creators of UV and Ruff), TursoDB, TigerBeetle, etc etc etc. People want to get paid for the project they work on. Some of their business models will fail. This is probably a case of tailwind growing their engineering team faster than they should have when the AI writing was on the wall in 2023.
I think a problem is that tailwind has no moat compared to most of those. If it never received any further updates today it would still be effectively feature-complete, save for the occasional new css features.
I don't disagree, but I think differentiating between Tailwind CSS (which is free) and Tailwind UI. Tailwind UI (Tailwind Plus) is a different story I think. It's extremely useful in its current form, but could benefit from more
Yeah, I was referring more to the fact that tailwind didn't have that many other ways to monetise compared to other OSS projects. Their paid templates and courses kinda fulfilled their goal in that way, they made the founders wealthy, but is there a sustainable business there?
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.
You can really feel the stress in Adam's comments. It must play absolute hell with your mental health, it's anxiogenic from the sidelines just thinking about it. Stay healthy and safe mate.
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).
> 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.
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.
This GitHub conversation is disgraceful. Lots of complaints and no support to the devs.
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
although I've mentioned this in a subcomment, I want to highlight that the PR itself also seems to be an excuse to get the library he made to be used by TailwindCSS (https://github.com/quantizor/markdown-to-jsx)
Nope. Started with regex but it was brittle so I used my library which parses to AST which is easier to work with. It's a docs site, so I'm getting one more download woohoo.
Something’s wrong when a key piece of foundational web tech is staring down unsustainability. Tailwind is almost ubiquitous these days. It needs to continue to 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.
I’m sorry for what’s happening to Tailwind, it clearly sucks, but a library like that is definitely not a key piece of foundational web tech the same way bootstrap and jquery weren’t.
As an engineer, I want to believe this, but really - does it?
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 "key piece of foundational web tech" was released 5 years ago and gained prominence maybe 2-3 years ago. Let's not exaggerate its impact. We were perfectly fine before Tailwind and will be fine after it.
We were not fine before Tailwind, we aren't fine now, and we won't be fine after it until the day we finally recognize that CSS is a terrible foundational standard that deserves to be replaced.
“Foundational” seems a bit overkill here. There is nothing foundational about it – it’s a convenience tool, albeit a very good one.
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.
You could go back in time and say this about jQuery. Tailwind's future was always questionable because CSS is growing in new and amazing ways, and wrapping the complexity of new CSS features into helper classes isn't really a sustainable model.
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.
The difference is that jQuery was replaced by other libraries, while Tailwind grows in popularity, but due to AI its creator doesn’t benefit from this popularity as much as before
jQuery was essentially replaced by JavaScript (and browser compatibility) getting better, but it continued to exist and grow because it was the de facto way to DOM manipulation, especially if you had to copy and paste off of Stack Overflow, or roll out a framework based UI.
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.
The difference is jquery went away because better things replaced it (in javascript). If the fundamental need for tailwind has passed why is it's usage growing? It's more that the problem solved by the paid portion of tailwind is now solved by AI.
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.
- The value they created (mindshare, shared “standards” for naming properties, and design atoms) and what they charged for (templates that AI can replace) are two different things — and AI has shortened the time it takes for this discrepancy to show up.
- Isn’t almost all of Tailwind’s value actually in that shared semantics (“mt-2” = a small top margin) — not only in users’ heads, but now also in LLM training data? Isn’t it more of a standards organization (like ISO) than a product company (yes, sure, standards are also a product/service)?
- They criticize AI for extracting value, but I wonder if Tailwind's business model is also value extraction from the standards they established.
- And isn’t it almost a miracle that a token library and the idea of “let’s name five margin sizes” (which they weren’t even the first to do - I started with Basscss) could sustain an ~7-person company for so long?
I tried this LLM prompt for deep research: "Tailwind is laying off people. I consider their business much more of a standards body (like ISO) — their main value is the mindshare and shared semantics and design atoms. What business models could they adopt from standard bodies’ business models?"
However, after reviewing the suggestions, I believe tailwind movement is probably not large/important enough to make money in a similar way (sell certification, membership with governance privileges, training ..).
Two interesting ideas: "Keep human docs free, but put machine-optimized “spec corpora” behind licensing (because AI is the channel disrupting them)."
"Stop relying on docs-as-marketing if AI is eating that funnel, and instead monetize the privileges and assurance around the standard (governance, certification, conformance, canonical distribution)."
(Don't get me wrong, I love using Tailwind, but I believe they need to see their business realistically.)
They were perfectly positioned to build a Lovable/Bolt/Replit back in the day... might not be too late now either.
They could sell training data too. Though, UIs are relatively solved. But great UIs and criticizing UIs aren't.
Learned a lot from Refactoring UI, and I know (from trying) that it's impossible to make a code review bot based on out of the box sota models today. Vision capabilities are lacking here, and I can see demand for more data here. And Adam's taste likely fits well here.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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?
>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.
This tells me the problem wasn't AI but the overall business wasn't healthy. Docs don't drive sales.
Before LLMs, Google was showing highlights which took crawled content and displayed it on google search results, meaning they’d get less traffic on their site while google stole their content.
It’s unfortunate that google helped kickstart the world wide web but now they’re extracting everything while polluting search results with ads
Doesn't matter. Even if people were for some reason still going to their docs there would simply be no need for the types of paid products they offer - prebuilt template components.
Why pay for a template when AI's can shit out your entire design system and multiple templates in 5 minutes, not to mention competition from other template systems like shadcn that are completely free.
And yes they might not be the best quality but you just prompt it until you like it and then use it as a reference.
It seems like every (coding) AI model out there is generating html with TailwindCSS styling.
@adam: this is just an idea. Have you tried reaching out to OpenAI, Anthropic et al to become sponsors of tailwind? Could that be a viable revenue path?
Maybe you could offer LLM friendly docs to them, or access to something valuable for them? Or maybe they’re just happy to sponsor.
Tailwind and its popularity make LLM’s more valuable, so I’m sure the model makers want Tailwind to thrive.
"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."
My surprise is that the tailwind creator could have a engineering team based in a css framework that basically was used for people that didn't knew real css. Is normal that this people now use other products more effective how AI for this task.
It is clearly the beginning of the end of many small shops in the supply chain. I hope bigger fish buy them so the tech can be more integrated into future AI products, but I doubt they will be smart enough to do that.
I bought Tailwind Plus when it was still Tailwind UI years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it in hobbyist projects and some professional projects. Would have pushed for company license if my current company isn’t exclusively native apps.
> 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?
Create a license that prevents AI companies that generate html based on tailwind from doing it without being in a commercial package. Let them know of the license change and give them 3 months to adjust. Keep tailwind accessible and allow that llm instruction to make it's way into the codebase so it gets picked up by multiple "AI" businesses that output code. This is your new business model.
Open source was not ready for this type of businesses that don't give a dam about rights or copyrights.
It’s open source under an MIT license, I wouldn’t use Tailwind if it wasn’t open source but there is nothing stopping them from future releases being non-open source.
They can’t retroactively pull the license, and most people would just start using a OSS fork of tailwind if they did.
It was probably inevitable. Building a commercial offering (mostly templates) around code which could be considered as "commodity" is extremely hard to do. I'm glad Adam and his team have had a lot of success already with this, but for sure it was not sustainable on the long run. If you are reading this, thanks Adam for having created Tailwind. It's not for everyone, but it's for some people, and that's good enough for me. We need options, and you were a solid one of them.
The PR author posted a TikTok link [1] the thread later explaining their position. Their behaviour seems very unprofessional to me. Mayve the just want to increase engagement to their accounts. Tailwind definetly made the right call here.
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.
We should have Telethons for all the companies on whose products we build our products but whose livelihood depends on the goodwill of others lest can't keep the lights on OR they get sold to some soulless corp and turned to crap.
I never appreciated tailwind until AI models revealed it as such a token-efficient way transport styles between models and other use-cases. AI aruably hurts demand for their premium offering the same way it hurts demand for junior devs.
Sincerely hope the Tailwind team can navigate this rough patch.
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.
I don’t know how big the “team” was, but 75% suggests maybe 4 engineers, one left. The next number up that works is 8, and 8 full time engineers to work on tailwind seems like a lot.
I'm happy to see this, not because I wish Adam failure. I am a Tailwind user myself and use it in all of my projects. Generally am a fan of Adam and respect his business.
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.
Out of curiosity, do you think the decrease in revenue for your tech course business is due to lack of demand (i.e. potential customers just ask an LLM rather than learn from a course now), or due to disruption in your acquisition channel (i.e. reduced traffic from SEO to your blog due to potential customers seeing Google's LLM answers at the top of the search results page)? Like for example, do you have other marketing channels such as social media, youtube or paid ads?
I think it's both but I think the end result is less traffic means less sales.
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.
Thank you for sharing, I really appreciate it! I've been working on my own tech course/education platform for the past couple years, and the landscape seems to be moving beneath our feet!
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.
It's important to remember this is just the commercial arm. The OSS side has as many maintainers as Adam allows and the community is quite active with PRs and volunteer work. Tailwind the project will be ok. Someone will fork it if stales thanks to its popularity. That being said, many more companies should sponsor considering its ubiquitous adoption.
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 bought their Plus thing a while back and not I can't find myself a reason to use it.
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.
Im currently considering buying it actually. I’ve landed a decent side-project building out a CRM for a small business that wants to ditch Salesforce. It’s all internal tooling so the customer has no care or need for a highly customized fancy UI and that $299 is peanuts relative to the time saved and my hourly rate. While I could just use Bootstrap it’s starting to feel a bit too dated (subjective).
I recommend buying it, but I would not be surprised if you still end up using some LLM augmented workflow to do the plumbing and integration when using it. It’s not really a one-click install type of thing that you get from it if you get my analogy. Also, if your customer doesn’t care for fancy UI, then more even the case to let the AI design it for you and pick something like DaisyUI or shadcn and their MCPs with Tailwind.
Licensing hasn't caught up yet. It probably wouldn't be the worst idea to have a simple content copyright license protocol or standard that works for LLMs?
Something simple and obvious, like sticking a license file that has certain expected fields in /.well-known. I wouldn't be surprised if this is already being discussed because it would easily allow agents to check for special license requirements that only apply to them, directing them how to share content while remaining in compliance.
Never been a fan of tailwind, but this is kinda sad. Given it's popularity what a sad situation that they aren't getting able to get properly funded.
I think the solution is one of the big companies with lots of money to acquire tailwind. Specifically Vercel. They use it, their v0 thing uses tailwind allover, they have bought a bunch of open source companies in the past, and they should have deep enough pockets. Last year they acquired tremor blocks, which is a UI library, that uses tailwind!
Refactoring UI is a great book that i've had a ton of value from. Tailwind plus also, and i've been so surprised/impressed to see that my one time purchase kept granting me new stuff. Thanks a lot to Adam and the Tailwind team.
I love Tailwind, and I am really sorry Adam and co are going through this. They've built a great product, and it's brought joy back building again for me.
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.
The issue seems to be that LLMs already consumed large parts of the templatized code somewhere. Not directly from TW but from some other project. Codex / Claude are also exceptionally good at whipping out a UI quickly even when given flimsy requirements. Its hard running this business and competing against a several billion dollar machine. Wonder how Material UI is doing as they have a similar business model.
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.
shadcn/ui I'd argue is probably the single biggest factor in the declining Tailwind revenue more so than just LLMs in general.
As said is it is to say shadcn is what Tailwind should've created and maintained for a fee rather than some html/css templates that are easily replicated.
I say this as someone who bought Tailwind+ to support the project many years ago and still use Tailwind every single day.
Tailwind is nice and all be it’s crazy verbose, I still am a fan of bootstrap. In the days of AI and tokens. Tailwind classes and styling cure through tokens. lol
As a avid user of Tailwind and one who purchased Tailwind CSS Plus, it's very sad to hear.
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
I'm a Tailwind Plus customer in spite of not being the world's biggest Tailwind fan. Even though it really grinds my gears how unreadable markup can be when littered with Tailwind classes, I appreciate the quality and variety of the templates and components available in Tailwind Plus and the constant (free!) updates. So this is a bummer to hear. Many thanks to Adam and the team.
What? That's not what this does at all. Educate yourself. It has nothing to do with the commercial side of his business, it's just the already public docs in cleaned up pure text form.
I agree with the sentiment that companies should help fund open source they depend on, but I think it's a stretch to say those business succeeded "only" because of Tailwind. It's a great project, although I'm pretty sure they would have figured out a way to work with CSS without it.
I bought Tailwind UI, now Plus a couple of years ago. I've also dabbled with a Claude skill that scrapes a "UI block" source from the site and transforms it into a Rails view component. Maybe there's a way to make Plus and LLMs work together rather than compete?
> 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.
I never personally wanted Tailwind as a product, but really feel for them when I see comments like this one [1]:
> Here's a friendly tip for the Tailwind team that you should already know, but I will repeat anyways: If your goal is monetizing your software, then making your software as easy to use for people's workflows, is paramount.
I made the horrible life mistake of starting a company around developer tools, and I would never, ever repeat the experience because of “friendly” stuff like this. I don’t know why software developers are so entitled, but it’s a serious culture problem.
I also made a horrible life decision in starting a company around developer tools, and I agree. Taking one of the comments from the PR:
> It's insane to blame everybody else for not being able to create a viable business model from an OSS project. Everybody who is using Tailwind is actually SUPPORTING Tailwind. Everybody who is reporting bugs properly is SUPPORTING Tailwind. Everybody who is collaborating and PRs changes is SUPPORTING Tailwind.
> Tailwind grew a lot due to community acceptance and support, and collaborations.
> The only person to blame here is the CEO/Main maintainer of Tailwind. They've made bad decisions, hired coders without knowing how to make enough money to pay them.
> If you want to monetize a free service, you either know what you do or you make mistakes and lose what you've built. It was always a risk; we are not at fault.
> @adamwathan I respect you for everything you've done, but you need to take a few breaths, take a walk, think, sleep, and come back, ask apologize of the community, and start working on solutions/crisis management.
And you always know that when you open the GH profile of people saying such things, you'll see an empty timeline. This particular user has a single repository which he's committed to a handful of times over the last year and has setup a GitHub sponsorship for it.
I try to remind myself that these types of people are a (loud) minority but it's absolutely soul destroying.
Yep. I almost edited my comment to include that one as well! "Insane", indeed.
As you note, the tire-kickers were the worst -- people who forked the Linux kernel (with no additional commits) trying to process the entire repo on a free plan, for example, then complaining (loudly) when cut off.
They have the UI Blocks, Templates and UI Kit in https://tailwindcss.com/plus.
I think they are in a good position to build an AI website builder similar to lovable.dev if they wanted to.
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.
This has been a long time coming I think. I remember listening to an interview with the creator maybe over a year ago now and him saying revenue is way down, presumably because of AI
I do wonder though if the llms.txt could actually be used for their benefit? Why not literally recommend the paid upgrades within it?
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/
That's sad to hear, if true, and I'd have gladly paid for Tailwind if they'd had a "OK, so you use our CSS indirectly" program in place. I'm aware of "Tailwind Plus", but that seems to be React-only, and thus the opposite of where I want to be.
It's not React only. It has pure/regular HTML, React, and Vue. I have mainly only used the pure HTML personally as I use Phoenix/LiveView for most of my stuff, and it works phenomenally well and is very copy/paste friendly. The UI/console they provide is also top notch. For others who do use React, the React stuff also worked well too for one project I did that was a SPA.
Oh, yeah the templates are React/Next.js, but the components and things are not (they are what I described above). Templates are great but 95% of the value I get is the components and things
> 95% of the value I get is the components and things
If you want (and only want) a pre-built site that just needs populated with content and maybe minor tweaks to things, then yeah it's React world. However I've rarely found that any template site (Tailwind or otherwise) is close enough to where it doesn't need medium to major surgery to meet my needs, at which point it's usually faster to just copy together components to what I actually want
So, ehhm, no, I'm not ignoring the salient part of your comment: you are ignoring the entire point of my post, which is that if Tailwind had a non-React monetization strategy, things maybe, possibly, might have worked out better.
> No, I want to be able to @import "tailwindcss" without feeling guilty.
tailwindcss is and always has been free, so I don't understand why there would be any guilt with using it. Tailwind UI/Tailwind Plus is essentially pre-built components built using tailwindcss, plus some pre-built site templates.
Thanks, that looks great and will be useful to me! However, unless I'm missing something basecoatui is a component library much like what Tailwind UI/Tailwind Plus provides (though organized differently and useful in a different way IMHO). The template sites are essentially complete websites that you just git clone and it's ready to run. Quite different. basecoatui would be very useful to me, whereas template sites rarely ever have been.
> So, ehhm, no, I'm not ignoring the salient part of your comment: you are ignoring the entire point of my post, which is that if Tailwind had a non-React monetization strategy, things maybe, possibly, might have worked out better.
Apologies if that came off harsh, I didn't mean to ascribe any malice to your reply. However, it seems like there's some confusion here about what the Tailwind "templates" are. They aren't a component library, the component library is different and is not React only.
So to summarize, there are two major parts that are different:
1. Templates (pre-built sites that you git clone). React only
2. Pre-built pieces/components that you copy/paste and modify into your existing app.
Indeed, I've done this quite a few times myself. It's also a phenomenal way to be able to start poking at UI immediately without messing with build pipelines or anything besides just pointing your browser at `file:///...`. Then if the prototype is useful it's very easy to just delete the script tag and get it set up "properly" for a prod build and you know your prototype will pretty much "just work"
I listened to his podcast this morning where he mentions 75% of their four person engineering team was laid off (only the founders and one engineer remain)
Can someone explain to me the advantage of writing class="bg-blue" instead of style="background-color: blue;" and why anyone ever thought they could make meaningful money from enabling the former?
The advantage is in both the speed of the shorthand when transferring the CSS you know you need for a layout from your brain to the element (flex items-center gap-2 vs. display: flex; align-items: center; gap: .5rem; - just try typing them both out), plus all the stuff inline styles can't do, such as variants based on screen size, colour scheme, user preference, pseudo-classes, parent/sibling state, etc. which you can get done in one place in one file in one sitting.
Narrowing in on background color is an extreme oversimplification of what Tailwind provides. I found it to be a great tool for working with CSS, especially for layout. Business viability can be debated, but the value is way beyond what you suggested.
For your first question, IMO the purported advantage is mainly convention at scale. There's nothing inherently wrong with raw CSS in style tags or other authoring models (well, except CSS-in-JS at runtime...). Tailwind is one simple authoring model that works at scale without fuss and bikeshedding. Wrote up my experience with the advantages and disadvantages on this though a bit ago to be able to point to[1].
For the second question, depends on your definition of "meaningful" I guess. I doubt the original goal was to make money. There's OSS less prolific than Tailwind that makes money. Is it unreasonable for those projects to seek ways to compensate their projects?
> why anyone ever thought they could make meaningful money from enabling the former
A better question might be why buyers thought it was worth paying for that "advantage" you want explained. When buyers think a thing like that, someone will fulfill their ask.
If LLMs are eating the revenue stream, that likely gives the answer:
Buyers thought Tailwind meant they didn't have to learn or do a thing in order to achieve an outcome. And someone built a niche around that.
Is it true, and if not, why does it persist? Also not hard to explain given today's approaches to learning and the abysmal state of the ad delivery sites that used to be web search.
It's almost impossible today to find the very few sites that show the standard component lib rendered as web components with modern CSS as supported cross browser -- no single party stands to profit from making that case. You'll see it in parts from other frameworks that aren't trying to do the UI saying "our framework drives native HTML/CSS/JS/WASM" with a few examples, but that's surprisingly unlikely to find from Google with "How do I make my web app look good?" if you don't know which terms to use.
One could probably make a niche living giving modern web-native training for corporates. (Plenty firms purport to offer this, but generally don't really teach past the days of bootstrap.) Price against their recurring licensing costs, and a $10K to $30K class (the type enterprise SaaS products like Hashicorp offers for e.g. Terraform ecosystem) for modern web might even pay better than Tailwind.
Generally, though, arbitrage plays can't be expected to last unless the value-add is actual work others don't want to do, so business model decay is likely to happen to things like Tailwind that have their ideas become standards that get implemented by the browser industry (see Apple and "Sherlocking": https://appdevelopermagazine.com/sherlocked:-the-controversi...
If that's your goal, you probably shouldn't call the class bg-blue? It should be bg-blue-but-purple-on-mobile. But then it's definitely so specific it's the wrong way to select a style. If you want the page background to be blue but purple on mobile, write that in your CSS with a selector of "body" instead of ".bg-blue-but-purple-on-mobile"
The whole point of Tailwind is that it lets you do that. You can debate if Tailwind itself is a good idea but thats not relevant to comparing it to inline styles.
I absolutely love Tailwind CSS, big fan of Adam, too, just watching his journey over the past several years. I'm a bootstrapped solopreneur, too, doing an open core business for my dotnet job orchestrator Didact. It's so difficult running a business, I feel for him and his engineers he had to let go. Maybe they can build some sort of app to go along with Tailwind. Heck, even if they made the base library itself paid one day, I'd probably pay for it. Using Tailwind is just that good for me.
Shoutout to Adam Wathan and team. I rarely shell out any money, but Tailwind was an exception. They actually made front end development fun for me and added tons of value with their UI kit etc. Even though I rarely use it, I bought the lifetime to support their mission. Hope they can continue supporting the framework. It was the best thing to happen to front end in a long time imo.
Anyone selling software components is going to get cooked by LLMs. People have been talking about that since ChatGPT 3 landed. It's just sad to see it actually playing out.
I wonder if this is all due to AI, or whether shadcn/ui's popularity (and blocks, and themes, and registry of paid component libraries) has also impacted them. That's my personal go to, and not Tailwind UI paid, and that's not because of LLMs.
The truth is, business opportunities are rarely eternal, usually they are just an opportunity to make money within a short window of time, such as a decade or two. Sometimes even shorter than that, perhaps even only a year or two.
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?
> The truth is, business opportunities are rarely eternal, usually they are just an opportunity to make money within a short window of time, such as a decade or two. Sometimes even shorter than that, perhaps even only a year or two.
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.
It would appear that they pay their employees fairly well, as seen in this old job posting [1] (not all levels will make this much of course but it gives you a general idea, almost 300k a year is a lot even for a staff engineer).
$275,000 is almost $23,000 a month. Take that times N amount of employees, and other business overhead, and suddenly $80k a month is literally peanuts.
I will be honest. I love open source. But something that really annoys me about the open source community is that the developers take this holier-than-thou approach to backing up maintainers in circumstances like this, but obviously they are not paying with their own money. They are just complaining, and it feels a lot like virtue signaling at worst and pure naivety at best. It feels extremely disengenous at this point, and it's annoying.
What do we actually know?
1. People are inherently selfish. If you give me this shit for free, I'm gonna use it for free. Obviously everyone is doing this. Spare me the "but I go to this conference or that conference".
2. Code is cheap. Why would I ever pay for something that is not gated behind a service with API limits and costs?
3. Coding as we know it is getting commoditized. That's correct. We are all going to lose our jobs as we know it today. Clearly that's the future. Wake up!
But when making these points, open source devs (and honestly a lot of people on hacker news) whine and complain. I don't really know why I'm leaving this comment - I just feel like I'm at an annoyance breaking point. This guy is obviously struggling to pivot and all the grandstanding and virtue signaling just feels like additional noise and wanting to feel good with very little action.
Because of point 3 most SWE's are also hesistant to pay for software. The positive feedback loop of "I did well out of this so i will support others as well" is over.
