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Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
51–60 of 893 posts
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#52The 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 lo…
AI's going to be a whole lot less useful when it doesn't have any open source component libraries to crib from.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#53I 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're thinking of Tailscale.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#54[flagged]
What was the monetization opportunity exactly? Pay for updated versions of the tailwind classes or something?
The core product was basically a library and those seem pretty hard to sell in any language, right?
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#55This 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?
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#56It’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.
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.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#57The 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 lo…
Maybe we need patreon equivalents for open source development?
It already exists. Tailwind has had GitHub sponsorships enabled for years but only 5 people have ever given them money that way.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#58I 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).
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#59[flagged]
> At around 1 PM Pacific yesterday, Adam called someone who had just been laid off from Laracasts an idiot. The person was lamenting about being replaced by AI.
This is totally untrue. The person who got laid off from Laracasts is @simonswiss, the person Adam is calling an idiot is @benjamincrozat.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#60[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 again…
There definitely is greed involved. But the other way around