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Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

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Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already pay people to generate training data.

this is news to me, how does this work? who is getting paid?

Some relevant job ads for Anthropic:

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.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#134
post #90

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).

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

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

eeeh.. those are standards, not products.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#138
post #133

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[flagged]

I didn't ask how to do a bait and switch to offer a good free product and later ask for more money or else I'm going to make it worse. But I guess nuance is hard to understand.

Also it's always funny when someone tries to look up your past instead of giving convincing arguments.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" ?

You should learn to vote for UBI?

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#140
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI's going to be a whole lot less useful when it doesn't have any open source component libraries to crib from.

They already pay people to generate training data.

This can never match the scale of organic training data
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