When you are thinking your days are numbered any cost to develop software (even token budget) is measured. As coding becomes commoditized the ROI in code will drop of that code (capitalism rewards scarcity; not value delivered) and you suddenly become cost conscious. We are moving from a monopoly-moat like market to a competitive cost based market in SWE as AI improves.
As an early Tailwind Plus / Tailwind UI customer I don’t think it has anything to do with AI. The product and technicals are there but from a business and user perspective Tailwind the paid product was trash and still is. It tried to do everything and lacked direction.
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.
Really sucks to see this happen! Been using Tailwind for past few years now.
All the more reason to go closed source. Except for few really vital components that have national security implications (OS/Kernel, drivers, programming languages), which can be funded and supported by universities, Governments etc, I am of the strong opinion that everything else should go closed source.
People with that perspective shouldn't have been doing open source in the first place. AI isn't hurting people sharing things, only people who are pretending to share but actually indirectly selling things.
There is no one in this World who will do things purely for altruistic purposes. Even if not for money, it would be for something intangible that ingratiates the Self (fame for example).
I can't find a single example of a software developer who has put out software purely for some altruistic purpose without any returns on that investment (direct or indirect).
Building a sustainable business model was a great way to justify open source. Not anymore.
really surprised tailwind didn't get ahead of this by providing some sort of mcp interface and custom agent for designing design systems and autogenerating ui code directly based on the user's project. if it worked out of the box or with a few clicks via en extension, it would be a killer feature.
I don't like tailwind. However, I don't wish that to anyone.
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.
> 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?
I think in this case, just about everyone falls into the funnel. I think it's difficult to find a potential buyer of tailwind who doesn't visit the documentation.
>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.
Wow that is just, really tragic... AI continues to just decimate this industry. Everyday I'm happy that I am, and have been since about day 3, an AI-hater.
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.
Before you shame the creator over this, read the thread thoroughly. I don't know what the solution here is tbh.
Frankly, I haven't visited the tailwind page in over six months as well. The AI just does things. Clearly the upsell path for the company is not sustainable.
But I'm merely telling the truth. The fact that people don't like it doesn't change the fact that software engineers are largely replaceable with AI now.
We are seeing the second order effects now that people using AI are not buying software products anymore, leading to layoff of software engineers.
Maybe they don't, since CSS is the easiest to tap into in terms of programming. Database-driven software still heavily relies on seasoned engineers and cannot be messed with AI.
For something basic like CSS, it is true. Ask ChatGPT or Claude Code to come up with any Tailwind template, and it will spit out within seconds for free, and even integrate it into the project effortlessly. This approach does not apply to heavy software such as a comprehensive CRM or another type of CRUD platform.
> 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.
Then step aside as the maintainer of the project then and better yet, make something like Tailwind-foundation etc. which is truly open source. Go spend your time building your business, but you can't become the bottleneck and not do anything for something that has become so foundational for Web Dev.
I urge you to understand what he is going through, he started the project, made it available freely, as more effort was required he added a premium offering to keep the whole thing running and hire more help.
Please pause to think before coming to a rush judgement. How would you react if you had done exactly the things he had done, and you just had to lay off most of your team yesterday. We are humans and not robots, for all he has done, he has certainly earned the right to some times focus on what's affecting him first before he can focus on OSS.
Be Kind, we are all born billionaires with billions of "kindness tokens" in the bank, don't use them sparingly.
He gives a gift to the world and you’re telling him to just give it up because somebody did work nobody asked for and he doesn’t want it for his project
I use Tailwind for connecting dev machines across two continents and as a free user I think it's an amazing product. It breaks my heart to see people losing their jobs because there isn't enough revenue.
I can empathize with the founder too because I was kind of in their shoes last year. Had been laid off and nearly exhausted my savings but I was more worried about having to let go of folks I employed.
Tailwind was far ahead of its time in having an OSS business model overall friendly to users while still being able to fund development (Note: OSS projects like Minio, ScyllaDB and CockroachDB do a far more insidious "open core only", or "crazy licensing fees after x processes/users" , etc). It was great to see OSS succeed financially without ads or punishing users.
"Information should be free", sure, but lets not kid ourselves, these massive new AI companies are making themselves new gatekeepers with new artificial moats for themselves. Information is not federated / distributed anymore.
We need "GPL for AI" that restricts AI scrapers from performing content theft/repackaging.
Please don't fulminate or post flame bait on HN. This low-effort comment started just the kind of flamewar we're trying to avoid on HN. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Which of those are evolving at the rate of frameworks?
BTW I'm of the opinion that frontend tooling developers should actually try to contribute things to HTML and CSS instead of building "component libraries" on top of them.
If the native controls were good and if the browsers allowed using "uniformly styled" versions of them then there would be no good reason for such libraries to exist.
Your comments in this thread are terrible, all of them. You are part of the reason why working on open source projects is so hard for people who obviously want to do good in this world. Check Adam's work: his work has been a net positive for the OSS community. Go spread your poison and nasty comments elsewhere please.
As someone who paid for a lifetime license of Tailwind UI, unlike, I strongly suspect, simlevesque - I 100% agree with this. The negativity is completely uncalled for, please take this somewhere else and do some self-reflection.
> Go spread your poison and nasty comments elsewhere please.
I have been on HN since 2008, his comment is by far the worst encounter ever in my memory. The sense of entitlement, not only in one comment by literally every single one of them in this thread and despite all the explanation he still believes he is right.
And to top it off he manage to drag HTML and CSS standards into it.
I like how we recognize this necessity to our biology but commit everyone to Hunger Games-lite performative, fiat (by decree alone), economics due to lack of political action in the face of some walking dead politicians who can't get through a day or week without handfuls of pills, they're that pathetic.
We are a deeply unserious society.
Anyway; good luck going viral online, everyone. I got lucky, have had generational wealth in my back pocket since birth, am off the hook for you by our social norms. Hopefully it works out for you because I and the rest of us won't be engaged in political action on your behalf. Dance for the organ!
I think the part you're missing here is that the author here is under no requirement to accept changes to their project and everyone else is welcome to fork it if they disagree with choices made by the author.
The author did not in fact, make the project worse, all they did was not accept a change, and that is entirely different than making it worse.
Even those who stood to benefit from the change have not received a degraded experience in comparison to the current state of affairs, but the same experience as the current state of affairs, since no change occurred. It is truly within the author's rights to do this, in any case.
One should avoid a sense of entitlement to additional and ever-increasing quantities of free work when free work has already been done.
At what point did they make it _worse_? Tailwind didn't remove any existing functionality here. What they did was refuse to merge a PR while they're trying to figure out how to navigate a difficult financial problem, all while being fully transparent about what's going on, and saying that they're open to merging the PR if/when they manage to get things together.
This is very different from, say, the minio situation, where they were actively removing feature before finally closing development down entirely. Whether tailwind will end up going down this route, time will tell. But as of right now, I find this reading to be quite uncharitable.
It's not even funcationality to the library code, it's a PR to their docs. If you just want optimized docs for your LLM to consume, isn't that what [Context7](https://context7.com/websites/tailwindcss) already has? Why force this new responsibility to the maintainer.
You keep repeating that he makes his project worse – an active action – while in fact he did not do anything at all, he just refused to change something.
The answer to "how should free things make money" is to not make them free. Any counterexamples are very fortunate. I don't know why people insist on giving away things for free while they actually desire to make money from those things. If the thing is valuable enough, someone will pay for it. Else...not
Very sad to hear, I bought Tailwind UI years ago and although it was a lot more expensive than I wanted, I've appreciated the care and precision and highly recommend buying it (It's now called Tailwind Plus) even still (maybe even especially now).
Mad props to Adam for his honesty and transparency. Adam if you're reading, just know that the voices criticizing you are not the only voices out there. Thanks for all you've done to improve web development and I sincerely hope you can figure out a way to navigate the AI world, and all the best wishes.
Btw the Tailwind newsletter/email that goes out is genuinely useful as well, so I recommend signing up for that if you use Tailwind CSS at all.
Tailwind did a great job of building a fanbase. Even without LLMs I always thought they were on a collision course with market saturation, though. They generously gave lifetime access for a one-time payment, which was bound to run into problems as free alternatives became better and their core fanbase didn't have any reason to spend more money.
Their business model also missed the boat on the rise of Figma and similar tools. I can think back to a couple different projects where the web developers wanted to use Tailwind [Plus] components but the company had a process that started in Figma. It's hard to sell the designers on using someone else's component library when they have to redraw it in Figma anyway.
The lack of Figma integration or a first-party plugin was a huge bummer for me. I still use Tailwind almost religiously because it just clicked for me and I have been on enough projects with terrible SCSS organization that I want to leave that as far behind me as I can.
I do appreciate that even without an integration, it’s fairly easy to set up vim on one screen and figma on the other and be able to translate the css to TW without any issues or having to constantly look things up.
alternatively, Adam executed the superior pricing strategy. had he charged for recurring licenses, would fewer people have signed up? would his subscriptions also be drawing down?
i wouldn't have bought a sub, but i did pay for tailwind premium (and, frankly, didn't use it like i'd've hoped). however, it was a bit of a Kickstarter investment for me. i like Adam's persona, and was happy to see continued investment down this path.
as many a business knows, you need to bring new initiatives to the table over, or accept that your one product carries all your risk.
thank you for Tailwind, Adam.
Adam presented his case for the lifetime pricing model in this podcast episode in 2023:
https://hackersincorporated.com/episodes/lifetime-pricing-is...
I believe he succeeding in convincing Sam and Ryan to adopt lifetime pricing for their UI course at https://buildui.com/pricing. I've purchased Build UI, and it was an excellent product, but unfortunately it appears to be completely dead for at least a full year now.
Neither the unannounced death of Build UI nor this apparently financial catastrophe for Tailwind bode well for the prospects of lifetime pricing! Although the problem might be more related to the entire market segment (frontend programming and design courses) than to the particular pricing model.
If Build UI was still making content, they would keep getting sales. There are also other ways to implement a "pay once" model that is sustainable, but it involves designing a much more thought out product roadmap and gatekeeping features behind new major versions where you need to pay for an upgraded license.
Jetbrains has done this for decades now with great success and is the standard sales model for most freemium WordPress plugins. Heck, even Adobe had a similar model until they were convinced they could squeeze out even more profit by charging monthly and trapping customers into subscriptions with high cancellation fees (my words, not theirs).
> alternatively, Adam executed the superior pricing strategy.
I'm not saying it wasn't a good choice at the time.
The problem with lifetime licensing only appears down the road if a company doesn't find a way to expand their offerings.
If you opened a local gym with reasonably priced lifetime memberships you'd probably have an explosion of new customers. You'd then hit a wall where you've saturated the market, can't sell any more memberships, but you have to keep paying employees and rent.
>had he charged for recurring licenses, would fewer people have signed up? would his subscriptions also be drawing down?
History says yes, and no. Much easier to retain periodic payment on a few engaged businesses than to continually look for people willing to make a one time payment. Especially in professional software.
The premium model just doesn't work unless you stay very lean. Workers need to be continually paid, even if you make your entire audience happy once.
As a small business that started with a one-time/upgrade based pricing policy, and moved to a recurring policy, I don't think it is too late for tailwind to do so for future upgrades/improvements. I am saddened that they laid people off before trying. I understand doing that is a leap of faith/risk, but that is what you need to do.
The key thing they need to recognize is that some percentage of their customers are serious businesses that want them to continue developing/maintaining the software, and that these businesses will be supportive as long as the deal is the same for everyone (you can't ask them to pay out of the goodness of their hearts, as then they feel they will be taken advantage of by people who don't pay).
When we switched to a recurring pricing model, I thought it was going to be a disaster. In fact, I got an angry call from exactly one customer (who then remained a customer despite threatening to leave). I got subtly expressed approval/relief from many more.
The book "How to Sell at Margins Higher than Your Competitors" was helpful to me, and might be helpful here as well. The key is to realize that you want to sell to people who really value your product and will pay for it. You don't want to maximize volume, you want to maximize revenue x margin.
You already have an installed base of people who value your product enough to pay for it once, you just have to create a system that enables them to sustain the technology they value in order to get ongoing support/upgrades/fixes/etc. The people who are going to complain on hacker news about recurring pricing aren't the people you want as customers anyway.
If the majority of your customers don't value it that much, then you are pretty cooked. But you may as well find that out directly. If people really don't want to pay for the software, don't waste time creating it for them.
We made the switch about 20 years ago. Since that time, about 70% of our lifetime revenue has come from recurring payments. Had I not had the courage to make the switch, I would be writing now that the business has been an unsustainable mistake, but that would have been false.
>If the majority of your customers don't value it that much, then you are pretty cooked.
cries in gamedev
Sadly my options are to either sell a few thousand copies on pc and deal with complaints on how my game isn't an 80 hour long timesink, or go into mobile and employ all the dark patterns I hate about marketing.
> Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever.
This is from Adam but I also suspect the same. LLMs has a bias toward tailwind css. I had Claude/GLM multiple times try to add tailwind css classes even though the project doesn't have any tailwind packages/setup.
This is a business model issue rather than tailwind becoming irrelevant.
I'll piggyback on this to highlight Refactoring UI as well. It's an ebook by Adam and Steve, though I'm not sure if it's technically part of Tailwind Labs or not.
This book taught me so much about modern UI design. If you've ever tried building a component and thought to yourself, "hmm something about this looks off," you might benefit from this book.
These days some of the examples might be a little bit dated (fashions come and go), but the principles it teaches you are rock solid.
FWIW I found Practical UI [1] a more actionable book than Refactoring UI. Both are similar but I found it covered the material in a more accessible way.
1. https://www.practical-ui.com/
i've read it and retained nothing. I always wonder what people get out of these hyped things that i'm unable to see.
Did you read it cover to cover in one-(ish) sitting? I would argue it's more of a reference book that over time you can internalize into your own design language.
I think think tailwind ui was one of the better purchases I’ve made (web tech wise). Up there with the lifetime acf pro license.
This sucks to see but was pretty obvious when it became the go to framework for LLMs.
Tailwind Plus is great - I love the lifetime access, but I always wondered how sustainable that model was. Even without AI, how many of those memberships could they sell?
I thought the same, and yet on the other hand, how could they have done it differently? People don't want to pay a subscription just to write a DSL of CSS. Perhaps they could've done it per project like some companies, but I don't think it'd be as popular as their lifetime model. Ironic.
We can go back to how software was sold decades ago: you pay for version 1.0, and get bugfixes for the 1.x series. Then 2.0 is released, and if you want it, you pay again for the 2.x series. And so on.
I agree on not wanting a subscription for something like this. But I also acknowledge that if people are still doing work on something post-sale (beyond bugfixes for a pre-defined support period), I should maybe expect to have to pay for that continuing work.
MUI sells paid components paid monthly. Definitely doable for the paid product.
I'm not super familiar with tailwind plus, but I am familiar with MUI.
MUIs paid offerings are open-core, you pay for support and a couple of extra features.
Tailwind plus looks like paying for basic components (checkboxes, sidebars, buttons) and it doesn't even offer anything like DataGrid (free with mui).
> and it doesn't even offer anything like
Shows Tailwind was just too little too late.
I could never afford Tailwind UI but then again I don’t really use Tailwind. That said, as an open-source styling solution, they could be supported in other ways. A lot — and I really mean a lot — of websites are built with Tailwind, yet very few consider donating or buying what they have to offer.
Plenty of F/LOSS is in the same state: businesses extract all value they can from open-source, but put back nothing. That’s mining The Commons. LLMs are just accelerating this trend.
It’s never gonna work in the long run. Let’s go back to writing everything in house then, since we’re 100x more productive and don’t have to pay a dime for other people’s work.
My current take is that if you start an open-source project now, you should go full AGPL (or similar copyleft license), and require a CLA for contributors.
If your thing ends up actually good you now have a defence against exploitation, and a way to generate income reliably (by selling the code under a different license). afaik, organisations like the FSF even endorse this.
AGPL is my first choice of license, but its efficacy does not necessarily come from its teeth, but from the aversion legal departments have towards the license. It's similar to how the GPL used to be, or still is, treated. Along with compatibility with other AGPL projects, that's the reason I use the license.
There are situations that the AGPL does not cover that could be considered leeching from the commons.
I think we need stronger licensing, and binding contracts that forfeit code recipients' right to fair use in order to hinder LLM laundering, along with development platforms that leverage both to limit exploitation of the commons.
I agree, I'm quite curious on what feelings are about still putting it in a public GitHub repo?
AI models will train on your codebase, unethical actors will still take it and not pay. Others can give the .zip to Claude and ask it to reimplement it in a way that isn't license infringement. I think it really turns open source upside down. Is this a risk worth taking or best to just make getting the source something that's a .zip on a website which the models realistically won't train on.
Or maybe ask yourself why are you doing open source in the first place?
AI training on your code is success if you care about your code being genuinely helpful to others. It's a problem only if you're trying to make money or personal reputation, and abusing open source as a vector for it.
Just to add to this. Open source for money has been a dead end for a long time, except for the (increasingly rare) situations where people accidentally convert their open source _contributions_ into employment (I accidentally did this back in 2015). Open source for recognition/reputation makes a bit more sense, but it is also becoming increasingly rare. LLMs are super-charging the extinction, but this was also observable in 2021, when I wrote this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29714929 .
Even before LLMs, I have seen people (shamelessly) re-implement code from open source project A into open source project B, without attribution (IIRC, a GPL C++ project [no hate, I use C++ too these days] basically copied the very distinctive AVL Tree implementation of a CDDL C project -- this is a licensing violation _and_ plagiarism, and it effectively writes the C project out of history. When asked about this, various colleagues[1], just shrugged their shoulders, and went on about their lives.). LLMs now make this behavior undetectable _and_ scalable.
If we want strong copyright protections for open source, we may need to start writing _literate_ programs (i.e. the Knuthian paradigm, which I am quite fond of). But that probably will not happen, because most programmers are bad at writing (because they hate it, and would rather outsource it to an LLM). The more likely alternative, is that people will just stop writing open source code (I basically stopped publishing my repos when the phrase "Big Tech" became common in 2018; Amazon in particular would create hosted versions of projects without contributing anything back -- if the authors were lucky they would be given the magnanimous opportunity to labor at Amazon, which is like inventing dynamite and being granted the privilege of laboring in the mines).
The fact is, if we want recognition, we need to sing each others' praises, instead hoping that someone will look at a version control history. We need to be story-tellers, historians, and archivists. Where is my generation's Jargon File?
[1]: Not co-worker, which is someone who shares an employer, but colleague, which is someone who shares a profession.
That's a big reason why FOSS is going to crumble. If AI succeeds and decimates the tech labor industry, people won't have the luxury to "code for fun". Life isn't a bunch of comfy programmers working on stuff in their spare time anymore.
We already see a component of this with art, but art actually needs to be displayed unlike code to show its vslue. So they adapt. Tools to keep the machine from training on their work, or more movements into work that is much harder to train on (a 2d image of a 3d model does the job and the model can be shared off the internet). Programming will follow a similar course; the remaining few become mercenaries and need to protect their IP themselves.
I'd like to contribute to open source to help and empower people.
Your environmental mission feels moot if you do a lot to help with greenhouse emissions and then proceed to also dump all the waste in the ocean. Your mission is "accomplished" by your hands and you are recognized as a champion. but morally you feel like you took a step back and became the evil you sought to address.
Now apply that mentality to someone in FOSS who sees their work go into a trillion dollar industry seeking to remove labor as a concept from it, and the rest of society. Even of you are independently wealthy and never needed to make money to get by, you feel like your mission has failed. Even if people give you a pat on your back for the software you made.
> abusing open source as a vector for it
It seems like you are very against open source not being an altruistic endeavor. Or that you should not make money with an open source project. I would like to challenge you on that.
Would you say that the Linux Foundation is a net positive on the software ecosystem? How about big open source projects like curl or QGIS? How about mattermost or nextcloud? All of these have full-time employees working on them (The Linux Foundation generated almost 300 million USD of gross revenue in 2024).
I would argue that good monetization is paramount to a healthy open source ecosystem.
Both can be true:
- AI training on your code is success
- AI undermining the sustainability of your project by reducing funding is an issue
Also, I see you haven't changed your mind much on the training LLMs being one of the major benefits of open source since the last discussion we had ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44155746#44156782
>Or maybe ask yourself why are you doing open source in the first place?
I, like everyone started work on OSS because it's fun. The problem comes when your project gets popular - either you try to make it your job or you abandon the project, because at a certain point it becomes like an unpaid job with really demanding customers.
That makes sense but doesn't answer "why do open source" though. In fact, it only shows that there is little incentive to pursue a serious open-source project and just stick to hobby projects while ackowledging it'll never go anywhere. I struggle to answer that myself.
Lol, I never in a million years expected my project to get 100 users never mind the tens of thousands it now has. Sometimes others make the decision for you ;) it's still your baby though.
> businesses extract all value they can from open-source, but put back nothing
This has always been the case. Sometimes they give back by opening one or more of their components. Other times they don't. I don't see it as a problem. It doesn't usually detract from what's already published.
In cases where it would detract, simply use an appropriate license to curb the behavior.
> LLMs are just accelerating this trend.
LLMs might not prove sufficiently capable to meaningfully impact this dynamic.
Alternatively, if they achieve that level then I think they will accomplish the long stated goal of FOSS by enabling anyone to translate constraints from natural language into code. If I could simply list off behaviors of existing software and get a reliable reproduction I think that would largely obsolete worrying about software licenses.
I realize we're nowhere near that point yet, and also that reality is more complex than I'm accounting for there. But my point is that I figure either LLMs disrupt the status quo and we see benefits from it or alternatively that business as usual continues with some shiny new tools.
>In cases where it would detract, simply use an appropriate license to curb the behavior.
I think it's a bit too late for Tailwind to do that.
>But my point is that I figure either LLMs disrupt the status quo and we see benefits from it
Who's "we"? The only we here will be tech billionaires. We get shiny tools and no job. Is that a good trade-off?
>Plenty of F/LOSS is in the same state: businesses extract all value they can from open-source, but put back nothing. That’s mining The Commons.
As incentivized by temporarily-free licenses.
As a question regarding Tailwind Plus, we / I exclusively use Angular but the templates are all React / Vue / plain HTML.
Are these components mostly just the HTML styling which would then be easily used in Angular as well, or would it be too much of a hassle to adopt to Angular?
Are you referring to signing up for the blog[1] email or something else? It was last updated July 25, 2025.
[1]: https://tailwindcss.com/blog
Referring to TFA (couple of comments on the issue).
https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
I think they mean where does one sign up to this newsletter.
I'm knee-deep in the tech newsletter niche and I've never seen an official Tailwind newsletter. The only one I subscribe to is a small, unofficial weekly newsletter by Vivian Guillen:
https://tailwindweekly.com/
The only problem is that it seems to have stopped sending in October.
> Btw the Tailwind newsletter/email that goes out is genuinely useful as well, so I recommend signing up for that if you use Tailwind CSS at all.
What is the signup link? I googled a bit but couldn't find it.
I think it's https://tailwindcss.com/blog
What most don’t realize is that this will happen to most businesses in all categories as more people rely on ChatGPT and Claude for discovery.
No discovery - no business.
And same with ads.if OpenAI decides not to add ads - prepare for even faster business consolidation. Those businesses preferred by llms will exponentially grow, others will quickly go out of business
> No discovery - no business.
I do SEO as a side gig to my 9-5 as a developer. All four of my freelance companies I work with have seen their traffic drop up to 40% since LLM's have effectively taken over and people are using search engines less and less.
