Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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
#152I’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 t…
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.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#153Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#154Can 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?
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.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ment…
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.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#157The 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…
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.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#158I can't get over the Author of the CR addi g his responses on TikTok.. What have we come to?
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
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#159Sadly, 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, havin…
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.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#160Companies 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.