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.
Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
21–30 of 893 posts
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#22Here is a link to their commercial offerings.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's some more context, which you seem to need: the reason they've laid off 75% of their devs is because their revenue is down 80%, despite tailwind being more popular than ever. This seems to be caused by a drop in visits to their documentation, which is really the only way people find out about their commercial offerings. This drop in visits to the docs is, in turn, most likely caused by the increased use of LLMs…
using tailwind docs is awful. I'd MUCH rather use an LLM than try to grok their documentation. That it was their only way to promote commercial offerings is not my problem, there are many other ways to approach this than encouraging a worse experience for devs.
What other ways can you approach it?
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#24It'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?
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#25[flagged]
Greed implies excessive accumulation of wealth. Based on the public statements, they are laying people off because they cannot afford to keep paying them while keeping the project afloat. It doesn't seem like greed is a factor here.
AI putting people out of work is a very real issue, and it is discussed on HN quite often. Here we have a very real example of it (apparently) and the reaction is vitriolic, but not against the AI processes, but the creators who are losing their work.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#26The 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.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#27I 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.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#28How does something like Tailwind lead to a company big enough that you can layoff 75% of the engineering team?
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#29It’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.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#30They have a right to decide what their product is. Just because someone sent a PR doesn't mean they have to consider it whatsoever!