We've had to pivot to short form social media advertising which seems to be closing the gap whereas before the majority of our leads were coming from organic search and being ranked high in their respective industries. It certainly takes more effort to craft a script, film it, edit it to add text overlays, animations and catchy effects, but its showing me its being effective in the leads we're generating.
I'm not sure if this is a sort of generational thing back when my parents were so engrained to use the yellow pages and then that stopped once the internet got into the advertising business - but it feels like a similar transition is taking place again.
As many have already told me, "Ignore AI at your peril"
Same where I work for 30% on some regions and for those where they put money only saw a minimum increase.
I honestly think the company is run by some good folks that are really trying to do some positive impact. They refuse so all sorts of bs ad-tracking gray area stuff, yet, people don't give a dime.
We caught over and over anthropic and others using shade tactics to bypass bot protection. They get the content, plagiarise it and contribute absolute nothing back. For weeks, openai was crawling our resources on DDOS levels of traffic.
F them. They just are just stealing and making businesses fail. This will be a catastrophe for many but yet, people think there is no relation.
The real question is, have your actual qualified leads decreased?
So much traffic is bogus or looking for something adjacent to what they land on that I'm not entirely convinced AI is at fault here.
It very well could be, but I'd love to see a real deep dive rather than potential coincidence.
>> The real question is, have your actual qualified leads decreased?
Yes.
>> So much traffic is bogus or looking for something adjacent to what they land on that I'm not entirely convinced AI is at fault here.
When I was reviewing our analytics, I noticed a huge uptick in traffic from IP addresses in Sigapore and Beijing. This coincided with spikes from Linux OS traffic that was higher than desktop and iOS traffic which has always been the two highest OS's for our traffic. Add in a huge spike in direct traffic all pointed in one direction - AI bots and crawlers.
If you can identify scraping bots, can’t you just serve them pages and pages of Lor Ipsum text
Not every human visits to buy either.
The real signal is conversions. If the percentage of people who visit and then buy / sign up remains constant, while traffic goes down, you can conclude LLMs are part of the cause.
OTOH if traffic goes down but conversions goes up in percentage, then it's hard to say LLMs are having a negative consequence.
I'm not sure if this is comparable to the yellow pages vs the internet.
Google became profitable in 2001 whereas OpenAI et al are still operating at a huge loss. Even with ads it's not clear whether LLMs can be profitable unless they increase prices significantly.
Google was not profitable until they rolled out ads, either.
The scope of use of AI assistants in people's lives are significantly higher than google search, imo. People use it in far more scenarios already than just information retrieval. That's why some are betting there's a chance it's more valuable than present-day google search.
IIRC Google had no monetization at all until ads. Even then the cost of providing search with ads is orders of magnitude lower compared to running LLMs.
They made money by licensing their search technology to other sites, as well as selling physical search appliances for businesses. They were considered by some to be struggling to find a way to monetise well.
Computational cost is indeed higher than search (though remember, search has been heavily optimised for many years!), but search and web companies were one of the lowest cost, highest-margin businesses in human existence. Many higher-cost businesses have been supported by ads.
>Many higher-cost businesses have been supported by ads.
Not at the scale of a trillion dollars, though. You can't make that kind of money back with eyeballs. You either need government subsidies or insane vertical integration. And if your program threatens to neuter the GDP of a country, I don't know how long subsidies will last. At least not in a democracy. People are so mad about immigrants taking jobs, and this would be 10 times worse (and bipartisan, eventually).
Even then: we're quickly hitting a resource wall as well. Are we really going to go to war just so we can have some dude generate AI sheep memes? Something's got to give.
It's not only the computational cost though. Hardware requirements are much higher and GPUs need to be replaced every 2-3 years. Plus model training expenses which are considerable. I imagine it's easily 100x more expensive and the margins (if there's ever any profit) will be very low.
OpenAI could be profitable (easily) if it stopped training new models. Whether they will make that choice or not, who knows.
That would be short-termist though. So, quite unlikely. In my usage (code) they are still better than everything else I have tried. Point being that I am looking predominantly for the one llm that gives me the best code output. If they risk losing that advantage for immediate profit, guess I will cancel like I did for claude... (I still got a gemini subscription, for some reason it has a good UI, fast for common non technical requests).
Seems to have been my pattern of behavior with all these tools.
>If they risk losing that advantage for immediate profit, guess I will cancel
We call that "when the bubble pops". Can't wait.
Google and Anthropic probably won't stop training though.
Perhaps SEO will become a business to churn out large amount of digestable text with friendly robot.txt and hoping the next AI model learns it? This seem to be the solution, just having a slightly longer turn around time.
> as more people rely on ChatGPT and Claude for discovery
In my limited web dev experience with these tools, they suggest and push Tailwind CSS very often when asked for advice.
The Tailwind company wasn't selling that, though. They were selling premium packages of components, templates, and themes. The demand for that type of material has dropped off significantly now that you can get an LLM to do a moderately good job of making common layouts and components. Then you can adjust them yourself until they're exactly what you want.
Underscoring the parent comment and adding to it: watching technologists on a site called Hacker News cheer on the centralization of power is really something.
There's nothing cheerful in that comment, it describes a danger that inexorably draws nearer and nearer.
My post was meant to underscore the parent’s post, not argue with it.
Maybe he meant this in more general way. Or this is how did read this.
Last 3 years of discourse in a nutshell. Sinclair's quote rings true once again... Just a shame people don't think of the long term cost to this trend chasing.
But then again, it wouldn't be a trend if people thought long term, would it?
I don't think any power is as centralized as Google is to search about 10 years ago? Or Facebook is to social media in the same time frame? What has changed other than the players?
The dynamics. Discovery benefits all parties, and the middle man can take a cut in several ways (Google chose ads). The middleman never had to open up but that tube spread value instead of extracting it (at least, until they started renting seeking with the tube).
Being the one stop knowledge hubs that sucks from everyone else only benefits the leech long term.
Google still offered a path for business/individuals that allowed both sides to profit immensely via advertising. Google also guided people to sources of information once you look past the ads.
With the AI companies, they suck up all freely available and proprietary information, hide the sources, and give information away to consumers for mostly free.
I think this phase of centralising power is part of the never-ending cycle of centralisation and distribution - mainframes -> PCs -> websites -> apps, and so on round we go. We will get a "data centres -> Personal LLMs" phase of the cycle which distributes it again.
So my hope is that LLMs become local in a few years.
We've been sitting around 16Gb of RAM on a laptop for 10-15 years now, not because RAM is too expensive or difficult to make, but because there's been no need for more than that for the average user. We could get "normal" laptop RAM up to 16Tb in a few years if there was commercial demand for it.
We have processor architectures that are suitable for running LLMS better/faster/efficiently. We could include those in a standard laptop if there was commercial demand for it.
Tokens are getting cheaper, dramatically, and will continue to do so. But we have an upper limit on LLM training complexity (we only have so much Internet data to train them on). Eventually the race between LLM complexity and processing speed will run out, and probably with processing speed as the winner.
So my hope is that our laptops change, that they include a personally-adapted very capable LLM, run locally, and that we start to see a huge variety of LLMs available. I guess the closest analogy would be the OS's from "Her"; less typing, more talking, and something that is personalised, appearing to actually know the user, and run locally (which is important).
I don't see anything stopping Linux from doing this too (but I'm not working in this area so I can't say for sure).
Obviously we'll face the usual data thieves and surveillance capitalism along the way, but that's part of the process.
> most businesses in all categories as more people rely on ChatGPT and Claude for discovery
What about restaurants, transportation, construction, healthcare, or manufacturing?
Will those go out of business too?
The better question is how well they do in a world where you have to pay OpenAI to be included. A local restaurant can likely survive on local advertising, neighborhood traffic, etc. but I’d bet a lot of categories further consolidate to favor larger companies who can negotiate LLM placement deals.
So what you're saying is that LLMs will replace not only search but Google/Apple Maps as well?
As a user and customer, I see that as a good thing.
yeah this is so sad, I'm an early supporter of Tailwind since v1 and I also bought the tailwind UI as well to support them. I hope this era doesn't discourage the tailwind team or put them out of business
Early customer here too. Tailwind UI was one of my best purchases in the sense that it helped me learn and use Tailwind in the best way possible, by showing me, not telling me.
It was never sustainable as a product/business, as this pricing model requires constant growth. What I've seen along the way was a heavy pivot towards React (which left me wanting: I mostly use the Vue components & the HTML/JS components with Astro.js in the projects I work in) and even in the case of React, they haven't managed to arrive at a full, mature component library offering (while others have!).
TL;DR: I'd be struggling to justify it as a purchase for a new user now, even before factoring AI in.
Smells like unnecessary sycophancy: I grep'd Adam in every comment and every single. one. is positive and phrased like this.
I grew up on this site, from 20 year old dropout waiter in Buffalo to 37 year old ex-Googler. One of the things I'm noticing me reacting to the last year or two is a "putting on a pedestal" effect that's unnecessary.
I think context matters here. People are being kind to someone who just had to lay off most of their team because, despite their project’s popularity and success (maybe even because of it), a massive change in the ecosystem completely destroyed their business model.
I’ve never been a huge fan of using Tailwind personally, but I deeply appreciated that they were making a (mostly) non-enterprise FOSS model work in an interesting way. It’s a shame that it seems that’s likely dead in the water now.
Perhaps if you’d simply read the thread you would have also seen these comments, which don’t name Adam but are addressed to him:
> We can't make it easier to use our product because then fewer people will visit our website" is certainly a business strategy.
> You are telling your customers that getting money from them, is more important than providing a service to help them.
This is madness. Some stories actually have good guys. I don't know Adam directly, but we have plenty of second degree connections. I've benefited immensely from his work, have never heard anyone say a single negative thing about him, and I genuinely believe he's done more to push the web forward with Tailwind than the larger players have done (certainly more than Facebook did with React and Google has done with Angular/AMP/etc).
Reflexively assuming that unanimous positive sentiment towards someone is itself an indication of a problem is exactly the reason people are writing posts as recently as (double checks) _yesterday_ titled "65% of Hacker News Posts Have Negative Sentiment, and They Outperform" https://philippdubach.com/standalone/hn-sentiment/
No one said he isn’t a good guy. Just that it was weird to have 15 comments saying “ignore the haters you’re a good guy!”
The “madness” here was you replying as if I said he wasn’t.
I'll be sure to avoid you during a time of crisis...
May I humbly suggest taking a breath or two? It is extremely taxing mentally to select strangers to tell you don’t trust them in an imaginary crisis. (Especially ones on a tech discussion board! Especially just because they noted there were no negative comments and only fawning ones! Especially when you think fawning feels fine in a crisis!)
> 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.
Adam is simply trying to navigate this new reality, and he's being honest, so there's no need to criticize him.
Tools like Tailwind are one of the few cases where I totally believe it when the CEO says "we are cutting jobs because of AI".
Sucks that anytime you ask AI to generate a site for you Tailwind will have an impact on that.
And this is why AI coding will eventually degrade into a mess. Enjoy it while it lasts.
AI eats up users caring about $company which makes library, library degrades because nobody is paying, $company goes insolvent, library goes unmaintained and eventually defunct, AI still tries to use it.
Vibe coding with libraries is a fad that is destined to die.
Vibe coding your own libraries will result in million line codebases nobody understands.
Nothing about either is sustainable, it’s all optics and optics will come crashing down eventually.
That is one take and certainly possible and negative but I think people create libraries for different reasons.
There are people who will use AI (out of their own pocket for trivial costs) to build a library and maintain it simply out of the passion, ego, and perhaps some technical clout.
That's the same with OSS libraries in-general. Some are maintained at-cost, others are run like a business where the founders try to break even.
That's presuming libraries need companies backing them to continue to work. That's a bad state of things in the first place.
That's presuming humans don't need money to feed themselves and continue to work.
That's neither here, nor there.
AI is destined to destroy software industry, but not itself.
Software does not decay by itself (it's literally the whole point of using digital media over analog). Libraries do not "degrade". "Bit rot" is an illusion, a fictitious force like centrifugal force in Newtonian dynamics, representing changes that happen not to a program, but to everything else around it.
The current degree of churn in webshit ecosystem (whose anti-patterns are increasingly seeping in and infecting other software ecosystems) is not a natural state of things. Reducing churn won't kill existing software - on the contrary, it'll just let it continue to work without changes.
You’re mostly right, libraries thrive by adapting to their surroundings. Mostly.
But after just months of being unmaintained, even the best libraries start to rot away due to bugs and vulnerabilities going unfixed. Users, AI included, will start applying workarounds and mitigations, and the rot spreads to the applications (or libraries) they maintain.
Unmaintained software is entropy, and entropy is infectious. Eventually, entire ecosystems will succumb to it, even if some life forms continue living in the hazardous wasteland.
“Bit rot is a myth” is junior dev bro pedantry.
Bit rot isn’t some mystical decay, it’s dependency drift: APIs change, platforms evolve, security assumptions expire, build chains break. Software survives because people continuously adapt it to a moving substrate.
Reducing churn is good. Pretending maintenance disappears is fantasy. Software doesn’t decay in isolation, it decays relative to everything it depends on. And it sounds like you don’t know anything about Newtonian dynamics either.
I struggle to fully grasp everything you postulate. Please help me understand.
Your original point was that libraries do not need companies behind them. From what you have written here a reason for that is that (web) libraries mostly create churn by introducing constant changes. What I think you follow from that, is that those libraries aren't necessary and that "freezing" everything would not do any harm to the state of web development but would do good by decreasing churn of constantly updating to the newest state.
What I struggle to understand is (1) how does AI fit into this? And (2) Why do you think there is so much development happening in that space creating all the churn you mention? At this point in time all of this development is still mostly created by humans which are likely paid for what they do. Who pays them and why?
Until you want a feature that the software doesn't have.
I hear you about damning shitty code which the web industry as a whole is quite responsible for, but I don't see how them dying outright is better.
I don't see enough people talking about this side of things. Couldn't agree more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Given that countries/cities can go into this state for a very long time without resolution, I am not quite optimistic.
Yeah, this pattern happens all the time:
1. Plant new trees,
2. Eat fruit from trees, get used to delicious fruit,
3. Planting trees hard, easier to wring out more juice from existing fruit,
4. Forget how to maintain trees, trees die, go to 1.
We are entering stage 3.
It's just interesting because most of the talk is programmers talking about AI taking their job by replacing them not taking their job because it's taking away revenue from the business.
Reminds me of the problem with Google & their rich results which wiped out and continues to wipe out blogs who rely on people actually visiting their site vs. getting the information they seek without leaving Google.
I expect a lot of business disruption because of AI. Agree it's not the same as employee replacement, but it adds to the sort of fog of war around what effect AI is really having.
I suppose in the limit that’s likely to be the fate of all other businesses.
Anything open source will be turned against its authors and against ICs.
We thought it would give us freedom, but all of the advantage will accrue to the hyperscalers.
If we don't build open source infra that is owned by everyone, we'll be owned by industrial giants and left with a thin crust that is barely ours. (This seems like such a far-fetched "Kumbaya, My Lord" type of wishful thinking, that it's a joke that I'm even suggesting this is possible.)
Tech is about to cease being ours.
I really like AI models, but I hate monopolies. Especially ones that treat us like cattle and depopulate the last vestiges of ownership and public commons.
it's a real shame no one warned us this would happen when a bunch of corporatists and opportunists wrested the term "open source" from the advocates of true freedom in the late '90s.
https://www.fsf.org/
But there was money to be made and the friends you thought were friends were just mercenaries with a shiv in their hand.
Also the FSF squandered its opportunity being RMS’ hobby / support organization and skipped a lot of important discussions, even before the skeevy behavior they’d been ignoring came to light. I used to donate in the 90s but … really feels like that was just flushing cash.
If my timelines are correct, the FSF ousted RMS before ChatGPT came out.
They actually re-appointed him to the board in 2021, also before ChatGPT came out: https://www.fsf.org/news/statement-of-fsf-board-on-election-...
ChatGPT came into the picture long after the open source issues we’re talking about were apparent. AI companies are making it even worse but solid advocacy in the 2010s or 2000s would’ve been helpful.
The FSF also ignored the SaaS revolution. They put out the AGPL but did not really market it or convert FSF projects to it.
Open source ended up disrupting the software profession; just not in the way people thought it would.
If we didn't have open source arguably developers would be more secure, way more secure, in the face of AI.
I'm just not sure how to connect this rhetoric to the facts of the source link, where a hobbyist attempted to extend some source-available code to support a new technology, and the CEO of the for-profit company who owns the license said he's not allowed to for business reasons.
You can be and I am sympathetic towards the CEO! I wouldn't accept a PR for cannibalize_my_revenue.txt either. But if we insist on analyzing the issue according to the categories you're describing, it seems undeniable that the CEO is a corporatist, and that he put an unfree license on his repository to stop people from freely modifying or redistributing it.
There were more-or-less two original spheres of OSS. There were the academics who were too "pure" and holier than thou for everyone else, and then there were commercial FOSS that OS'ed because something already reached its reasonable lifetime potential and it was cool to give away the plans to a cult classic to let it live on in some other mostly permanent, mostly released form. When OSS becomes a mindless pattern, an absolute prerequisite to investment, and/or ceases to be released without regret, resentment, and/or strings attached, then it's not cool anymore and becomes toxic.
> owned by everyone
There's no such thing. Even if on paper "everyone" has an ownership share, in practice it's going to be a relatively small number of people who actually exercise all the functions of ownership. The idea that "everyone" can somehow collectively "own" anything is a pipe dream. Ownership in practice is control--whoever controls it owns it. "Everyone" can't control anything.
> I really like AI models, but I hate monopolies. Especially ones that treat us like cattle and depopulate the last vestiges of ownership and public commons.
I would dispute whether the tech giants are "monopolies", since there's still competition between them, but that's a minor point. I agree with you that they treat individual coders like cattle--but that's because they can: because, from their standpoint, individual coders are commodities. And if automated tools, including AI models, are cheaper commodities that, from their standpoint, can do the same job, that's what they'll use. And if the end result is that whatever they're selling as end products becomes cheaper for the same functionality, then economically speaking, that's an improvement--we as coders might not like it, but we as customers are better off because things we want are cheaper.
So I'm not sure it's a consistent position to "really like AI models" but also not want the tech giants to treat you like cattle. The two things go together.
> we as customers are better off because things we want are cheaper
Why privilege that side of the equation over "we as workers"? Being a customer isn't all there is to life. I happen to spend quite a bit more time working than shopping.
> Why privilege that side of the equation
It's not a matter of "privilege". It's simple economics: if the same functionality can be provided more cheaply, that's a gain to everyone. The gain to customers is the most obvious gain, and it's what I focused on in my previous post--but it's also a gain to producers, because it frees up resources to produce other things of value. But the producers have to be willing to change how they make use of resources in order to take advantage of those opportunities.
> I happen to spend quite a bit more time working than shopping.
Then you should be a lot more worried about AI providing the same functionality you were providing as a coder, but more cheaply--because that makes you, or at least you as a coder providing that functionality, a commodity that's no longer worth its cost. So if you want to avoid being commoditized and treated like cattle, you have to change what you produce to something that AI can't do more cheaply than you can.
IMO, the only ethical and legal way to build LLMs on the entire output of all human creativity, that still respects rights and won't lead to feudalism, is conforming to the actual legal requirements of fair use that are being ignored.
According to fair use doctrine, research models would be okay. Models used in education would be okay. Models used for public betterment by the government would be okay, etc
Pie in the sky version would be that models, their output and the infrastructure they run on would be held in a public trust for everyone's benefit. They wouldn't exist without consuming all of the public's intellectual and creative labor and property, therefore they should belong to the public, for the public.
> Tech is about to cease being ours.
On the hardware side, it's bad, as well. Remote attestation is here, and the frog is just about boiled when it comes to the idea of a somewhat open and compatible PC as the platform for general computing.
It was kinda cool while it lasted, glad I got to see the early internet, but it wasn't worth it to basically sign away for my great grandchildren to be peasants or belong to some rich kid's harem.
They commoditized their complement to their hardware/infra, that being software. Good for them and the value of tech will shift to what is still scarce relatively.
Stop enabling corporations' theft and exploitation.
Don't FOSS by default, unionize, embrace solidarity, and form worker-owned co-ops that aren't run by craven/unrealistic/non-business founders if you want any sort of stability.
It does give us freedom. In fact, it arguably gives more people freedom, as non-programmers can create now simple tools to help themselves. I really don't see any way that it reduces our freedom.
Some of the critics in the thread are… odious. I’ve written down some of the GH handles, because if I’m ever hiring again, I wanna make sure I’d never hire some of these folks.
I don’t understand how someone can display such contempt towards the maintainer of a thing they’ve used for free.
> I’ve written down some of the GH handles, because if I’m ever hiring again, I wanna make sure I’d never hire some of these folks.
You can block accounts on GitHub and add a note as to why. Might be simpler and more accessible later on than a random TXT (plus, it probably updates if they change their username).
Note that blocking also means they can’t contribute to your repos. Which you may not care about anyway.
Thank you, that’s indeed much cleverer. Unfortunately I’ve closed my account this year, trying to put my money where my mouth is and not furthering the goals of GitHub or Microsoft.
What's wrong with microsoft and github? I can't lie, between this comment and the "writing down people's github handles out of spite just in case" you are coming off as someone with a lot of grievances.
> What's wrong with microsoft and github?
Pull up a chair. This is going to take while...
I deleted my GitHub for the same reasons.
Understandable, but I’m definitely a lot less bitter than it seems.
Well, Microsoft is vile. I won’t expand because there’s plenty online on the topic. And I don’t like their acquisition of GitHub, which has turned into an ecosystem for laundering open-source code through LLMs.
"Sorry, we cannot give you the job because even though you're qualified and passed our interviews, you were such a meano to Adam! That is a no-go at this organization"
Who trusted you with hiring
People get rejected from companies based on nothing but vibes of personality fit every day.
Half the people in that thread have this mentality that just using tailwind is enough contribution, so therefore GiVe mY oPuS MoRe InFo
I thought we learned years ago that exposure doesn't keep the lights on. That mentality is nothing but entitlement
One comment stated that "it's not our fault the founder was unable to manage his finances to pay his people" well if open source worked the way people try to act like it does, he shouldn't have to pay anyone, right? But here we are
That's part of a personality fit.
Not wanting to hire a dick who can't keep a cool head and give constructive feedback is perfectly reasonable.
You can use a product and still be critical, especially when layoffs happen, truth is there are a lot of things we don't know about their finances – tailwind definitely is successful by any metrics, they have corporate sponsors that alone give them a healthy MRR (I count at least $100k/month from the sponsors page alone)
I sympathise that it sucks having to fire people, been there. But it sucks more to get fired.
Nice, nothing like a little personal bias to inject into an interview process. If you can't handle criticism and you're just looking for sycophants, you're probably not the type of employer or hiring manager most people want to work for anyway.
Oh, it’s not the criticism. It’s the hatred, the vile attacks on open-source maintainers. I wouldn’t want to work with people like that, would you?
insert "First time?" meme
I am one of those critics, but I never used Tailwind. A layoff of that magnitude is horrific, but if what they are describing as their business model is true, they really really need to rethink it. I wonder what the size of their marketing team is like, and if they were involved in the layoffs. Seems like they need some help there. I found the "downvote" spam in that thread, for reasonable posts, to be quite off-putting, and that led me to my remarks.
The 75% of the team is 3 out of 4 developers. There are no marketing.
