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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

#301

Post by throwway120385 »

elictronic wrote: post #139
blitzar wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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

#302

Post by satvikpendem »

khy wrote: post #89
freedomben wrote: post #6

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'…

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.

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

#303

Post by threetonesun »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #231

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.

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.

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

#304

Post by motbus3 »

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

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

#305

Post by searls »

refulgentis wrote: post #251
freedomben wrote: post #6

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'…

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.

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/

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

#306

Post by suyash »

legitster wrote: post #185
sosodev wrote: post #26

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 lo…

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.

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

#307

Post by Twirrim »

simlevesque wrote: post #156
simonw wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How, exactly, have they made Tailwind worse just to make more money? Point to specifics, please.

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

#308

Post by jsheard »

jacooper wrote: post #280
theappsecguy wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

#309

Post by Rumple22Stilk »

ecshafer wrote: post #285
elictronic wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The earth of the expanse is 1000 times better than any time in history.
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