Left are the three owners of tailwind, one engineer and one ops+customer service + partner sails person.
Tailwind, not Tailscale.
thanks :D
I wrote down your handle, so if you are ever hiring, I will be able to skip your toxic place.
If there's anything AI coding is good at, it's writing react components and tailwind css.
I am not 100% sure about that - I usually find AI written CSS to be slightly visually flawed and almost always logically flawed.
The way you write websites that actually work imo, is you understand how your chosen CSS layout engine works roughly, and try to avoid switching between layout modes - traditional to flexbox to grid to flexbox again down the tree can drive the most brillant devs utterly mad .
But seriously, after a certain complexity threshold, it becomes impossible to tell what's going on and why.
And if you don't think about it in advance, it's very easy to reach that threshold, especially if you don't get to write the whole page from scratch, but have to build on the work of others.
AI (and many frontend devs) do write-only CSS - they add classes until the code they write looks right.
But code like that tends to fall apart under multiple resolutions, browsers, screen sizes, devices etc.
I am not a frontend dev, and came pretty late to the frontend party. That said I felt that anything that obscures the raw CSS makes it much harder to deliver UI that works right, as it peppers hidden side effects across your code.
That's why I wasn't too keen on CSS frameworks like Tailwind - I found that when writing frontend code the writing part takes up the minority of the time, it's producing a well thought out layout flow is what is actually the biggest sink of time and effort.
That said, I'm not a frontend dev, and I'm to too good at CSS - but not horrible either - so I defer to the judgement of others who are pros at this, its just my opinion and experience.
> I usually find AI written CSS to be slightly visually flawed and almost always logically flawed.
Funny, this also qualifies most of the _human_ written CSS I've seen. !important all the things!
It is funny how things that are hard for humans are also hard for LLMs
That’s because LLMs are just databases of (mostly stolen) human data.
If you want a bunch of tailwind class slop, then yes. Otherwise, A lot of context engineering is needed if you want it to write modular tailwind components properly for large projects where consistency is important.
> Otherwise, A lot of context engineering is needed if you want
I am not seeing that. I have a few AI-assisted projects using tailwind and scrolling through it now 99% of it looks... completely modern and professional. I had previously asked it to "completely refactor, a rewrite if needed, all the tailwind/css/app styles. ensure visual and code consistency across pages".
Modern coding tools add tons of their own content, but none of the above was "a lot of context engineering".
> completely modern and professional
And it looks completely the same, so much so that people can tell it's AI generated now simply due to the gradient, among other design choices LLMs seem to make by default: https://prg.sh/ramblings/Why-Your-AI-Keeps-Building-the-Same...
Isn't that an article about using a frontend aesthetics prompt in order to avoid the AI tells? A lot of the with-aesthetics pages look pretty good imo.
Claude's frontend design skill is an interesting read
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...
It's describing the problem and also giving a solution. The problem of vibe coded sites all looking the same is very real however, if you don't consciously and actively guide the LLM towards being different, as described in the article.
Absolutely, but the AI era seems to have lowered the bar for what's considered passable code. Slop works for most projects.
And design too. I shouldn’t be able to tell Claude designed your site/app, but it is too often the case. Good taste still remains an advantage thankfully.
Agreed. Also I could not imagine being in his shoes, it must be heartbreaking seeing all his work burn like this.
It is "progress" when tech bros displace traditional workers, but it is "heartbreaking" when a tech bro gets displaced by other tech bros.
Whats the 2026 version of "you should learn to code"?
There’s many people who dislike both of those things. Please think before you write
"You should learn how to vibecode and ship whatever works enough, as fast as possible, to get bought for a wildly disconnected from fundamentals valuation." This may sound flippant, or low quality, but it I assure that it is not intended to be. It is derived from observations of the current tech macro. Quality does not appear to matter, ethics do not appear to matter, sustainability and engineering rigor do not appear to matter; it appears that all that matters is "Start up. Cash in. Sell out. Bro down."
I would love to be proven wrong, truly, because this is a path to the death of craftsmanship, deep knowledge, and to some extent, curiosity, in the domain.
It satisfies the dream of a business with no people. As Doctorow illustrates it, like plugging the Fisher-Price steering wheel into the drive train of the business.
> Quality does not appear to matter, ethics do not appear to matter, sustainability and engineering rigor do not appear to matter
I don't know why people keep saying this, as if quality, ethics and sustainability mattered before and every developer was a pure artisan of their craft. In reality, having been in many companies and looking at their codebases, it has always been slop, with very few exceptions.
Yeah, no kidding. I was alive 20 years ago, this isn't like talking about the 1800s, what exactly was different with the craftsmanship and ethics back then?
You might be right but even then this feels fundamentally really immoral
The sell out is the biggest fundamental issue in this equation because it is the part of the equation which doesn't reward Quality,ethics,sustainability and engineering rigor overall.
Welcome to the AI bubble fueling it.
I genuinely don't know but I think AI prototyping/using it for personal use cases are fine but when we completely start to vibecode, if your project is complex enough, you will reach problems and all the other factors/researches point out. In my opinion, for longevity, vibecoding is not the deal.
But as you said, longevity isnt rewarded. I really hate how the system has become of just selling businesses.
I feel like as such the businesses who are truly passionate about their product (because they faced the problems themselves or are heavily interested in it/passionate about it) might win "long term"
To me trust feels the biggest resource in this day and age. Information era has now been sloppified. Trust is what matters now.
I don't know but I will take the slow but overall steady route. There is a sense of commitment with human trust which I feel would set apart businesses and I will try to create side projects with that initiative
One of the ways I feel like acheiving it while still getting the shipfast aspect is that I just build things for myself, vibe coding in this case can help and I launch it for public, if there is interest in any product or smth, I will try to respond and try to add feedbacks fast (perhaps still using vibecoding) but in long term, I try to promise to keep the code lean (usually approx 2-3k lines of code at max) and then if I see prospect and interest about the idea, I have tried to think that a middle way is either rewriting or completely understanding AI generated code to its core and having a very restrictive AI access afterwards any product feels good and then the trust aspect of things can be gained.
I don't know too much about side hustles. I just build things for myself in whatever I want mostly I must admit using vibe code and end up usually sharing it online/deploying it for others as well if it might help.
You should learn to vote for UBI?
UBI will turn Earth into the Earth of the Expanse. I truly believe it would be absolutely ruinous on man. Our psychology is just not built for that.
I disagree, the only real issue with UBI is the amount of inflation it will cause. Germany has something nearly approaching UBI and they are doing fine.
Would Germany's UBI work if there were no jobs at all?
Nobody knows, because we have never before had no jobs for any reason, let alone specifically due to all labour being fully automated.
That’s unproven, but suppose it’s true: what’s your alternative? If we are in fact facing widespread unemployment, what’s going to be better than UBI at avoiding societal collapse? Billionaires paying private armies to contain poor people is a straight-up sci-fi dystopia but even that depends on enough people having money to buy things from their companies.
If we truly hit the point where we have more people than jobs. That we hit AI improving at miraculous paces that we cant even reskill people. I think it would be better to essentially have make work programs. Have basic qualification programs where you are guaranteed a job. People need a purpose. Throw every person capable of getting an engineering or science degree into labs. Massively expand teaching, nurseing and medicine so there is extremely personal care just by the sheer numbers.
retraining programs are famously both failures and mostly absent for this sort of disruption.
displaced factory workers mostly drift into janitorial or cab driving sorts of work. Why would it be different for other sorts of workers?
This is so fucking dumb. I hate when software engineers try to solve problems. You are good at one thing, do that.
The rest of us will struggle without your help because that's what we been doing. We are literally struggling to fulfill our purposes because we have jobs.
TAX. THE. FUCKING. RICH.
Then use it to pay for services like healthcare and education so that everyone has a safety net and opportunity to thrive without just giving everyone enough cash so that they are incentivized to slack.
DDT has been banned, cigarettes are all but banned, leaded fuel has been banned. Nuclear energy has been banned in Germany.
The industry wanted all of that and did not get its way after some time. You can ban "AI", make companies respect copyright. You can do all sorts of things.
Since "AI" can only plagiarize, countries that do the above will have an edge (I'm not talking about military applications that can still be allowed or should be regulated like in treaties for nuclear weapons).
Maybe. Or maybe it'll turn it into something closer to Earth from Star Trek.
Maybe yours isn't.
The earth of the expanse is 1000 times better than any time in history.
The life of people on earth doesn't seem better than people now. For connected people it seems great, but for the average joe it seemed awful.
Did you read the expanse? The earth of the expanse is full of crime and destitution. People apply in the tens of thousands for every lottery slot of school or jobs. People just wallow in nothingness. The people fleet earth for mars and the belt just to have a basic sense of purpose.
If we are to just have UBI. Have basic sustenance for no effort, while we have unlimited entertainment and porn at our finger tips. It would be a disaster. I would literally we rather have make work programs.
I can't imagine how it could work internationally, when people can literally migrate between countries and countries ain't sharing resources for free
They can? How many times have you migrated? Try going from the Middle East or Africa to any developed country.
You are joking right? There were handred of thousands of people that did this in last ten years or so to EU.
Agreed, it's one of the only ways forward I can think of while still maintaining markets in some part of the economy...that is, if you care about the human condition at all. Plenty of these tech leaders seem to want to replace humanity though, so this will be an uphill battle.
It's a nice fantasy but completely contrary to human nature.
Glad to hear you've isolated the UBI-incompatibility (UBII) gene. Could you present your findings for the rest of us?
What is your alternative, when the price humans can sell their labor at dips below what is necessary for them to survive? All these takes about "UBI will demolish the human spirit" or whatever are just ridiculous when the alternative is "starve to death".
Just doing nothing isn't great for the "human spirit", but UBI doesn't mean people can't find their own goals to pursue. The idea of something where people are not longer required to work to survive is hard to accept since many people haven't seriously considered how they could meaning outside of their careers
I could ask every one of my coworkers what they would do and they would have a realistic answer.
I don't really have sympathy for people attached to their careers. They did that to themselves.
counterpoint : my father had realistic expectations for what he wanted to do post-retirement.
what actually happened was that he sat around purposeless because it turns out that the motivation of producing a paycheck or product was actually the reason he did things. He stopped showering, became depressed, and neglected his health.
And this isn't an uncommon reaction to the open-ended 'free-form' life post-retirement. Some people very realistically need to have some level of structure imposed on their life or otherwise be taught how to create that structure themselves. I think this will be a very real problem whenever UBI gets closer to reality.
I see two alternatives, one that people find new ways to do productive work with or in the presence of LLM, or massive social unrest, rebellion, war and/or starving to death, followed by a reset. I.e. the way human nature has responded to similar imbalances in the past.
So, you have no actual thoughts on this topic other than "UBI is bad" is what I hear.
My thoughts are that UBI is not compatible with human nature. It cannot work at societal scale. I'm not sure how I can state it more simply.
You were asked for alternatives, and said essentially "UBI bad, keep doing what we've been doing". Sorry, that seems lazy and uninteresting to me.
So is a compiler. Humanity is the conscious altering of nature.
be real it's just going to be slavery and murder of anyone who disagrees
Funded by an automation tax as proposed by Martin Ford. Not holding my breath on either count. We mustn't upset the 1,000 or so billionaires in this country in any way for they are wise and they are kind and only bad things will happen if we do.
But chin up, peasant, each and every one of us can dream of one day being a billionaire as well if only we act as wise and as kind as they do.
> But chin up, peasant, each and every one of us can dream of one day being a billionaire as well if only we act as wise and as kind as they do.
(I know this was written satirically) but this is a nice example of doublespeak and I immediately got reminded of it.
I wouldn't say that we have reached 1984 level, there is still some decentralization where you can get hosting and then self host from small vps providers as well etc.
Not that most people do such things tho. Internet is still heavily centralized but overall, there are still outlets of escape legally and you are able to sometimes even talk to vps provider owners themselves directly in some cases if they are small enough.
But still, each year although we get away from 1984 the year, we get near to 1984 the book.
As much as I am pro AI and I really am very pro AI, there is definitely an emperor's new AGI vibe amongst the tech bro and billionaire classes. I can only attribute it to a compulsive need to oversell everything and then deliver 25 to 50%, a state everyone is so used to now that if you try to be honest and make claims that state what you can really deliver, they will assume you can only deliver 25 to 50% of what you are claiming and therefore the guy promising twice as much gets the funding.
This makes me happy that I'm nearing retirement but that switch flipping is being delayed by my hourly rate going up for possessing forgotten knowledge. Sigh...
Everyone suggests UBI like this sort of thing is a massive hurricane and we just gotta take it on the chin.
Nah man, this stuff isn't happening anywhere else. We can simply say "No, you don't get to ruin the economy for your personal profit."
Well, here you said it; is it over now?
I'm confused, do you not know what "we" means?
Yes, I have no idea who's this magical "we" in your "We can simply". To me this seems like a textbook coordination problem leading to a tragedy of the commons- even if you got 99.9% of the world into your "we", the remaining "defectors" would have a massive benefit from using AI to replace human labor.
Not only can we not just do that (you did not even define what you mean), but China is coming out with models that are good enough for this purpose - and they are, because they are open, everywhere.
Indeed we need to revolt against AI and force every other big powerful nation to do the same thing. Yet unfortunately that seems like a big joke until AI has destroyed their society too.
The reality of UBI in the United States is that it's going to go from being something freely given to being something that is a full time job to maintain, and then it will be cut or replaced with services that are specifically designed to be as cheap as possible. Until we're all living in terrafoam, birth-controlled and warehoused until we die.
Manna keeps coming to mind for me as well.
It feels like UBI is (at best) likely to become as complicated and corrupt as our tax system already is.
>Whats the 2026 version of "you should learn to code"?
Elderly care.
Is it that mass unemployment will lead to caring more for one's family again, resulting in proper family structures that take care for their elders like in the past? I hope so.
When you talk in meaningless terms like "traditional workers" and "tech bros", all it tells me is that you have divided the world into people you like and people you dislike and mourn / celebrate accordingly.
If ones position for "other people" was "they should pull themselves up by their bootstraps" then the same applies. If your position was we should stop/slow/consider the march of progress - well you lost to 30 years of moving fast and breaking things.
I suggest and ask for nothing but consistency, irrespective of if you like or dislike the people who are affected.
would you prefer "labor" and "class traitors"?
Sure! But when you imagine using those terms:
> It is "progress" when class traitors displace labor, but it is "heartbreaking" when a class traitor gets displaced by other class traitors.
it becomes clear that the original comment was a pointless strawman of a position that nobody holds. A class traitor wouldn't be expressing sympathy about displacement in the first place. It only seemed to make sense because, when you say "tech bro", people superimpose the general category of technologists who think they can make the world better on top of one specific stereotypical guy who believes all the worst things they've ever heard a technologist say.
unfortunately, it doesn't seems like tech bro gets displaced by other tech bros at all and more like corporates running costly ephemeral branding as tech bro by abusing other tech bros works.
What's the difference between tech bros and corporates? Isn't being a tech bro almost by definition about getting to the point where your can sell out your company and your principles?
10 biggest companies (by value) in the world ... all tech companies except number 9 on the list Saudi Aramco.
Well, I never read the artcicle because paywall, but there is a WSJ headline today about a $160k mechanic job at Ford that can't be fulfilled because no labor
Right, that's a lie.
I think it's fairly sad that somebody feels this needs to be said.
I don't buy it. They failed to build a sustainable business model and are now suffering the consequences. Everybody is leaning into AI because it works (in the sense that it pays the bills). Saying the layoffs were because of AI offloads the blame.
>and he's being honest
oh, come the fuck on. it's "AI made us do it" drivel that companies began to justify layoffs with in 2023 (!!!).
Tailwind is just another FOTM frontend thing. I saw dozens of them come, gain some popularity, then abruptly disappear once the marketing budget ran out.
He mentions that tailwind is more popular than ever before but their revenue is down 80% so unless he’s lying about that it makes sense rather than tailwind going out of style.
However, why is that even surprising? Tailwind is essentially a frontend css stylesheet. What business could there possibly be around that?
I understand, they have UI kits, books, etc. but just fundamentally, it was never going to be easy to monetize around that long term, with or without AI.
Tailwind also has a compiler of sorts (so you only include in the bundle the exact styles you need) and a bunch of tooling built around it. In an alternate universe it could have been a fully paid enterprise tool, but then it might not have caught on.
The comment you are responding to said their revenue is down 80%. So they did monetize training and services, and I don't see how that would have been a problem long term if AI didn't come along and make all of that unnecessary.
Yes. The point I was trying to make was that after the initial hype disappears, sales in those categories would probably taper off regardless. But it is purely my opinion.
I suppose Tailwind might be more popular because it fits AI development better?
He fired a shitload of people, of course we can criticise him
Three. He fired three people.
Just posting the "75%" without context is a bit of an odd choice. He explains why in the podcast, but it still feels like he should have specified immediately to avoid assumptions about scale.
He himself said "75%", nowhere in that thread does he say 3 people. That's why the headline is like that.
75% is a ratio buddy. Using this thing called critical thinking, we can find the number of employees and figure out what 3/4 of that number is!
But I forget we don't critically think anymore. Hell, that's why this PR asking for llm.txt exists right? Who needs to read docs
What? He could have said 3 if he wanted, but he wanted it to sound worse so he said 75. I know its inferrable how many people it is, but if the guy laying them off doesn't care to say the number, why should someone else when posting this?
Both of those numbers in isolation dont tell the whole story. Saying firing 3 people sounds like a wednesday at a big company. Saying firing 75% of the staff indicates the impact that those changes will have on everything about the company. The latter is more useful.
I'm also criticizing you for not hiring the laid-off people at their former salary.
The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such things.
While I understand that this has been difficult for him and his company... hasn't it been obvious that this would be a major issue for years?
I do worry about what this means for the future of open source software. We've long relied on value adds in the form of managed hosting, high-quality collections, and educational content. I think the unfortunate truth is that LLMs are making all of that far less valuable. I think the even more unfortunate truth is that value adds were never a good solution to begin with. The reality is that we need everyone to agree that open source software is valuable and worth supporting monetarily without any value beyond the continued maintenance of the code.
Having worked on a design system previously I think most people, especially non-frontend developers, discount how hard something like that is to build. LLMs will build stuff that looks plausible but falls short in a bunch of ways (particularly accessibility). This is for the same reason that people generate div-soup, it looks correct on the surface.
EDIT: I suppose what I'm saying is that "The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such thing." is wrong. My hunch is that AI has the appearance of eliminating the need for such things.
I think you're overestimating how much people care about quality.
If you can produce something that works 80% of the time for 5% of the cost? People take that all the time when they buy cheap shit off Temu or Amazon.
They almost completely just give money back if it fails/sucks, and they are still coming out ahead.
Amazon (AWS) is not cheap! :D
Accessibility is an interesting space for quality because under the ADA you can be sued for it and be exposed to huge liability.
Accessibility testing sounds like something an LLM might be good at. Provide it with tools to access your website only through a screen reader (simulated, text not audio), ask it to complete tasks, measure success rate. That should be way easier for an LLM than image-based driving a web browser.
But accessiblity on the frontend is to a large extend patterns - if it looks like a checkbox it should have the appropriate ARIA tag, and patterns are easy for an LLM.
That kind of pattern was easy before AI.
It's just… a lot of people don't see this on their bottom line. Or any line. My awareness of accessibility issues is the Web Accessibility Initiative and the Apple Developer talks and docs, but I don't think I've ever once been asked to focus on them. If anything, I've had ideas shot down.
What AI does do is make it cheap to fill in gaps. 1500 junior developers for the price of one, if you know how to manage them. But still, even there, they'd only be filling in gaps as well as the nature of those gaps have been documented in text, not the lived experience of people with e.g. limited vision, or limited joint mobility whose fingers won't perform all the usual gestures.
Even without that issue, I'd expect any person with a disability to describe an AI-developed accessibility solution as "slop": because I've had to fix up a real codebase where nobody before me had noticed the FAQ was entirely Bob Ross quotes (the app wasn't about painting, or indeed in English), I absolutely anticipate that a vibe-coded accessibility solution will do something equally weird, perhaps having some equivalent to "As a large language model…" or to hard-code some example data that has nothing to do with the current real value of a widget.
Oh no I'm very cynical about that.
I think perhaps the nuance in the middle here is that for most projects, the quality that professional components bring is less important.
Internal tools and prototypes, both things that quality components can accelerate, have been strong use-cases for these component libraries, just as much as polished commercial customer-facing products.
And I bet volume-wise there's way more of the former than the latter.
So while I think most people who care about quality know you can't (yet) blindly use LLM output in your final product, it's completely ok for internal tools and prototyping.
It's not that people care about quality, but that people expect things to "just work".
Regarding the point about accessibility, there are a ton of little details that must be explicitly written into the HTML that aren't necessarily the default behavior. Some common features of CSS and JS can break accessibility too.
None of this code would obvious to an LLM, or even human devs, but it's still what's expected. Without precisely written and effectively read-only boilerplate your webpage is gonna be trash and the specifics are a moving target and hotly debated. This back and forth is a human problem, not a code problem. That's why it's "hard".
I use the web every day as a blind user with a screenreader.
I would 100% of the time prefer to encounter the median website written by Opus 4.5 than the median website written by a human developer in terms of accessibility!
That's really interesting. Are you speaking from experience with websites where you know who authored them or from seeing code written by humans and Opus 4.5 respectively?
So I have been using the human-authored web since well... 1999 or so, starting with old AOL CDs. I've obviously seen a lot of human content.
Back in the old days you might have image links and other fun stuff. Then we entered the era of flash. Flash was great, especially the people who made their whole site out of it (2004 + not being able to order ... was it pizza? something really sticks in my memory here.)
Then we entered the era of early Bootstrap. Things got really bad for a while -- there was a whole Bootstrap-Accessibility library people ended up writing for it, and of course nobody actually used the damn thing. The most frustrating thing at this point (2010?) was any dropdown anywhere. Any bootstrap dropdown was completely inaccessible using typical techniques, and you'd have to do something tricky with ... mouse routing? Gods it's been 15 years.
CAPTCHAs for stupid things became huge there for a brief moment -- I remember needing to pass a CAPTCHA to download ... was it Creative drivers? That motivated me to make a service called CAPTCHA-Be-Gone for other blind people for a while.
Then we see ARIA start to really come into its own... except that's a whole new shitshow! So many times you'd get people who thought "Oh to add accessibility, we just add ARIA" and had no fucking idea what they were doing, to the point where the most-common A11y advice these days has become "Don't use ARIA unless you know you need it."
Oh then we had this brief flash (~10 years ago?) of "60 FPS websites!" -- let's directly render to the fucking canvas, that'll be great. Flutter? ... Ick!
Nowadays the issues are just the same as they ever were. People using divs for everything, onclick handlers instead of stuff that will be triggered with keyboard... Stuff that Opus just doesn't do!
I guess I've only been using Opus 4.5 for about a month but just ... Ask it to build something? Use it with a screen reader? Try it!
> Then we see ARIA start to really come into its own... except that's a whole new shitshow!
I am not blind, but my experience trying to write accessible web pages is that the screen readers are inconsistent with how they announce the various tags and attributes. I'm curious what you think about the screen readers out there such as NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver, TalkBack, etc. and how devs should be testing their web pages.
Many of the larger corporate clients tend to standardize on the exact behavior of JAWS and I am not sure that is helpful. It's like the Internet Explorer of screen readers.
If you want to know why a page ends up riddled with ARIA overriding everything, that's why. In even the best cases, the people paying for this dev work are looking for consistency and then not finishing the job. It's never made the highest priority work either since testing eats up a ton of time.
To reinforce my original point, I just don't think LLMs can write anything but the most naive code and everyone has opinions and biases completely incompatible with standardization. It's never "done" and fundamentally fickle and political just like the rest of the web.
Knowing obscure things you need to do for accessibility is actually something I would expect an llm to be pretty good at.
Satisfying constraints like these isn't merely about knowing the spec and having lots of examples. Accessibility requirements are even more subjective than ordinary requirements already are to begin with.
LLMs are not that cheaper, a customizable accessible component is still worth hours of work.
The Tailwind Team's Refactoring UI book was a big eye opener for me. I had no idea how many subtle insights are required to create truly effective UX.
I think people vastly underestimate just how much work goes into determining the correct set of primitives create a design system like Tailwind, let alone a full blown component library like TailwindUI.
While I believe you, its an argument that artists bring forward since the beginning of art, so even many hundred years before the internet on average humankind did not value this work.
> design system ... discount how hard something like that is to build.
This is probably a good thing. The web would be much better off with fewer design systems.
It's not that hard to build a design system with decent accessibility. Just use shadcn ui components instead of rolling your own.
It's not really a refutation of my point about how building a good component library is hard, to suggest using another component library. Of course, if you use one it's easier, that was my entire point.
shadcn ui is not a component library but the basis for a component library that has great accessibility built-in from the start, so yes, it is a refutation.
You're thinking of Radix primitives which Shadcn is built on, but both are component libraries.
Maybe we're arguing semantics, but I think calling shadcn a "basis for a design system" is more accurate than a traditional component library. The difference to me is that shadcn lives inside your codebase and you can fully customize it as you please. You cannot customize a component library like MUI nearly to that extent.
> The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such things.
Or more cynically that it eliminates the need to pay for such things. Claude and friends were no doubt trained on the commercial Tailwind components, so the question becomes whether those models could have done the job of Tailwind UI without piggybacking on the unpaid labour of the Tailwind UI developers. If not then we clearly have a sustainability problem here - someone still has to do the hard work to push things forward, but with the knowledge that any attempt to profit from that work will be instantly undercut by the copyright laundering Borg.
I bought a Tailwind Plus trial a few years ago and I've been using AI tools since they came out. I typically find the block or template I want to use via the Tailwind Plus site and then feed it into Claude Code and ask the agent to modify them as required. This has been working well for me. I think the problem is that the Internet is absolutely full of people who expect free shit and never even consider paying for it to support the devs. I don't really know how you fix that. In a sane world, we'd be funding the most popular/useful projects using government grants, since our entire fucking economy sits atop a pile of OSS.
Ironically, some of the same people that are ready to pay $200.-/month Claude subscriptions.
You're not wrong.
I don't know why I didn't think about this before, but you are right. This is just wrong.
Bought a license, not a trial. Freudian slip.
I think you can see this when you look at the downvotes on that GitHub issue on any comment which suggests gating AI access behind a paywall.
AI's going to be a whole lot less useful when it doesn't have any open source component libraries to crib from.
I don’t think the scraping party cares about the license, if the JavaScript code is linked online they’ll just take it. Source: see the art industry
I think AI has come as the industry was somewhat maturing and most frameworks/software had previous incarnations that mostly did the same thing or could be done adhoc anyway. The need for libraries as the models get better probably declines as well.
Not all open source but a lot of it is fundamentally for humans to consume. If AI can, at its extreme (still remains to be seen), just magic up the software then the value of libraries and a lot of open source software will decline. In some ways its a fundamentally different paradigm of computing, and we don't yet understand what that looks like.
As AI gets better OSS contributes to it; but in its source code feeding the training data not as a direct framework dependency. If the LLM's continue to get better I can see the whole concept of frameworks being less and less necessary.
They already pay people to generate training data.
This can never match the scale of organic training data
Or quality
Actually synthetic training dats is better, thats why the new models are all better at design.
If synthetic data is so much better then what are AI crawlers still DDOSing everyone for? Are they stupid?
Mostly. I had the "AI bot tsunami" problem on my own personal site and blocked a bunch of bot user agents in robots.txt. Most of them were from companies I had never heard of before. The only big AI name I recognized was GPTBot from OpenAI.
These people won’t have to be experts like the tailwind team? Quality will be spontaneous?
They pay people to generate open source libraries? I'd love to see it
this is news to me, how does this work? who is getting paid?
Some relevant job ads for Anthropic:
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https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs/4924308008 - "Research Engineer / Research Scientist, Biology & Life Sciences" - "As a founding member of our team, you'll work at the intersection of cutting-edge AI and the biological sciences, developing rigorous methods to measure and improve model performance on complex scientific tasks."
The key trend in 2025 was a new emphasis on reinforcement learning - models are no longer just trained by dumping in a ton of scraped text, there's now a TON of work involved designing reinforcement learning loops that teach them how to do specific useful things - and designing those loops requires subject-matter expertise.
That's why they got so much better at code over the past six months - code is the perfect target for RL because you can run generated code and see if it works or not.
Mercor, Turing, Scale, etc facilitate the work. Labs pay them, they pay contractors.
The funny part is how they think this will give them the power to take control of what is the defacto standard and circumvent standards.
It will instead further distinguish what is AI slop because it doesn't work and be siloed off to people who don't care about the code so can't fix it.
If people want good interoperable production ready code that can be deployed instantly and just works and meets all current standards and ongoing discussions, we've had it for many decades and it's called open source.
Well, you can tell from the tone of his post that he isn't blaming anyone directly. They monetized convenience, and something more convenient came along.
I think it's more shocking to everyone how quickly something like that happens.
Exactly the business model wasn't strong enough, just upselling templates for hundreds of dollars which AI can churn in few tokens was easy to disrupt.
The business model is strong. AI is stealing traffic/money from creators. That's not a problem with the business model, it's a problem with AI. AI hyperscalers shamelessly monetize other people's work without compensation. Truly an awful dystopia.
The output of AIs that is "churned out" wouldn't exist without templates like this being used as an input to the training. But that isn't "Copyright Infringement", according to the AI companies.
They have more and better lawyers. But I know what feels morally unjust.
You and I would not get away with this no matter how much lawyering we buy.
This has nothing to do with the actual facts or arguments of the case. Our "Justice" system has openly and capriciously emphasized corporate rights over individual rights for at least 50 years now.
I disagree. The bare minimum they could have done in all these years was build a proper high quality, tightly coupled component library instead of riding this "copy paste your way to a result" trend.
Not stuff like shadcn and Tailwind Catalyst, but a proper versioned, tightly coupled UI library with rich theming capabilities made for the 99% of users who aren't skilled enough at design to be cobbling together their own design systems or editing a Button component directly.
Instead they rode the wave (despite being best positioned to redirect the wave) and they're paying the price.
If it wasn't AI it'd be the first version of MUI that moves on from Material Design 2 as a default. Or Hero UI v3. Or literally anyone who brings sanity back to the space of component libraries and leaves "copy and paste code snippets" behind
I don't understand how a component library would be AI-proof in a way CSS templates are not.
If a business model can't withstand being disrupted, it is no longer viable. It's like Uber putting cabs out of business with something better. Selling templates is now no longer viable, and blaming AI will not do anything. As Darwin would say, adapt or die.
If the disruption comes from theft, is the business not viable?
Just like piracy isn't theft, so too isn't AI scraping. Personally I think copyright should be abolished and I think it's wild to see people on HN turn from hackers to copyright hawks literally supporting massive corporations which are the primary beneficiaries of long copyright laws, like Disney and their Mickey Mouse laws.
Now is not the time to take a principal stance on copyright. The harsh reality is that trillion dollar companies are taking the word of individual creators like Tailwind for free and monetizing it without any form of compensation. That feels incredibly unjust and needs to be fixed. I don't care what the fix is called.
What do you mean? If don't take a principled stance on something even when it hurts, you don't have principles.
Copyright is evil. Disliking LLMs doesn't change that.
I'm not a fan of copyright either but big corporations have abused them for so long, either enforce them to punish these companies or abolish them so these companies die, either one is fine with me. But don't just selectively enforce them to the benefit of these corpos but ignore them when they punish them, that's the worst of both worlds.
It isn't just the product itself: he's saying traffic to the site has dropped substantially, so any product will be harder to sell now for them.
Some people who would buy the higher quality templates don't know that they exist now.
I think the era of buying templates is over, when you can get a tool that listens to you patiently, iterates again and again till you're satisfied for pennies, why would you pay hundred's for a template that is there for anyone else to buy as well.
The selling feature is that it's more polished (and has good accessibility etc), they're still intended to be customised, which you could use AI for. Why use Tailwind itself when you could generate one with AI? Because it's solidly tested and polished, similarly.
But the broader, more important point: an open source project previously could be funded by using attention to sell other services or add-ons. But that model might be gone if users no longer visit or know the creators.
Is AI making component libraries redundant? Or is it just making it really easy to use free component libraries?
(Or is it really more about traffic to the documentation site and thus eyeballs on the sales pitch?)
I'm making an app using ShadCN, which is pretty good and free -- maybe Tailwind Plus would be significantly better, I don't know, I had to consider the possibility that this project never makes any money so I wanted free for the first shot. And the LLMs turn out to know it pretty well.
Once I get it built using ShadCN, it's hard to imagine when I'd have time to go redo all the component hackery with another library, even if it were way better.
I guess my point is just that "paid UI components" is a really tough business when there are so many people willing to make components just for the fun/glory/practice. Same with a lot of UI stuff it seems -- I highly respect icon designers, but I'm probably just going to use Lucide.
I think all kinds of libraries are becoming redundant. Unless the library solves significant technical problems its likely AI will generate whatever you need. Even tailwind itself is kind of unnecessary, I've used it a lot, but recently been just using AI to generate raw css on side projects, I feel it works pretty well. Tailwind is really a developer convivence, it made things pretty fast to style, but now I don't really think it has anywhere near the advantages it did. If you aren't writing tailwindcss but generating it, almost all the advantage is gone. Only thing it kind of provides is a set of defaults / standards
Fwiw I don’t even think shadcn is good, but our app is built on top of those components already, so we can’t change it without changing everything, so we’re stuck with it.
Does it matter whether it's been obvious that it would be a major issue? It's not unlikely that he did realise this a long time ago, and if he did, it's also not unlikely that he still hasn't found a solution, because there might not be one.
> I think the even more unfortunate truth is that value adds were never a good solution to begin with.
This is the money quote for me - charging for a different thing than the one that brings the value is unsustainable, and AI is accelerating that realization.
Unfortunately, without free distribution, Tailwind would never gain anywhere close to its current mindshare, so there just might not be an opening there (save for a "this year is a year of Linux on desktop" dream of bots and pnpm install paying with micropayments for each download).
> The reality is that we need everyone to agree that open source software is valuable and worth supporting monetarily
The reality is that you need to figure out is that if you want people to pay when they make a ton of money from your code, you should put that in the license.
Well.. there are many fast growing companies that provide UI + APIs for certain components of your app. Sure you can build things easier in-house, but the opportunity cost of doing so also went up. Supabase, Stream, Clerk, Stainless all growing very well.
How does it eliminates the need for simple templates and components? Templates and components are always gonna be more cost effective, back in the day we used to buy simple jQuery components for like 5*$ and even LLMs cant beat that, you will quickly end up with a shittier component with 0 accessibility and end up paying more to the Claude Opus
The only thing that can save open source software is open source LLMs
Unfortunately only the Chinese are really being serious about that
In the face of LLM's it won't be rational for many people to open source their work. People don't want their work/effort being used against them.
I've considered no longer uploading work I do to GitHub.
Agreed. I don't know how realistic it is without a major need that would force major player to abide by it, but yea..
Maybe we need patreon equivalents for open source development?
I think we just need better platforms for enterprise procurement.
The issue is that currently you either publish as free & open-source and get tons of traction and usage but little funding, or you publish as paid and get no traction.
The blocker for paid software isn't actually the money itself (this is solvable by just pricing it reasonably), it's all the red tape that someone has to go through to get their company to purchase a license to begin with.
Maybe a marketplace that preemptively does audits, provides insurance, code escrow, licensing, etc ahead of time, that vendors can put their software on it proactively and companies can have accounts where their employees can just open an "app store" and just buy/license software directly? Similar to the AWS marketplace but for libraries.
Sounds like the kind of enterprise-class walled garden that IBM or Oracle maintains.
It already exists. Tailwind has had GitHub sponsorships enabled for years but only 5 people have ever given them money that way.
Meanwhile Evan You of Vue JS was making something like 200k just from Patreon before starting void(0) which is venture backed, it's all a marketing problem because I don't think anyone knew their GitHub sponsors even existed, people just don't seem to use it in general.
I don't know why Tailwind needed anyone more than Adam, I understand that more people makes the work go faster such as for their Rust compiler but then you run into money problems like this.
They have off-GH sponsorship that's much more widely subscribed.
https://tailwindcss.com/sponsor
Yeah, it's apparently pulling in over $800K in annual revenue [1].
EDIT: Doing the math on the sponsor list, it's probably around $1M in ARR now.
[1] https://petersuhm.com/posts/2025/
I'm sorry but it simply does not cost a million dollars to maintain Tailwind, a CSS library that has no compelling reason to ever change at this point.
Key comment is this one: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
> [...] 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. 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. [...]
> Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework.
>The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products
Wall that's the problem, and it's tractable problem. Seems like tailwind needs a sales strategy beyond hoping people read the docs. And that it gives rise to a perverse incentive--making a less intuitive product to drive the need for documentation--is bound to affect the product.
If LLMs are really the problem, and it seems possible that they are, then you might need to lean in. Maybe selling access to mcps and skills. I'd still bet on hiring someone to chase down some contracts is going to be the easiest way out of the hole though.
Tailwind can be made less intuitive?
Agreed. If Tailwind could give you a paid subscription to a service that plugs into your agent and will recommend component compositions, styles, etc. (basically how those web app generators companies work but targeted at experienced devs) they have a chance to survive the transition.
Presumably the MCP could also be aware of the commercial products, which ought to coax the agent to apply those patterns. That'd be more useful than actually have the library.
This isn't novel either. Expo offers an MCP with its paid subscription, for instance. It's helpful. In fact, I wish the tamagui crew would get on that...
I feel like if their docs are their only funnel into their commercial product, they need to fire their marketing staff and find people who are competent. There are so many other ways they could be reaching potential customers, even those only familiar with Tailwind's free product.
> There are so many other ways they could be reaching potential customers
Like what, exactly, now that most people interact with tailwind purely via AI agents?
I started work on a front end project React/Astro/Tailwind project for the first time in about a year, building out with CLI agents, and one things that's changed compared to a year ago is that I have the entire UI basically working and I haven't even looked at the tailwind classes. I just say yes that's fine but can you improve the width for the sidebar on mobile (obviously paraphrasing here, I write the requirements for the agent carefully) and within a couple of iterations it's working. I keep expecting to have to jump in to manually fix things but so far I haven't needed to.
I worked in FE for years and I know tailwind and CSS quite deeply. But the entire extent of what I've needed to know for this project so far can be summed up as "it's some kind of styling tool". I never had to look at the docs, I never went to their website, or or Twitter or anywhere else that might have worked for marketing.
I did make an informed decision in choosing this stack, but it's equally likely that the AI could have recommended it to me, and the AI entirely set up the project scaffolding and config for me.
So where in this could they possibly have marketed paid components to me? And even if they did, why would I have paid for them when Shadcn is free and was added automatically by the AI?
> I did make an informed decision in choosing this stack, but it's equally likely that the AI could have recommended it to me, and the AI entirely set up the project scaffolding and config for me.
I'm not a web dev, I've heard of Tailwind CSS but my actual knowledge is "I know what the CSS in that name means, therefore it's some kind of styling tool".
One of my experiments before Christmas with Claude Code, was to see what it does in pure vibe-coding mode, where I just say "yes" and then see what kind of mess (if any) it made.
It did not use Tailwind CSS. There was a lot of… if a human had done it I'd say "copy-paste" CSS, but I think it just regenerated it all fresh each time rather than actually using the pasteboard? And it was raw CSS, no dependencies that I noticed.
They maintained professional etiquette in their marketing and I don't blame them. If you annoy people, they will not recommend you.
I've watched open source projects get lambasted because their developers dared to make a buck. Being conservative with their marketing is what is expected of them even if it isn't fair.
What marketing staff?
> they need to fire their marketing staff
Sounds like they did just that. Ereyesterday.
Thanks for that - the GitHub app “helpfully” collapsed this comment (along with most of the others in the thread), so I was confused how the headline related to this issue.
That traffic is down can have at least two separate AI related causes:
1) Lower amount of impressions on the google search pages due to the AI answers
2) Lower amount of searches since people are using code generators
I wonder which one it is primarily.
Sadly, selling pre-made components and templates was never a sound business model, especially in the wake of AI. One thing I learned being on HN for so long and launching my own products is that a product is not a business. Don't conflate the two, at your peril.
Lots of people make great products but actually turning that into a business is fundamentally a different skill. It seems like Tailwind grew too fast, having 2 million ARR a few years ago and almost 10 employees (200k each is probably the all-in cost anyway for an employee if they're full time with benefits, so I suppose there was barely any profit), whereas they'd probably have been fine with running a Patreon like Evan You did for Vue, and cutting down the number of devs drastically, which I suppose is what they're doing now.
It is a business. Envato was a billion dollar business in 2017. I agree that AI makes these kinds of businesses vulnerable, but it's overstepping to say that these things aren't businesses.
I never said Tailwind the company wasn't a business, when I said "a product is not a business" I meant that as advice to creators in general, not in specific to Tailwind; of course it is, it made millions in revenue. What I meant was that even though businesses may exist, having a long-term, durable business model is not always viable.
"selling premade software assets" is a business, and it's the business both Tailwind and Envato were in. Both businesses got hit hard by AI. Check out Envato's homepage now. It's unrecognizable from what it was in 2017, and completely genAI oriented.
I think you're just repeating the same point I'm making. The point is they're not good businesses, hence why Envato pivoted and Tailwind soon might need to as well.
You're shifting your argument, first you said it's not a business. Any business can be good/bad depends on climate and over time. It was a business and many busienss in the current era of AI will face such challenges. All business just need to constatly adapt over time aka innovate.
> first you said it's not a business
You're misunderstanding what I'm saying, I was not talking about Tailwind Labs not being a business, I am saying that in general, products are not businesses by default. In that case, my argument is the same as it has been, agreeing with your last 3 sentences.
I don't even know what Envato is from looking at their own website. Maybe some companies don't need to exist if they can't even explain themselves.
Definitely more than 200k per head. I remember seeing a job posting for Tailwind Labs for a (design?) engineer which was 250-300k TC.
Seems like it was an insanely profitable product, but a risky business.
It’s still pretty profitable, more than $100k a month
Revenue is not profit
Telerik, DevExpress, and a lot of other companies have made profitable businesses that have lasted well over a decade on that business premise. Selling solid and easy to integrate pre-made components has been a pretty good business for a while.
I wonder how they're doing too then, as we don't have public stats about them (Telerik was acquired by a public company Progress Software but they do not break down revenue by Telerik specifically). Ultimately, this business of selling components is not sound in the age of AI.
Another thing to consider, it seems JS devs use more AI for work than .NET devs for example, which might be in more old-school companies and industries. I can't verify this but there seems to be a correlation between companies who use hip new CSS and JS frameworks, and their AI usage, thus accelerating Tailwind Corp's cannibalization by AI, as most vibe coders are building web apps from what I've seen and Tailwind and React are very well represented in the training set.
> Another thing to consider, it seems JS devs use more AI for work than .NET devs for example, which might be in more old-school companies and industries.
Speaking from years of .NET work in state and federal government, the sort of dev groups that lean on Telerik or DevExpress have less leverage to build new things for themselves than you would expect, so the use of AI inside of them is predominantly for maintaining existing software. Decisions on how things get built at most public agencies still revolve around MS Access and WebForms due to a whole bunch of BS ordinances that legislators put in place; for those sorts of places a reliable vendor can absorb the blame if concerns surrounding accessibility, compliance, or security of your ancient web services crop up, while Claude and Codex put the liability back on your org.
Yeah I don't disagree that selling components is going to be hard business in the age of AI. Just mostly pointing out that it was a good business previously.
PrimeTek components (PrimeReact, PrimeNG) are MIT licensed open source.
They also have a CSS utility library (like Tailwind).
Tailwind had several times more than 2M / ARR at their peak.
you have 2 comments in total and a super popular name :-(
While I'm sure AI is partially to blame, I feel like the real problem is that (1) they don't have a sensible business model and (2) they have saturated their market.
There are relatively few individuals and organizations out there with products that are worth spending vendor money on, especially for something like a CSS library. Companies that do have this need are ready to spend BIG.
Tailwind charges a one-time fee in the hundreds of dollars range and pledges lifetime support.
When they say revenue is down 80%, it's because everyone already bought their library in its first few years of existence. And looking at their site there is nothing else to spend money on. So how are they planning to sustain their revenue?
They were selling HTML templates. Not even anything else, literally just HTML with Tailwind classes. That wasn't a sustainable business even before AI.
i remember listening to Adam in one of the podcast he was in (I think it was either the Hackers Inc, or the Art of Product, but could've been something else where he was a guest) - and I remember that he mentioned that idea that there are always a new wave of new developers that they can sell the product to.
I still think he was correct. I myself bought tailwindUI as an aspirational purchase, and i doubt people would pay for it as a subscription.
But I think a lot has changed in the last few years. There arent probably as many new developers given the market, and among those there are probably even less that are willing to pay $100+ for a UI library, not when there are competitions like shadcn or radix or many others as free alternative, or when you could just ask an LLM to generate them for you.
Tailwind Labs definitely need to explore new revenue streams, but i dont think UI components is the way to go. Without knowing their internal data, this is just a guess, but I doubt traffic to docs or pipeline to premium products is much of a factor in the decline.
I believe the new UI libraries hit hard more than the AI impact. AI is not always that accurate so eventually if you want to deep dive in, you still have to turn around to the doc. But the new libraries though, they give the market another good choice, especially when shadcn came out, it's so huge that I personally even feels there's no need to go for the raw Tailwind experience, and what's worse is that shadcn is still evolving fast.
I believe the only way to let Tailwind survive is changing the business model.
They had a business model good enough to employ a few people. Not every business needs to be Google’s Adsense.
LLMs are clearly to “blame” here. You can make any component with LLMs from scratch or it will expertly use one of the many existing UI frameworks.
they were never positioned as a unicorn, the question becomes can you be a small business/SMB in software/tech
Most software/tech is a small business.
They had a sensible business model UNTIL AI came around. As usual, AI is just destroying everything it touches.
Not every business should need hyperscaling mega-exit unicorn enshittification.
Lifestyle and small businesses are good and of course these are being crushed by our new oligarchs.
> It's because everyone already bought their library in its first few years of existence
Literally everyone? No new developers being trained? No new tailwind users?
More details:
https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/discussions/1467...
https://x.com/adamwathan/status/2008909129591443925
https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
Today, I wanted to add tailwind to a new project and realized I had purchased it back in 2022. So I went to the website and realized it had moved to tailwind plus. That’s how distracted I’ve been. To my surprise my access worked and I could still download the full UI kit.
I know they promised lifetime, but I did not expect updates forever. This looks like the first issue to fix. I would have no issues paying 20% of purchase price for an updated version, that gave me access to 12 months of free updates.
Also, what about paid access to skills or MCP server for design systems and components?
I know these may be things he already considered, so don’t want to presume I have an answer. But as a customer, totally willing to support a good product that has supported me.
Lovable while claiming they are making $250m ARR heaving using Tailwind, doesnt even pay to support tailwind at all. Although with the AI companies you can never trust the numbers as they play the giving free trials and counting as future ARR game.
And that's totally fine what Lovable is doing. Tailwind offers an MIT-licensed library that anyone is free to use without paying for it. Tailwind's paid offering is optional, and many businesses won't need it. Just as non-paying users of OSS are not entitled to anything from the maintainers, maintainers are not entitled to revenue from users who are complying with the license terms of their free offering.
As an open source developer myself, it concerns me that so much of what we do us under- and un-funded, but that's the licensing model Tailwind chose. If you want something different, then release it under the AGPL (or something else that businesses aren't comfortable using, or cannot use), and charge for commercial licensing for any use of your product. Yes, you'll have fewer users, but that may be the trade off you need to make in order to build a sustainable business.
Great point here, the only thing that feels greedy to me is that these larger companies do not contribute back to the foundational libraries that they are building on, even to a minor extent for ecosystem improvements. Perhaps greedy is a strong word.
i’ve always felt that oss licenses needs to include responsible use terms or something. some orgs dont mind paying for value contributed but you need to provide a structure to do so, even if that is on a voluntary basis.
If anyone from Lovable etc sees these comments, great opportunity for sponsorship where it can make a difference upstream.
Some companies have done this well, at a stage Retool use to sponsor a number of open source libs which greatly helped them with exposure to devs. Surely a better way to spend ad revenue imo.
If you give something away for free, don't complain when people take it for free. Make it AGPL instead then.
As a fellow business owner, I’ll always feel bad when business owners need to make these types of decisions.
I bought Tailwind UI - I always thought it was a critically bad business decision from their end to keep giving me additional new stuff for free. It seemed to me that it should have been a subscription.
However, knowing nothing about the inside of their business, I have no idea how that would have affected their viability.
He goes into detail the motivation/decision to do lifetime pricing vs subscription pricing here: https://hackersincorporated.com/episodes/lifetime-pricing-is...
The idea is that subscription businesses have churn, and if you can capture the lifetime value of a customer with your one time price, there isn't any difference (other than people feeling grateful when you add new content for "free").
That’s an excellent point, thanks for linking.
My takeaway from this thread is: his theory’s great until you discover that your customers are wiling pay *so* much more.
On a more positive note, I’ve been blown away by the (largely, one conspicuous troll-like annoyance aside) positive thoughts in the comments. Maybe it’s not too late?
It is true, I paid the lifetime fee for the premium tailwind offering, and they probably could have gotten double that from me with an annual subscription instead.
> It seemed to me that it should have been a subscription.
The one time fee should have been for personal licenses, and a annual subscription for businesses.
I like the approach of paying for major upgrades.. So you get free updates on your current version for as long as you want, but when the next major update comes out, you either stick with your current version at no cost (and ideally still get maintenance and security patches) but if you want the next major version, there's an upgrade cost.
That feels fair to me.
> I always thought it was a critically bad business decision from their end to keep giving me additional new stuff for free. It seemed to me that it should have been a subscription.
Maybe. One data point isn't all that useful, but I never would have bought it if it weren't for the model he chose. I will never, ever do a subscription for something like that.
Right, but you can do a one-off purchase to get the product as it existed at the time. Instead they offered all future improvements in the price.
This is not sustainable once your customer growth dies down, as it eventually did.
Their customer growth wasn't exactly dying down tho, it was massively disrupted. That is a key distinction that should be noted.
Not entirely true. They had one product at first. I think it was UI kit. The full app templates that came later were a separate product and they charged again. However, you’re right insofar as they added more templates to the later product for free.
I guess this is what makes marketing so tricky; I myself would’ve bought a $10/mo subscription so much sooner given the chance, which by now - and happily, incidentally - would’ve brought in way more dosh than my one-off payment.
i bought Tailwind UI years ago and have barely used it outside of like a couple of abandoned side projects. I bought it knowing that is going to happen because it is a one-time payment, and the idea of supporting the project/Adam is prob a bigger factor that the product.
I definitely wont even consider it if its a subscription.
Selling UI components is a hard sell to begin with - i think they made the right decision with a one-time point payment at that higher price point. If it were a subscription, i probably would've cancelled it within 2 or 3 months.
I think it’s simple that people aren’t using CSS frameworks because the AI creates CSS on its own.
I can't get over the Author of the CR addi g his responses on TikTok.. What have we come to?
if the coding agents are already using Tailwind so much, I don't see why he is so adamant on add this to the repo. llms.txt is basically useless, and you need it you can add it to your user claude.md
Oh $DEITY you just reminded me of summer of code.
I'm not normally one to do armchair psychology but from the way he posts I'm pretty sure he's just on the spectrum, obviously smart but total inability to read the room or understand other people's perspectives
that's why I complained about it in the PR, mmm, I thought it was grossly unprofessional of him (besides the things he said in the discussion.
e.g. Tech changes all the time, that isn't an excuse to be a dick. e.g. ok dude, don't expect any future free work from me in the future on any of your projects going forward. Rude AF.)
also, I just realised, that PR is an excuse to get the library he made (https://github.com/quantizor/markdown-to-jsx) used within TailwindCSS :p
Stray thought: adding a library the PR submitter controls would be a good starting point for an XZ/SSH-style supply chain attack: badger & threaten the maintainers to add the dependency, and then sneak something into a future library update.
This seems like a huge red flag, there is no need to add any more dependencies to an already fully featured repo
It's on Github, I'm not surprised. I'd be surprised if you got a TokTok response on sourcehut.
We really are in the worst timeline, huh? I wish there were professional consequences for this kind of online behavior.
It's peak brain fried slop that's for sure
Wow. This is wild. I have a mix of empathy for the guy and also a feeling like he has no idea what he's doing running a business.
> Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework.
So his idea is to make Tailwind less modern than competitors by throwing a wrench in this tool that makes it easier to write tailwind with AI, simply because he thinks the only way Tailwind can make money is if actual human beings come to read the docs site? If that's the case, your income is based on products that's are not high enough value to potential customers, or you're marketing it poorly, or both.
> 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.
I get priorization but this isn't really that. He's not saying "I'll get to this when I find some time. Busy with high-priority business-related things right now.". He's saying "AI is going to be the end of profits for tailwind and instead of coming up with an alternative income stream I'm going to just block anything making tailwind easier to use with tailwind. And also stop complaining about it."
It sucks to fire people, but that doesn't mean you have to spread the flames out to open source contributors trying to make tailwind better for everyone. Look for new income streams, ideally ones that can be sold to people that control the money in companies (that isn't often the devs that are in your docs).
> I get priorization but this isn't really that. He's not saying "I'll get to this when I find some time. Busy with high-priority business-related things right now."
I don't really understand how you can find a difference between your sentence with what he wrote:
> I totally see the value in the feature and I would like to find a way to add it.
> 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. 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.
Pretty sure those are the same picture
This is the most pragmatic, non-conformist and rational comment here.
Exactly, when the Renaissance was happening, the printing machine(s) were spreading across the Europe rapidly, priest(s) were trying to prevent the spread of machines because they were copying the books, by hand, which was their income stream.
So they were against it, in the end, they learned their lesson the hard way. It was inevitable, it's the same thing with the LLM(s).
> 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.
Yeah, that is a quite depressing situation, but saying "trying to do fun free things for the community..." is quite contradictory.
Isn't that how that community is created in the first place?
I also don't understand the logical thinking that made them think that, if we make it harder to gather information with LLM(s) or if we do not improve it, people will keep coming to our website, NO!
They would just simply grab something similar, or ask an LLM to use something else, there are hundreds of alternatives, no one, literally no one has moat in the today(s) world.
I believe that if they focused solely on open source, improving the developer experience, creating more libraries, abstraction(s) over the abstraction(s), open source component libraries like shadcn/ui, DaisyUI, Radix etc, their income today would have been much higher than from what they currently have I believe.
There are many, like so many action items that Adam could do, instead of throwing tantrums at people, easiest could have been the sponsor-first business model, which would have scaled out much better I mean, they don't have recurring revenue, OSS sponsorships are mostly recurring, unlike the current model.
Good analogy but it feels a bit different, in a sense that the LLMs index all your content and then you don't benefit from any of that outcome. You essentially had no saying to the process of indexing, whether it's MIT licensed or else.
I'd say that this is a very interesting situation, I would not blame it on the founder. Nobody saw this coming ...
I'd be sympathetic to this take if
1. The contribution actually made something useful
2. He actually said anything to the note of "I'm going to just block anything making tailwind easier to use with ai."
3. The contributor was not adding an external library that he authored without mentioning it in the comments
I defer 100% to maintainers of a project if an external contributor drops a pr that they are now in charge of maintaining with no evidence that it is useful, or that the author of the change will maintain.
The biggest miss from Tailwind is ignoring the rest of the ecosystem. Rightly or wrongly, everyone has moved on to using shadcn's system for components. Tailwind hasn't. Tailwind has excellent components available through Plus which are worth paying for but they're not available where people are, which pushes people towards other libraries built on top of Tailwind. I have paid for Tailwind Plus and I like their Catalyst UI and I have used it on a project but it's a pain to use compared to alternatives, so, I don't bother.
I'd go as far as to guess that their revenue isn't down due to AI but because of their lifetime access model combined with shadcn's registry system being much easier to use.
Prediction: Tailwind acquired by Vercel.
> everyone has moved on to using shadcn's system for components
This may be an exaggeration.
It is.
At least in the React space where there are a ton of libraries like Mantine or React Aria which I use.
> everyone has moved on to using shadcn's system for components
I played around with shadcn for a new project a year or so ago, decided I really didn't like their fundamental approach of copying code (that now I have to maintain) into my code base. So I ended up using something else (DaisyUI), which has been reasonably nice so far.
I'm just one person (and one not super plugged into the frontend scene), but "everyone" feels like a gross overestimation. I would guess it's not even a majority.
I don't even know who the hell uses them systems for components.
Just trowing a flex-box and a few good ol' css rules does 99.999% of the job usually.
$300 for UI blocks? For what? A div with flex, gap, and padding?
>everyone has moved on to using shadcn's system for components
shadcn only works in react, tailwind works everywhere
> everyone has moved on to using shadcn's system for components.
This is the first time I've seen anyone ever mention it.
I tried ShadCN then quickly ported everything over to Mantine. A bit of config magic later, I can quickly whip out functional UIs faster than I can think of features.
I like this prediction and it would be a good fit. Vercel can also monetize existing traffic much more broadly than tailwind can with just tailwind plus.
> Rightly or wrongly, everyone has moved on to using shadcn's system for components.
Everyone in your bubble on X maybe.
I wish Adam had addressed the impact of competition in a bit more detail.
Shadcn has definitely taken a big chunk, the premium ecosystem around Shadcn is absolutely exploding. I know. I run https://www.shadcnblocks.com and we saw huge month on month growth in revenue for the entire year.
Even with strong headwinds from AI, I expect our revenue to continue increasing throughout 2026.
I’ll be honest.
I’m a contributor to this.
I’ve been CSS since the mid 2000s and I have a lot of it memorized by heart.
My team uses tailwind, therefore I use tailwind
But I don’t want to reconfigure my mental model to think in esoteric shorthand, when I already have vanilla web tech memorized.
So I just write some code to match the design and then I let an llm transform it into what my team expects.
I’m sharing in the hopes that the tailwind team can figure out a middle ground because I think a service that can take any valid styled content and output the same result in tailwind would be a niche small language model that solves the use case for why I don’t go to the docs.
The shorthand makes inline style more ergonomic, so you can see the wood for the trees, rather than long strings of style attributes in your markup.
Inline style is the thing. That's what tailwind is enabling in a readable way. And inlined style is what makes style more maintainable and less susceptible to override rot.
The separation between form and function is always a bit illusionary, but particularly so with CSS. Almost all markup is written to look a specific way, not a configurable way.
Every project I worked on that used CSS was a mess. It's always 1000 line SCSS files and nobody knows what is going on there.
> It's always 1000 line SCSS files and nobody knows what is going on there
It's been 15-20 years since I last saw that.
There are tons of solutions on how to easily organize CSS code these days that don't involve TW.
You mean CSS-in-JS?
CSS modules is the native solution. But yes, compile-time CSS in TypeScript like PandaCSS or Vanilla Extract or StyleX (not run-time like Emotion) are also great alternatives.
No. For example, scoped CSS in Vue, Svelte, or Astro components.
> and nobody knows what is going on there.
For what its worth, I had the same experience with Tailwind. I regularly see classes that don't have an meaningful outcome.
I don't think the problem is Tailwind or CSS (well, I guess Tailwind is CSS with extra steps but you get the idea) syntax (or any of the CSS preprocessors), but the fact that styling in browsers has accumulated a lot of cruft, and people who haven't "grown up" with it over the years don't fully understand it (I am more competent than most with it and there's still times I screw up).
One thing that's kinda nice about Tailwind is that it made copy-pasting components easier. So people can get something decent without fully understanding what's happening
> I regularly see classes that don't have an meaningful outcome.
You mean custom classes?
Yeah, I’m not advocating for css or against tailwind
Just sharing that the root cause is most developers don’t want to pick up an additional syntax when they already have the fundamentals
The main problem is the premise of tailwind
Every single web design on earth is a compound opinion on like a few hundred popular properties and values
They put all that in one style sheet
Which became the one style sheet on earth
Which made it possible to summon all those styles directly from within our apps
Tailwind is like the chess of utilities. There’s only so many opening and closing moves that running a business on it is incredibly difficult, given supply and demand.
>Just sharing that the root cause is most developers don’t want to pick up an additional syntax when they already have the fundamentals
IF they already have the fundamentals. What I see is that more and more developers don't know CSS at all or very little; they only use Tailwind and haven’t worked with CSS extensively before.
After we've completed the knowledge transfer from the public domain, across all potential sources of information, from books to open source code to private data banks and LLMs then what comes next? Destroying the said works so that nobody else can access them ? Privatize knowledge, hoard all the data, limit access, sell ads?
Here is a link to their commercial offerings.
https://tailwindcss.com/plus?ref=top
There should be a monthly option - I'd pay for that.
i just gave my favorite LLM a screenshot of one of those components and it recreated it perfectly. i paid $0.
i dont see how any business model can compete with free. maybe they can focus on branding like Pepsi or Coke and see if developers will make their decisions based on that.
> i just gave my favorite LLM a screenshot of one of those components and it recreated it perfectly. i paid $0.
Because it's most likely in the training data. I.e., it stole it for you.
Y'know, this is the one time that i thought lawyers wouldn't let it slide. I still don't understand why apparently there aren't _massive_ class-action (or similar) lawsuits worldwide against AI companies. LLMs are full on copyright-removal machines.
Copyright washing as a service.
how do you know it recreated perfectly. Is it equally customizable? Is it equally accessible? And your LLM models cost money too. If you use the API keys, you can quickly see the cost.
Being 100% honest even though it sucks to be the truth - it doesn't matter if its customizable or accessible or not because you just ask the LLM to do that for you.
Or ask the LLM to customize it to your specific use case since most people really only really care about their situation - not for it to be customizable to everyones use case.
Even with AI, I'd still use a component library. It reduces the surface area you have to maintain and keeps your look consistent. The same reasons to use them before AI.
When I saw this on HN, I instantly felt terrible for Adam & the team. Happy to see that these comments are mostly supportive, they could have easily piled on the pain.
Listen to his podcast episode if you want his raw feelings on this - https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
Very happy Tailwind Plus and Insiders customer here.
Tailwind Plus was always tricky since most people would use it for commercial products and that seemed like a grey area based on their licensing. Then shadcn came along and all the Tailwind Plus alternatives (many times recreating the same UI elements that plus has) and then people just copied and used those components and polished further using AI.
Before Tailwind got big, Adam released an amazing book about UI/UX called Refactoring UI[0] and it really helped me become better and understand subtleties of design. I even considered printing a personal physical book for my coffee table. If you want to support Adam and don't need Tailwind Plus, this ebook could be a good way.
[0]. https://www.refactoringui.com/
(IANAL) Using it for commercial products isn't grey area at all, it's explicitly allowed. Pretty much all you can't do is create a component library based on it. You can also freely use it in open source as long as you aren't making a component library.
If it wasn't usable in commercial products, I don't think anyone would pay for it.
I should’ve clarified. My apps are all open source so it didn’t feel right putting their UI for free out there. It does happen in some projects but it felt easier just to design components myself.
>>Adam released an amazing book about UI/UX called Refactoring UI[0] and it really helped me become better and understand subtleties of design.
In the age of AI, if you have Table of Contents. ChatGPT can write the book for you.
Only books I buy these days are in fiction genre. Everything else is derived from facts that already exist some where and AI can derive and write the whole book.
Not only are you wrong (LLMs are horrible at reproducing anything that isn't fairly ABUNDANT in the training data), but it's also quite sad.
AI can write a whole book on anything. You can take anything, even make up a phenomenon, and have an AI write a whole factual-sounding book on it.
How that isn't clearly an indicator to you that it produces loads and loads of BS, I'm really not sure.
Wow, this is a grim reality check: AI hyperscalers taking in billions of revenue, while at the same time putting honest business like Tailwind out of work, without any form of compensation. What happened to "you wouldn't steal a car" etc.? It's only illegal if you're not a trillion dollar company?
I have trouble expressing how terrible unjust it feels that AI companies are stealing money from the common people. I have no other way to put it.
Also: this will definitely limit the use of AI. People will stop publishing valuable content for free on the internet, if AI scrapers will steal and monetize it.
The ad was "You wouldn't download a car." To which my response was always a loud "HELL yes, I would!"
That was an internet meme. The real ad said "You wouldn't steal a car".
I’m not sure this is such a reality check. I remember figuring this out maybe a month or so after October 2023, when ChatGippity first dropped. Like, if it’s a “do anything platform” won’t the first anything be to cannibalize low hanging anything’s, followed by progressively higher hanging anything’s until there’s no work left?
Like play out AI, it sucks for everybody except the ones holding the steering wheel, unless we hold them accountable for the changing landscape of stake-in-civilization distribution. Spoiler: haha, we sure fucking aren’t in the US.
> Like play out AI, it sucks for everybody except the ones holding the steering wheel
Not true. Models don't make owners money sitting there doing nothing - they only get paid when people find value in what AI is producing for them. The business model of AI companies is actually almost uniquely honest compared to rest of software industry: they rent you a tool that produces value for you. No enshittification, no dark patterns, no taking your data hostage, no turning into a service what should've been a product. Just straightforward exchange of money for value.
So no, it doesn't such for everyone except them. It only sucks for existing businesses that find themselves in competition with LLMs. Which, true, is most of software industry, but it's still just something that happens when major technological breakthrough is achieved. Electricity and Internet and internal combustion engines did the same thing to many past industries, too.
> they only get paid when people find value in what AI is producing for them
The people "finding value in them" are other people with money to throw at businesses: investors, capital firms, boards & c suites. I'm not sure anybody who has been laid off because their job got automated away is "finding value" in an LLM. There's a handful of scrappy people trying to pump out claude-driven startups but if one person can solo it, obviously a giant tech company can compete.
> No dark patterns
https://www.palantir.com/
> No enshittification
https://google.com
https://bing.com
> No taking your data hostage
blank stare they're not taking my data hostage, but they're sure as shit taking my data
I think we just fundamentally disagree on all of this. You may be right, and I hope you are. I go back and forth on whether it's going to be a gentle transition or a miserable one. My money is on the latter.
> https://www.palantir.com/
What's the dark pattern here, exactly? "Selling military-adjacent stuff with an edgy vibe" isn't what's meant by a dark pattern.
this whole "ai is theft" argument is just pure cope. tailwind was always just a thin abstraction over css standards and they only became the industry standard by playing the seo game and dumping docs on the open web for everyone to see. you dont get to claim theft when a model actually learns the patterns you basically forced onto the world for free to build your brand. tailwinds business model was essentially rent seeking on the fact that css is tedious to write manually and now that the marginal cost of production has dropped to near zero they are suprised they cant sell 300 dollar templates anymore.
the car comparison is honestly embarassing for this community to even bring up lol. its not theft to recognize a pattern and its definately not illegal for a company to do what every junior dev has been doing for years which is reading the docs and then not buying the paid stuff. adam built a business that relied on human inefficiency and now that inefficiency is gone. its not a tragedy its just a market correction. if your moat is so shallow that a llm can drain it in one pass then you didnt really have a product you just had a temporary advantage. honestly tailwind should of seen this coming a mile away but i guess its easier to blame "scrapers" than admit the ui kit gravy train is over. move on and build something that actually provides value.
It doesn't matter what Tailwind your opinion is. It matters that they built something which definitely has market validation that people were willing to pay for. AI took their lunch AND their lunch money.
I'm not going to dogpile criticism on Tailwind or Adam, whose behavior seems quite admirable, but I fundamentally agree with the thrust of the parent comment. It's unfortunate for Tailwind and anyone who was invested in the project's pre-2022 trajectory, but no one is entitled to commercial engagement by unaffiliated third parties.
Here's a similar example from my own experience:
* Last week, I used Grok and Gemini to help me prepare a set of board/committee resolutions and legal agreements that would have easily cost $5k+ in legal fees pre-2022.
* A few days ago, I started a personal blog and created a privacy policy and ToS that I might otherwise have paid lawyers money to draft (linked in my profile for the curious). Or more realistically, I'd have cut those particular corners and accepted the costs of slightly higher legal risk and reduced transparency.
* In total, I've saved into the five figures on legal over the past few years by preparing docs myself and getting only a final sign-off from counsel as needed.
One perspective would be that AI is stealing money from lawyers. My perspective is that it's saving me time, money, and risk, and therefore allowing me to allocate my scarce resources far more efficiently.
Automation inherently takes work away from humans. That's the purpose of automation. It doesn't mean automation is bad; it means we have a new opportunity to apply our collective talents toward increasingly valuable endeavors. If the market ultimately decides that it doesn't have sufficient need for continued Tailwind maintenance to fund it, all that means is that humanity believes Adam and co. will provide more value by letting it go and spending their time differently.
Laws are not intellectual property of individuals or companies, they belong to the public. That's a fundamentally different type of content to "learn" from. I totally agree that AI can save a lot of time, but I don't agree that the creators of Tailwind don't see any form of compensation.
It does not feel not right to me that revenue is being taken from Tailwind and redirected to Google, OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic without 0 compensation.
I'm not sure how this should codified in law or what the correct words are to describe it properly yet.
I see what you're getting at, but CSS is as much an open standard as the law. Public legal docs written against legal standards aren't fundamentally dissimilar to open source libraries written against technical standards.
While I am all for working out some sort of compensation scheme for the providers of model training data (even if indirect via techniques like distillation), that's a separate issue from whether or not AI's disruption of demand for certain products and services is per se harmful.
>I see what you're getting at, but CSS is as much an open standard as the law
That's the thing, Tailwind is a layer on top of that to ease development, but almost all web development using LLMs is using Tailwind, not CSS.
the ai companies are presented as just 'existing', when in fact there is money being made it's just be routed to them.
You're clearly not a fan of Tailwind, and that's fair enough.
However, stating that Adam Wathan (AW) "basically forced [Tailwind] onto the world" is nonsense. People chose to adopt it because it solved a problem.
In case you're not familiar with the origins of Tailwind, AW was building a SaaS live on stream, and everyone kept asking about the little utility CSS framework he'd built for himself (rather than the short-lived SaaS).
That's how it all started. Not through a big SEO campaign, or the mysterious ability to force others to choose a CSS framework against their will, but because people saw it, and wanted to use it.
> this whole "ai is theft" argument is just pure cope. tailwind was always just a thin abstraction over css standards
Both of those can be true.
Both are true. And thin abstraction doesn't mean it's not valuable abstraction.
When I started working on one of my side projects a year or so ago, I realized I didn't have time to figure out how to style each and every component, so I paid for Tailwind Plus. It was pricey, and I definitely had to think about it for a few days, but I'm so glad I did. It saved me way more time than the dollar value of the product, and it has continued to get better.
If you are using Tailwind, I highly recommend Tailwind Plus. You'll learn so much about what Tailwind can do using that library, and it is so easy to adapt into your own offerings. It is 100% worth it.
Hearing that they're struggling, I may have to also bite the bullet and pick up Refactoring UI.
Note: I am in no way connected to the Tailwind folks other than through my credit card.
I love the poster with the AI-generated avatar admonishing him for not making the software "easy to use" and suggesting that this will hamper his business, completely papering over the fact that LLMs will never be "potential monetization candidates" (ew, wording).
Adam goes into depth on this in an episode of his podcast: https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
I didn’t know he started a new podcast!
It's insane how much AIs use Tailwind and yet the companies aren't contributing anything. It would be trivial for Anthropic or Cursor to pay something.
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.
For what it's worth, Cursor does support Tailwind, see their sponsors page. But certainly agree.
https://tailwindcss.com/sponsor
How would you possibly enforce this? I can disconnect my laptop from the internet and the local LLM will still autocomplete TW classes. Does JetBrains therefore owe TW every time it does this? What if it was actually completing UnoCSS class names that happen to overlap? How about when it's just simple autocomplete based on what classes are visible and what I've used within the same file?
These might sound like snide rhetorical questions, but when you start demanding payment, they're very real.
> How would you possibly enforce this?
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.
Then pretty soon people will stop using Tailwind and use another OSS atomic CSS library instead, like UnoCSS. You can't stop the hydra.
Sounds like full employment for IP lawyers. Not a world I'd prefer.
> It would be trivial for Anthropic or Cursor to pay something.
You don't get rich by paying people what they deserve.
If they tailwind, it sets a precedent for others. They can't pay everyone.
So you're saying that just because they can't pay everyone, they should pay no one?
Yeah I know how that sounds but it's the most logical explanation.
Alternatively, they don't have a viable business model?
This isn't rocket science. If your business can't exist within the law, it doesn't get to exist.
There’s no law that says you have to pay businesses because you make customers life easier.
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?
Tell Uber you said hi.
> It's insane how much AIs use Tailwind and yet the companies aren't contributing anything. It would be trivial for Anthropic or Cursor to pay something.
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?
It’s crazy to me that it was ever a business to begin with.
Cool, in a way! But this feels like just going back to normal.
Apparently they were 8+ people, in 2024 team size was 6 and were hiring 2 more [0] and in 2020 they had $2m+ ARR [1].
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...
> 2020 they had $2m+ ARR
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.
Very good point, and I imagine part of the issue here... everything they sell is one-time payment, more of a reason they should have been preparing for the music to stop
On his morning walk/podcast thing about the topic he said 75% of the team = 3 developers
I wonder if that includes him or not as the remaining 25% as 1 member.
No it was the 3 co-founders, a part-time person and 4 engineers. Now they are 3 engineers down.
But surely the co-founders pay themselves too. I don't understand the logic in not counting them as part of the company.
Tailwind had several times more than 2M / ARR at their peak.
I believe you, I'm just going out of the figures they have published. If they had "several times more" annual revenue, then not having a warchest for situations like this is puzzling.
A lot of open source projects attempt to become a business in some form or another (or vice versa). Great examples of this include Astral (creators of UV and Ruff), TursoDB, TigerBeetle, etc etc etc. People want to get paid for the project they work on. Some of their business models will fail. This is probably a case of tailwind growing their engineering team faster than they should have when the AI writing was on the wall in 2023.
I think a problem is that tailwind has no moat compared to most of those. If it never received any further updates today it would still be effectively feature-complete, save for the occasional new css features.
I don't disagree, but I think differentiating between Tailwind CSS (which is free) and Tailwind UI. Tailwind UI (Tailwind Plus) is a different story I think. It's extremely useful in its current form, but could benefit from more
Yeah, I was referring more to the fact that tailwind didn't have that many other ways to monetise compared to other OSS projects. Their paid templates and courses kinda fulfilled their goal in that way, they made the founders wealthy, but is there a sustainable business there?
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.
You can really feel the stress in Adam's comments. It must play absolute hell with your mental health, it's anxiogenic from the sidelines just thinking about it. Stay healthy and safe mate.
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).
> 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.
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.
This GitHub conversation is disgraceful. Lots of complaints and no support to the devs.
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
although I've mentioned this in a subcomment, I want to highlight that the PR itself also seems to be an excuse to get the library he made to be used by TailwindCSS (https://github.com/quantizor/markdown-to-jsx)
Nope. Started with regex but it was brittle so I used my library which parses to AST which is easier to work with. It's a docs site, so I'm getting one more download woohoo.
Something’s wrong when a key piece of foundational web tech is staring down unsustainability. Tailwind is almost ubiquitous these days. It needs to continue to 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.
I’m sorry for what’s happening to Tailwind, it clearly sucks, but a library like that is definitely not a key piece of foundational web tech the same way bootstrap and jquery weren’t.
As an engineer, I want to believe this, but really - does it?
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.
Webdev has overvalued DX to the detriment the user experience for the past 10-15 years. A correction has been long overdue.
This "key piece of foundational web tech" was released 5 years ago and gained prominence maybe 2-3 years ago. Let's not exaggerate its impact. We were perfectly fine before Tailwind and will be fine after it.
We were not fine before Tailwind, we aren't fine now, and we won't be fine after it until the day we finally recognize that CSS is a terrible foundational standard that deserves to be replaced.
> deserves to be replaced
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"?
> key piece of foundational web tech is staring down unsustainability
This must be satire. CSS is what's actually foundational; literally, a foundation upon which Tailwind was built.
It's a key component for many webdevs even if it isn't literally foundational.
CSS is foundational.
Tailwind is not.
“Foundational” seems a bit overkill here. There is nothing foundational about it – it’s a convenience tool, albeit a very good one.
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.
I've never used Tailwind. I guess it's just an alternative to Bootstrap from the docs?
There's plenty of alternative CSS frameworks.
I can absolutely see why it's difficult to monetize.
You could go back in time and say this about jQuery. Tailwind's future was always questionable because CSS is growing in new and amazing ways, and wrapping the complexity of new CSS features into helper classes isn't really a sustainable model.
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.
The difference is that jQuery was replaced by other libraries, while Tailwind grows in popularity, but due to AI its creator doesn’t benefit from this popularity as much as before
jQuery was essentially replaced by JavaScript (and browser compatibility) getting better, but it continued to exist and grow because it was the de facto way to DOM manipulation, especially if you had to copy and paste off of Stack Overflow, or roll out a framework based UI.
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.
The difference is jquery went away because better things replaced it (in javascript). If the fundamental need for tailwind has passed why is it's usage growing? It's more that the problem solved by the paid portion of tailwind is now solved by AI.
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.
Sounds shady.
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!
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.
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?
A really interesting moment:
- The value they created (mindshare, shared “standards” for naming properties, and design atoms) and what they charged for (templates that AI can replace) are two different things — and AI has shortened the time it takes for this discrepancy to show up.
- Isn’t almost all of Tailwind’s value actually in that shared semantics (“mt-2” = a small top margin) — not only in users’ heads, but now also in LLM training data? Isn’t it more of a standards organization (like ISO) than a product company (yes, sure, standards are also a product/service)?
- They criticize AI for extracting value, but I wonder if Tailwind's business model is also value extraction from the standards they established.
- And isn’t it almost a miracle that a token library and the idea of “let’s name five margin sizes” (which they weren’t even the first to do - I started with Basscss) could sustain an ~7-person company for so long?
I tried this LLM prompt for deep research: "Tailwind is laying off people. I consider their business much more of a standards body (like ISO) — their main value is the mindshare and shared semantics and design atoms. What business models could they adopt from standard bodies’ business models?"
However, after reviewing the suggestions, I believe tailwind movement is probably not large/important enough to make money in a similar way (sell certification, membership with governance privileges, training ..).
Two interesting ideas: "Keep human docs free, but put machine-optimized “spec corpora” behind licensing (because AI is the channel disrupting them)."
"Stop relying on docs-as-marketing if AI is eating that funnel, and instead monetize the privileges and assurance around the standard (governance, certification, conformance, canonical distribution)."
(Don't get me wrong, I love using Tailwind, but I believe they need to see their business realistically.)
They were perfectly positioned to build a Lovable/Bolt/Replit back in the day... might not be too late now either.
They could sell training data too. Though, UIs are relatively solved. But great UIs and criticizing UIs aren't.
Learned a lot from Refactoring UI, and I know (from trying) that it's impossible to make a code review bot based on out of the box sota models today. Vision capabilities are lacking here, and I can see demand for more data here. And Adam's taste likely fits well here.
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?
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).
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.
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
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
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.
Make Tailwind Plus an annual subscription, not a one-time purchase.
Corporate sponsorships.
In-person training focused on big corps.
Acquisition.
Just to build on this, Vercel would be an obvious acquisition candidate. It feels up their alley and they make heavy use of Tailwind.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
They had 8 employees
Sure, but to maintain a CSS framework? Seems like they way overhired.
They have some rust tooling, no?
With TC of $250k. There is a lot of room for optimization.
They shouldn’t
>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.
This tells me the problem wasn't AI but the overall business wasn't healthy. Docs don't drive sales.
Before LLMs, Google was showing highlights which took crawled content and displayed it on google search results, meaning they’d get less traffic on their site while google stole their content.
It’s unfortunate that google helped kickstart the world wide web but now they’re extracting everything while polluting search results with ads
> google helped kickstart the world wide web
Where on earth did you get that idea? The web existed long before Google - Google just found a unique way to monetise other people’s content
Doesn't matter. Even if people were for some reason still going to their docs there would simply be no need for the types of paid products they offer - prebuilt template components.
Why pay for a template when AI's can shit out your entire design system and multiple templates in 5 minutes, not to mention competition from other template systems like shadcn that are completely free.
And yes they might not be the best quality but you just prompt it until you like it and then use it as a reference.
Its almost like he is asking users to take a stand between using LLMs and using Tailwind.
LLMs, or Tailwind. Pick one!
It seems like every (coding) AI model out there is generating html with TailwindCSS styling.
@adam: this is just an idea. Have you tried reaching out to OpenAI, Anthropic et al to become sponsors of tailwind? Could that be a viable revenue path?
Maybe you could offer LLM friendly docs to them, or access to something valuable for them? Or maybe they’re just happy to sponsor.
Tailwind and its popularity make LLM’s more valuable, so I’m sure the model makers want Tailwind to thrive.
Any other monetization ideas to help Adam?
Bolt is what turned me onto it (same with React Aria).
Google now sponsors Tailwind:
"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."
https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2009339263251566902
Didn't he (half) jokingly ask Anthropic to buy Tailwind a few weeks ago, right when Bun was acquired? Makes a lot more sense now.
source?
found it https://x.com/adamwathan/status/1995940378101621194?s=20
thx :)
My surprise is that the tailwind creator could have a engineering team based in a css framework that basically was used for people that didn't knew real css. Is normal that this people now use other products more effective how AI for this task.
I know CSS and was quite sceptical about tailwind before I used it in anger.
I was going to write a longer response, but instead I keep reading your last sentence:
> Is normal that this people now use other products more effective how AI for this task.
I think it's too early to tell on that.
We bought Tailwind UI and it was very good and I learned a lot of nice tricks from it.
Real shame, and I fear it is just the start of the impacts of AI on our industry.
It is clearly the beginning of the end of many small shops in the supply chain. I hope bigger fish buy them so the tech can be more integrated into future AI products, but I doubt they will be smart enough to do that.
I bought Tailwind Plus when it was still Tailwind UI years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it in hobbyist projects and some professional projects. Would have pushed for company license if my current company isn’t exclusively native apps.
Quoting Adam,
> 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?
Create a license that prevents AI companies that generate html based on tailwind from doing it without being in a commercial package. Let them know of the license change and give them 3 months to adjust. Keep tailwind accessible and allow that llm instruction to make it's way into the codebase so it gets picked up by multiple "AI" businesses that output code. This is your new business model.
Open source was not ready for this type of businesses that don't give a dam about rights or copyrights.
It’s open source under an MIT license, I wouldn’t use Tailwind if it wasn’t open source but there is nothing stopping them from future releases being non-open source.
They can’t retroactively pull the license, and most people would just start using a OSS fork of tailwind if they did.
It was probably inevitable. Building a commercial offering (mostly templates) around code which could be considered as "commodity" is extremely hard to do. I'm glad Adam and his team have had a lot of success already with this, but for sure it was not sustainable on the long run. If you are reading this, thanks Adam for having created Tailwind. It's not for everyone, but it's for some people, and that's good enough for me. We need options, and you were a solid one of them.
The PR author posted a TikTok link [1] the thread later explaining their position. Their behaviour seems very unprofessional to me. Mayve the just want to increase engagement to their accounts. Tailwind definetly made the right call here.
[1] https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZThLjg284/
AI taking jobs by users avoiding ads. It makes me wonder how widespread this is and what other "not so obvious" job-taking effects it has.
That's not what they're talking about here, though, is it? They have premium offerings as well, which LLMs are causing people to not buy.
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.
If your business can easily be replaced or lose revenue because of AI, it doesn't sound like a good business model to begin with
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.
We should have Telethons for all the companies on whose products we build our products but whose livelihood depends on the goodwill of others lest can't keep the lights on OR they get sold to some soulless corp and turned to crap.
I never appreciated tailwind until AI models revealed it as such a token-efficient way transport styles between models and other use-cases. AI aruably hurts demand for their premium offering the same way it hurts demand for junior devs.
Sincerely hope the Tailwind team can navigate this rough patch.
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.
How does something like Tailwind lead to a company big enough that you can layoff 75% of the engineering team?
I don’t know how big the “team” was, but 75% suggests maybe 4 engineers, one left. The next number up that works is 8, and 8 full time engineers to work on tailwind seems like a lot.
Listened to the podcast, it was 3 laid off.
LinkedIn says the company was 2-10 employees. 75% laid off wouldn't have been a lot of people. Tough for them though.
Three engineers laid off, one remaining.
It was three out of four people.
https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/discussions/1467...
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
3 of 4. Not a behemoth by any stretch. A bit sad.
I was wondering the same thing.
I'm happy to see this, not because I wish Adam failure. I am a Tailwind user myself and use it in all of my projects. Generally am a fan of Adam and respect his business.
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.
Out of curiosity, do you think the decrease in revenue for your tech course business is due to lack of demand (i.e. potential customers just ask an LLM rather than learn from a course now), or due to disruption in your acquisition channel (i.e. reduced traffic from SEO to your blog due to potential customers seeing Google's LLM answers at the top of the search results page)? Like for example, do you have other marketing channels such as social media, youtube or paid ads?
I think it's both but I think the end result is less traffic means less sales.
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
Thank you for sharing, I really appreciate it! I've been working on my own tech course/education platform for the past couple years, and the landscape seems to be moving beneath our feet!
Indeed, I hope things work out for you.
Hey! you just discovered media piracy dude! Congrats!
That's an interesting way to think about it.
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.
It's important to remember this is just the commercial arm. The OSS side has as many maintainers as Adam allows and the community is quite active with PRs and volunteer work. Tailwind the project will be ok. Someone will fork it if stales thanks to its popularity. That being said, many more companies should sponsor considering its ubiquitous adoption.
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 bought their Plus thing a while back and not I can't find myself a reason to use it.
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.
Im currently considering buying it actually. I’ve landed a decent side-project building out a CRM for a small business that wants to ditch Salesforce. It’s all internal tooling so the customer has no care or need for a highly customized fancy UI and that $299 is peanuts relative to the time saved and my hourly rate. While I could just use Bootstrap it’s starting to feel a bit too dated (subjective).
I recommend buying it, but I would not be surprised if you still end up using some LLM augmented workflow to do the plumbing and integration when using it. It’s not really a one-click install type of thing that you get from it if you get my analogy. Also, if your customer doesn’t care for fancy UI, then more even the case to let the AI design it for you and pick something like DaisyUI or shadcn and their MCPs with Tailwind.
I've seen that the team had 4 members. 3 being laid off.
I bought Tailwind UI/Plus just for my side projects several years ago because it was so useful. I'm very sad to see this.
Licensing hasn't caught up yet. It probably wouldn't be the worst idea to have a simple content copyright license protocol or standard that works for LLMs?
Something simple and obvious, like sticking a license file that has certain expected fields in /.well-known. I wouldn't be surprised if this is already being discussed because it would easily allow agents to check for special license requirements that only apply to them, directing them how to share content while remaining in compliance.
That's no better than robots.txt, it's simple to bypass and with the current LLM tech there's lots of plausible deniability regarding the output.
Never been a fan of tailwind, but this is kinda sad. Given it's popularity what a sad situation that they aren't getting able to get properly funded.
I think the solution is one of the big companies with lots of money to acquire tailwind. Specifically Vercel. They use it, their v0 thing uses tailwind allover, they have bought a bunch of open source companies in the past, and they should have deep enough pockets. Last year they acquired tremor blocks, which is a UI library, that uses tailwind!
Makes perfect sense, lets get it done.
Refactoring UI is a great book that i've had a ton of value from. Tailwind plus also, and i've been so surprised/impressed to see that my one time purchase kept granting me new stuff. Thanks a lot to Adam and the Tailwind team.
I love Tailwind, and I am really sorry Adam and co are going through this. They've built a great product, and it's brought joy back building again for me.
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.
The issue seems to be that LLMs already consumed large parts of the templatized code somewhere. Not directly from TW but from some other project. Codex / Claude are also exceptionally good at whipping out a UI quickly even when given flimsy requirements. Its hard running this business and competing against a several billion dollar machine. Wonder how Material UI is doing as they have a similar business model.
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.
shadcn/ui I'd argue is probably the single biggest factor in the declining Tailwind revenue more so than just LLMs in general.
As said is it is to say shadcn is what Tailwind should've created and maintained for a fee rather than some html/css templates that are easily replicated.
I say this as someone who bought Tailwind+ to support the project many years ago and still use Tailwind every single day.
Tailwind is nice and all be it’s crazy verbose, I still am a fan of bootstrap. In the days of AI and tokens. Tailwind classes and styling cure through tokens. lol
As a avid user of Tailwind and one who purchased Tailwind CSS Plus, it's very sad to hear.
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
I'm a Tailwind Plus customer in spite of not being the world's biggest Tailwind fan. Even though it really grinds my gears how unreadable markup can be when littered with Tailwind classes, I appreciate the quality and variety of the templates and components available in Tailwind Plus and the constant (free!) updates. So this is a bummer to hear. Many thanks to Adam and the team.
not the most important point here, but llms.txt won't have any impact on anything anyway.
I'm fairly convinced these are bot / LLM generated PR's in the first place; the content is nonsensical garbage.
No, I spent many hours of my personal time on it.
You spent many hours of your personal time trying to enable AI companies to better steal OSS work?
Dude get a better hobby or something lol
What? That's not what this does at all. Educate yourself. It has nothing to do with the commercial side of his business, it's just the already public docs in cleaned up pure text form.
Ever feel like creating and nurturing an opensource project? Some of those responses make me second guess doing anything with opensource.
So, is it AI or a problematic business model that caused this?
This is the actual comment that it's mentioned: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
However, the whole conversation is worth reading (but it's sort of heartbreaking).
Sounds like fairly decent folks, all around.
Tailwind UI could be the missing piece for AI generated frontend to have consistency, but it seems that shadcn took that place in the last 3-5 years.
Companies like Vercel, Lovable, and Stackblitz should pay salaries to each of these engineers. Their business succeeded only because Tailwind exists.
Companies like Vercel, Lovable, and Stackblitz should dissolve because their existence is a net negative for humanity.
Why is there existence a net negative for humanity?
Same reason as tobacco companies.
I agree with the sentiment that companies should help fund open source they depend on, but I think it's a stretch to say those business succeeded "only" because of Tailwind. It's a great project, although I'm pretty sure they would have figured out a way to work with CSS without it.
Welcome to the internet, most of it is build by unknown OSS developers, how many people will you go ask these companies to pay for?
My takeaway from this: If LLM can eat your lunch, you should remove your cash cow from crawler avenues and gatekeep it to humans only
There is an industry wide biting the hand that feeds them going on. It would be nice for people to realise that's what's happening.
I bought Tailwind UI, now Plus a couple of years ago. I've also dabbled with a Claude skill that scrapes a "UI block" source from the site and transforms it into a Rails view component. Maybe there's a way to make Plus and LLMs work together rather than compete?
> 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.
Specific link to actual comment: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
I think that the OP should update link to this comment
I never personally wanted Tailwind as a product, but really feel for them when I see comments like this one [1]:
> Here's a friendly tip for the Tailwind team that you should already know, but I will repeat anyways: If your goal is monetizing your software, then making your software as easy to use for people's workflows, is paramount.
I made the horrible life mistake of starting a company around developer tools, and I would never, ever repeat the experience because of “friendly” stuff like this. I don’t know why software developers are so entitled, but it’s a serious culture problem.
[1] https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
I also made a horrible life decision in starting a company around developer tools, and I agree. Taking one of the comments from the PR:
> It's insane to blame everybody else for not being able to create a viable business model from an OSS project. Everybody who is using Tailwind is actually SUPPORTING Tailwind. Everybody who is reporting bugs properly is SUPPORTING Tailwind. Everybody who is collaborating and PRs changes is SUPPORTING Tailwind.
> Tailwind grew a lot due to community acceptance and support, and collaborations.
> The only person to blame here is the CEO/Main maintainer of Tailwind. They've made bad decisions, hired coders without knowing how to make enough money to pay them.
> If you want to monetize a free service, you either know what you do or you make mistakes and lose what you've built. It was always a risk; we are not at fault.
> @adamwathan I respect you for everything you've done, but you need to take a few breaths, take a walk, think, sleep, and come back, ask apologize of the community, and start working on solutions/crisis management.
And you always know that when you open the GH profile of people saying such things, you'll see an empty timeline. This particular user has a single repository which he's committed to a handful of times over the last year and has setup a GitHub sponsorship for it.
I try to remind myself that these types of people are a (loud) minority but it's absolutely soul destroying.
Yep. I almost edited my comment to include that one as well! "Insane", indeed.
As you note, the tire-kickers were the worst -- people who forked the Linux kernel (with no additional commits) trying to process the entire repo on a free plan, for example, then complaining (loudly) when cut off.
They have the UI Blocks, Templates and UI Kit in https://tailwindcss.com/plus. I think they are in a good position to build an AI website builder similar to lovable.dev if they wanted to.
Just charge a bucks for every deployment or something. Most of will easily pay a dollar.
Tailwind should not be free, its good.
I think you're underestimating the composition.
Explain please
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.
This has been a long time coming I think. I remember listening to an interview with the creator maybe over a year ago now and him saying revenue is way down, presumably because of AI
I do wonder though if the llms.txt could actually be used for their benefit? Why not literally recommend the paid upgrades within it?
I would also say that the tailwind ui library is facing stiff competition from free offerings like shadcn.
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.
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/
It solved a problem, people will pay for that.
Now LLMs have removed the problem, so there's declining interest in solutions.
While I'm a shameless freeloader with mostly backend skills - Adam has my utmost respect for out of the box innovation.
I did buy some of this books. Not the Tailwind UI though.
Adam, you gotta pay bills too. I understand that. And I respect that.
The day a product of mine starts making money, I'll come knocking your door.
Thank you.
That's sad to hear, if true, and I'd have gladly paid for Tailwind if they'd had a "OK, so you use our CSS indirectly" program in place. I'm aware of "Tailwind Plus", but that seems to be React-only, and thus the opposite of where I want to be.
It's not React only. It has pure/regular HTML, React, and Vue. I have mainly only used the pure HTML personally as I use Phoenix/LiveView for most of my stuff, and it works phenomenally well and is very copy/paste friendly. The UI/console they provide is also top notch. For others who do use React, the React stuff also worked well too for one project I did that was a SPA.
It's well worth the money IMHO.
I just had a more-detailed look, and I'm not sure where I'd find the pure-HTML stuff? From https://tailwindcss.com/plus/templates/pocket#pricing:
"Our website templates are built using Next.js, so all of the markup is written using React"
And the individual components that make up these templates don't seem to have pricing attached, nor non-React usage examples?
Oh, yeah the templates are React/Next.js, but the components and things are not (they are what I described above). Templates are great but 95% of the value I get is the components and things
So, my initial reaction that "Tailwind Plus" only offers apparent value for React users is... entirely valid?
Only if you ignore this part of my comment:
> 95% of the value I get is the components and things
If you want (and only want) a pre-built site that just needs populated with content and maybe minor tweaks to things, then yeah it's React world. However I've rarely found that any template site (Tailwind or otherwise) is close enough to where it doesn't need medium to major surgery to meet my needs, at which point it's usually faster to just copy together components to what I actually want
> If you want (and only want) a pre-built site
No, I want to be able to @import "tailwindcss" without feeling guilty.
> I've rarely found that any template site
Well, meet https://basecoatui.com -- and there's more where that came from.
So, ehhm, no, I'm not ignoring the salient part of your comment: you are ignoring the entire point of my post, which is that if Tailwind had a non-React monetization strategy, things maybe, possibly, might have worked out better.
> No, I want to be able to @import "tailwindcss" without feeling guilty.
tailwindcss is and always has been free, so I don't understand why there would be any guilt with using it. Tailwind UI/Tailwind Plus is essentially pre-built components built using tailwindcss, plus some pre-built site templates.
> Well, meet https://basecoatui.com -- and there's more where that came from.
Thanks, that looks great and will be useful to me! However, unless I'm missing something basecoatui is a component library much like what Tailwind UI/Tailwind Plus provides (though organized differently and useful in a different way IMHO). The template sites are essentially complete websites that you just git clone and it's ready to run. Quite different. basecoatui would be very useful to me, whereas template sites rarely ever have been.
> So, ehhm, no, I'm not ignoring the salient part of your comment: you are ignoring the entire point of my post, which is that if Tailwind had a non-React monetization strategy, things maybe, possibly, might have worked out better.
Apologies if that came off harsh, I didn't mean to ascribe any malice to your reply. However, it seems like there's some confusion here about what the Tailwind "templates" are. They aren't a component library, the component library is different and is not React only.
So to summarize, there are two major parts that are different:
1. Templates (pre-built sites that you git clone). React only
2. Pre-built pieces/components that you copy/paste and modify into your existing app.
You were linking to their React-only offering above, but the actual Tailwind Plus website is this one: https://tailwindcss.com/plus
The Tailwind UI blocks are a similar offering to Basecoat, and are available in non-React format.
The "Tailwind React Templates" are not really similar to Basecoat.
You can actually use tailwind via the script tag in a plain HTML file. Not for production, but great for whipping up prototypes
Indeed, I've done this quite a few times myself. It's also a phenomenal way to be able to start poking at UI immediately without messing with build pipelines or anything besides just pointing your browser at `file:///...`. Then if the prototype is useful it's very easy to just delete the script tag and get it set up "properly" for a prod build and you know your prototype will pretty much "just work"
> Going to lock this one as it's spiraling a bit.
Well that was an understatement. That issue devolved completely.
Where's the 75% layoff number from ? This thread is about making docs llm friendly.
I listened to his podcast this morning where he mentions 75% of their four person engineering team was laid off (only the founders and one engineer remain)
https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
75% is a lot more dramatic than 3 people geez
Yea this feels kind of unecessary from him and makes him look a bit full of himself.
He said he wanted to state it like that because he thought just saying "3 people" undersold the impact.
the impact of which seems a lot like its changing from company into side-project
Welcome to the age of clickbait and fake drama.
if you actually read the thread: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
Missed this bit, thank you.
Adam added a comment to that thread with the 75% number and more context.
Scroll down
ctrl+F 75%
No way the author of the PR created a TikTok to moan and mentioned it in 2 separate comments and accused Tailwind devs of "throwing a tantrum" ahaha.
Oh my days, how cringeworthy.
Multiple tiktok self-promotions in github comments is nuts
Can someone explain to me the advantage of writing class="bg-blue" instead of style="background-color: blue;" and why anyone ever thought they could make meaningful money from enabling the former?
The advantage is in both the speed of the shorthand when transferring the CSS you know you need for a layout from your brain to the element (flex items-center gap-2 vs. display: flex; align-items: center; gap: .5rem; - just try typing them both out), plus all the stuff inline styles can't do, such as variants based on screen size, colour scheme, user preference, pseudo-classes, parent/sibling state, etc. which you can get done in one place in one file in one sitting.
The money wasn't coming from that.
I don't see a significant difference between your two examples.
Narrowing in on background color is an extreme oversimplification of what Tailwind provides. I found it to be a great tool for working with CSS, especially for layout. Business viability can be debated, but the value is way beyond what you suggested.
For your first question, IMO the purported advantage is mainly convention at scale. There's nothing inherently wrong with raw CSS in style tags or other authoring models (well, except CSS-in-JS at runtime...). Tailwind is one simple authoring model that works at scale without fuss and bikeshedding. Wrote up my experience with the advantages and disadvantages on this though a bit ago to be able to point to[1].
For the second question, depends on your definition of "meaningful" I guess. I doubt the original goal was to make money. There's OSS less prolific than Tailwind that makes money. Is it unreasonable for those projects to seek ways to compensate their projects?
[1] https://wlls.dev/blog/on-tailwind
> why anyone ever thought they could make meaningful money from enabling the former
A better question might be why buyers thought it was worth paying for that "advantage" you want explained. When buyers think a thing like that, someone will fulfill their ask.
If LLMs are eating the revenue stream, that likely gives the answer:
Buyers thought Tailwind meant they didn't have to learn or do a thing in order to achieve an outcome. And someone built a niche around that.
Is it true, and if not, why does it persist? Also not hard to explain given today's approaches to learning and the abysmal state of the ad delivery sites that used to be web search.
It's almost impossible today to find the very few sites that show the standard component lib rendered as web components with modern CSS as supported cross browser -- no single party stands to profit from making that case. You'll see it in parts from other frameworks that aren't trying to do the UI saying "our framework drives native HTML/CSS/JS/WASM" with a few examples, but that's surprisingly unlikely to find from Google with "How do I make my web app look good?" if you don't know which terms to use.
One could probably make a niche living giving modern web-native training for corporates. (Plenty firms purport to offer this, but generally don't really teach past the days of bootstrap.) Price against their recurring licensing costs, and a $10K to $30K class (the type enterprise SaaS products like Hashicorp offers for e.g. Terraform ecosystem) for modern web might even pay better than Tailwind.
Generally, though, arbitrage plays can't be expected to last unless the value-add is actual work others don't want to do, so business model decay is likely to happen to things like Tailwind that have their ideas become standards that get implemented by the browser industry (see Apple and "Sherlocking": https://appdevelopermagazine.com/sherlocked:-the-controversi...
Can you modify your style tag to make the background turn purple on a mobile device? No? Ok.
If that's your goal, you probably shouldn't call the class bg-blue? It should be bg-blue-but-purple-on-mobile. But then it's definitely so specific it's the wrong way to select a style. If you want the page background to be blue but purple on mobile, write that in your CSS with a selector of "body" instead of ".bg-blue-but-purple-on-mobile"
The point being you can't do this with inline styles: "bg-purple md:bg-blue"
Yes but you should not use inline style for that (nor Tailwind).
The whole point of Tailwind is that it lets you do that. You can debate if Tailwind itself is a good idea but thats not relevant to comparing it to inline styles.
w-full md:max-w-[100px] bg-purple dark:bg-red hover:underline
Good luck writing that as inline style.
I absolutely love Tailwind CSS, big fan of Adam, too, just watching his journey over the past several years. I'm a bootstrapped solopreneur, too, doing an open core business for my dotnet job orchestrator Didact. It's so difficult running a business, I feel for him and his engineers he had to let go. Maybe they can build some sort of app to go along with Tailwind. Heck, even if they made the base library itself paid one day, I'd probably pay for it. Using Tailwind is just that good for me.
Shoutout to Adam Wathan and team. I rarely shell out any money, but Tailwind was an exception. They actually made front end development fun for me and added tons of value with their UI kit etc. Even though I rarely use it, I bought the lifetime to support their mission. Hope they can continue supporting the framework. It was the best thing to happen to front end in a long time imo.
It’s tragic that a good product, with a lot of users is not able to generate decent revenue.
Anyone selling software components is going to get cooked by LLMs. People have been talking about that since ChatGPT 3 landed. It's just sad to see it actually playing out.
Tailwind should have bought shadcn and started pushing a better subscription model. Shadcn & vercel ate tailwind's lunch imo.
Very sad. Any OSS project that depend fully on consulting will be on high risk. Platforms like deepwiki shrinks the knowledge gap massively.
there's no knowledge on deepwiki
only slop
That is old thinking. Deepwiki is so much helpful. I use ABP framework and never had to ask the developer anything.
I wonder if this is all due to AI, or whether shadcn/ui's popularity (and blocks, and themes, and registry of paid component libraries) has also impacted them. That's my personal go to, and not Tailwind UI paid, and that's not because of LLMs.
The truth is, business opportunities are rarely eternal, usually they are just an opportunity to make money within a short window of time, such as a decade or two. Sometimes even shorter than that, perhaps even only a year or two.
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?
> The truth is, business opportunities are rarely eternal, usually they are just an opportunity to make money within a short window of time, such as a decade or two. Sometimes even shorter than that, perhaps even only a year or two.
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.
Is 75% 3/4 engineers, 30/40 or something else?
75% it’s 3/4, and plural “we have let go” means 6 people was let go. Or three if that’s a royal “we”.
It says 75% of the engineer team. There might be other roles not affected.
I bought the Refactoring UI book years ago and it taught me so much about simplicity and good design!
looking at their partner list, which is 5000$ a month, and theres 16 partners, thats minimun 80k$ a month. just an insight.
It would appear that they pay their employees fairly well, as seen in this old job posting [1] (not all levels will make this much of course but it gives you a general idea, almost 300k a year is a lot even for a staff engineer).
$275,000 is almost $23,000 a month. Take that times N amount of employees, and other business overhead, and suddenly $80k a month is literally peanuts.
[1] https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-st...
Do you think they’d survive?
i have no idea, even less in usa, but with 80k a month income you could def pay for a dev team and infra in some countries.
Sad to hear such from creator of tailwind
I will be honest. I love open source. But something that really annoys me about the open source community is that the developers take this holier-than-thou approach to backing up maintainers in circumstances like this, but obviously they are not paying with their own money. They are just complaining, and it feels a lot like virtue signaling at worst and pure naivety at best. It feels extremely disengenous at this point, and it's annoying.
What do we actually know?
1. People are inherently selfish. If you give me this shit for free, I'm gonna use it for free. Obviously everyone is doing this. Spare me the "but I go to this conference or that conference".
2. Code is cheap. Why would I ever pay for something that is not gated behind a service with API limits and costs?
3. Coding as we know it is getting commoditized. That's correct. We are all going to lose our jobs as we know it today. Clearly that's the future. Wake up!
But when making these points, open source devs (and honestly a lot of people on hacker news) whine and complain. I don't really know why I'm leaving this comment - I just feel like I'm at an annoyance breaking point. This guy is obviously struggling to pivot and all the grandstanding and virtue signaling just feels like additional noise and wanting to feel good with very little action.
Because of point 3 most SWE's are also hesistant to pay for software. The positive feedback loop of "I did well out of this so i will support others as well" is over.
When you are thinking your days are numbered any cost to develop software (even token budget) is measured. As coding becomes commoditized the ROI in code will drop of that code (capitalism rewards scarcity; not value delivered) and you suddenly become cost conscious. We are moving from a monopoly-moat like market to a competitive cost based market in SWE as AI improves.
As an early Tailwind Plus / Tailwind UI customer I don’t think it has anything to do with AI. The product and technicals are there but from a business and user perspective Tailwind the paid product was trash and still is. It tried to do everything and lacked direction.
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 web is too open. Sad day to read these comments.
This is what you get when you sell a lifetime product
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
> our revenue is down close to 80%.
Damn
Really sucks to see this happen! Been using Tailwind for past few years now.
All the more reason to go closed source. Except for few really vital components that have national security implications (OS/Kernel, drivers, programming languages), which can be funded and supported by universities, Governments etc, I am of the strong opinion that everything else should go closed source.
Enough with this BS. Stop feeding the slop.
People with that perspective shouldn't have been doing open source in the first place. AI isn't hurting people sharing things, only people who are pretending to share but actually indirectly selling things.
There is no one in this World who will do things purely for altruistic purposes. Even if not for money, it would be for something intangible that ingratiates the Self (fame for example).
I can't find a single example of a software developer who has put out software purely for some altruistic purpose without any returns on that investment (direct or indirect).
Building a sustainable business model was a great way to justify open source. Not anymore.
That’s rough. Respects to the honesty.
really surprised tailwind didn't get ahead of this by providing some sort of mcp interface and custom agent for designing design systems and autogenerating ui code directly based on the user's project. if it worked out of the box or with a few clicks via en extension, it would be a killer feature.
75% is how many people?
Sounds like 3:
https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/discussions/1467...
Six of eight
How does Tailwind make money?
LLMs are mostly trained on jsweb stuff. Are very good for it. The need for web developers will GREATLY decrease. Thats how it is.
I don't like tailwind. However, I don't wish that to anyone.
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.
I feel very sad. The way AI is delivering, I suspect 90% will laid off within 2-3 years. I don't know myself what should I do in future.
Now would be a good time for AI companies to sponsor open source
> 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?
I think in this case, just about everyone falls into the funnel. I think it's difficult to find a potential buyer of tailwind who doesn't visit the documentation.
>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.
Wow that is just, really tragic... AI continues to just decimate this industry. Everyday I'm happy that I am, and have been since about day 3, an AI-hater.
How many of us understood the scale of the problem when music creators were ranting because the piracy was destroying their business?
We'll have to adapt mates. Sadly (i dont say this happily) this is a new reality we cant decide on.
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.
really sorry to hear this, been a big fan of tailwind. hopefully they can turn it around. good luck to adam and the team.
If I were mtsears4 - after such reply I would dig a deep hole, hide there and cry for a week.
Dude thought he is smart but ended up being an entitled brat.
Honestly I think that they should be putting Tailwinds Plus and consulting services first. Sucks that AI is making the web itself obsolete now.
Before you shame the creator over this, read the thread thoroughly. I don't know what the solution here is tbh.
Frankly, I haven't visited the tailwind page in over six months as well. The AI just does things. Clearly the upsell path for the company is not sustainable.
What would the solution be?
That sucks. I’m not a big fan of Tailwind, but at least it helps non-designers make somewhat decent user-interfaces.
It’s hard to run a software business.
Pretending like this is some Google-level apocalypse when it's a garage band downsizing? Spare me.
I was downvoted to oblivion for posting this comment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42439059
But I'm merely telling the truth. The fact that people don't like it doesn't change the fact that software engineers are largely replaceable with AI now.
We are seeing the second order effects now that people using AI are not buying software products anymore, leading to layoff of software engineers.
I feel like you don't need engineers anymore. Bad news for all of us, but its just a fact of life.
You need engineers but they have to pay for tokens now. Paying subscription just to have ability to do the job.
Maybe they don't, since CSS is the easiest to tap into in terms of programming. Database-driven software still heavily relies on seasoned engineers and cannot be messed with AI.
For something basic like CSS, it is true. Ask ChatGPT or Claude Code to come up with any Tailwind template, and it will spit out within seconds for free, and even integrate it into the project effortlessly. This approach does not apply to heavy software such as a comprehensive CRM or another type of CRUD platform.
In my mind, there are two types of businesses in the world: one is not particularly challenging but rather trivial, and the other is very high-tech.
Today, LLMs make the first type of business much harder.
> 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.
Then step aside as the maintainer of the project then and better yet, make something like Tailwind-foundation etc. which is truly open source. Go spend your time building your business, but you can't become the bottleneck and not do anything for something that has become so foundational for Web Dev.
I urge you to understand what he is going through, he started the project, made it available freely, as more effort was required he added a premium offering to keep the whole thing running and hire more help. Please pause to think before coming to a rush judgement. How would you react if you had done exactly the things he had done, and you just had to lay off most of your team yesterday. We are humans and not robots, for all he has done, he has certainly earned the right to some times focus on what's affecting him first before he can focus on OSS.
Be Kind, we are all born billionaires with billions of "kindness tokens" in the bank, don't use them sparingly.
He gives a gift to the world and you’re telling him to just give it up because somebody did work nobody asked for and he doesn’t want it for his project
Get a grip.
I use Tailwind for connecting dev machines across two continents and as a free user I think it's an amazing product. It breaks my heart to see people losing their jobs because there isn't enough revenue.
I can empathize with the founder too because I was kind of in their shoes last year. Had been laid off and nearly exhausted my savings but I was more worried about having to let go of folks I employed.
You might have mistaken tailwind and tailscale.
I have done so on countless occasions, but this is about the css "framework".
tbh it annoys me when i want to go to my tailscale console but my browser takes me to tailwindcss which I have never used..
You're thinking of Tailscale.
Tailwind is a UI styling and components company. Are you thinking of Tailscale?
I think you mean tailscale
Tailwind was far ahead of its time in having an OSS business model overall friendly to users while still being able to fund development (Note: OSS projects like Minio, ScyllaDB and CockroachDB do a far more insidious "open core only", or "crazy licensing fees after x processes/users" , etc). It was great to see OSS succeed financially without ads or punishing users.
"Information should be free", sure, but lets not kid ourselves, these massive new AI companies are making themselves new gatekeepers with new artificial moats for themselves. Information is not federated / distributed anymore.
We need "GPL for AI" that restricts AI scrapers from performing content theft/repackaging.
I think it's too late for that. For new projects? Of course.
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hm, families need to eat.
Then why is HTTP, CSS and HTML free ? It's creators need to eat too. Should they start charging for it ?
Tailwind CSS is free and funded by extras like Tailwind Plus.
HTML and CSS are free to use but the W3C is funded by membership fees.
Which of those are evolving at the rate of frameworks?
BTW I'm of the opinion that frontend tooling developers should actually try to contribute things to HTML and CSS instead of building "component libraries" on top of them.
If the native controls were good and if the browsers allowed using "uniformly styled" versions of them then there would be no good reason for such libraries to exist.
Your comments in this thread are terrible, all of them. You are part of the reason why working on open source projects is so hard for people who obviously want to do good in this world. Check Adam's work: his work has been a net positive for the OSS community. Go spread your poison and nasty comments elsewhere please.
As someone who paid for a lifetime license of Tailwind UI, unlike, I strongly suspect, simlevesque - I 100% agree with this. The negativity is completely uncalled for, please take this somewhere else and do some self-reflection.
> Go spread your poison and nasty comments elsewhere please.
I have been on HN since 2008, his comment is by far the worst encounter ever in my memory. The sense of entitlement, not only in one comment by literally every single one of them in this thread and despite all the explanation he still believes he is right.
And to top it off he manage to drag HTML and CSS standards into it.
eeeh.. those are standards, not products.
I like how we recognize this necessity to our biology but commit everyone to Hunger Games-lite performative, fiat (by decree alone), economics due to lack of political action in the face of some walking dead politicians who can't get through a day or week without handfuls of pills, they're that pathetic.
We are a deeply unserious society.
Anyway; good luck going viral online, everyone. I got lucky, have had generational wealth in my back pocket since birth, am off the hook for you by our social norms. Hopefully it works out for you because I and the rest of us won't be engaged in political action on your behalf. Dance for the organ!
WTF?
So your answer to "how should open source projects achieve financial sustainability" is "don't even try"?
When you start making your open source project worse for your users because you are not making enough out of it I'll choose to use something else.
There's a point where it's too much and it just feels like a trojan horse when later you stop caring for your free users.
I think the part you're missing here is that the author here is under no requirement to accept changes to their project and everyone else is welcome to fork it if they disagree with choices made by the author.
The author did not in fact, make the project worse, all they did was not accept a change, and that is entirely different than making it worse.
Even those who stood to benefit from the change have not received a degraded experience in comparison to the current state of affairs, but the same experience as the current state of affairs, since no change occurred. It is truly within the author's rights to do this, in any case.
One should avoid a sense of entitlement to additional and ever-increasing quantities of free work when free work has already been done.
> all they did was not accept a change,
A change to make the documentation easier for LLM scrapers to inhale.
What would be the point? It would, in no way, improve anything. Probably not even for LLMs.
I am astounded the gentleman responded at all. I think all the talk of money (whilst urgent and catastrophic) is a red herring
For sure, yeah.
I notice that you didn't answer their question: How should OSS be funded?
Ethically
What's the ethically bad thing Tailwind did here? Not merging that pull request?
I'd feel lied to if someone offers me a free tool and later the person that controls it chooses to make it worse just to make more money.
I got bit by that many times and do my best to avoid it but when it happens it's a stab in the back.
At what point did they make it _worse_? Tailwind didn't remove any existing functionality here. What they did was refuse to merge a PR while they're trying to figure out how to navigate a difficult financial problem, all while being fully transparent about what's going on, and saying that they're open to merging the PR if/when they manage to get things together.
This is very different from, say, the minio situation, where they were actively removing feature before finally closing development down entirely. Whether tailwind will end up going down this route, time will tell. But as of right now, I find this reading to be quite uncharitable.
It's not even funcationality to the library code, it's a PR to their docs. If you just want optimized docs for your LLM to consume, isn't that what [Context7](https://context7.com/websites/tailwindcss) already has? Why force this new responsibility to the maintainer.
So which part did he make it worst?
By not adding an extra "feature" you deemed as essential?
Even more surprising is this is from an 2012 account.
How, exactly, have they made Tailwind worse just to make more money? Point to specifics, please.
Did they send you an email or call you? I doubt it.
You found their homepage. You found that they didn’t ask for money, and allowed you to use their product for free. You decided to use it.
And now, they’re liars. How dare they try to make money?
Please let us know if you launch this open source project, we’d all be excited to use it!
You keep repeating that he makes his project worse – an active action – while in fact he did not do anything at all, he just refused to change something.
The answer to "how should free things make money" is to not make them free. Any counterexamples are very fortunate. I don't know why people insist on giving away things for free while they actually desire to make money from those things. If the thing is valuable enough, someone will pay for it. Else...not
You're existing in hyper-capitalism. So yes big surprise, people need to make money.