Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team • Hacker News Board

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

#341

Post by arewethereyeta » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 7:52 PM UTC

Create a license that prevents AI companies that generate html based on tailwind from doing it without being in a commercial package. Let them know of the license change and give them 3 months to adjust. Keep tailwind accessible and allow that llm instruction to make it's way into the codebase so it gets picked up by multiple "AI" businesses that output code. This is your new business model.

Open source was not ready for this type of businesses that don't give a dam about rights or copyrights.

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

#342

Post by acabal » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 7:53 PM UTC

Taking their sponsors page at face value and doing the math, they're bringing in close to $100k/month with corporate sponsorships alone... how much money could maintaining a framework possibly cost?

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

#343

Post by Aperocky » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 7:54 PM UTC

burningChrome wrote: post #295

risyachka wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What most don’t realize is that this will happen to most businesses in all categories as more people rely on ChatGPT and Claude for discovery. No discovery - no business. And same with ads.if OpenAI decides not to add ads - prepare for even faster business consolidation. Those businesses preferred by llms will exponentially grow, others will quickly go out of business

> No discovery - no business. I do SEO as a side gig to my 9-5 as a developer. All four of my freelance companies I work with have seen their traffic drop up to 40% since LLM's have effectively taken over and people are using search engines less and less. We've had to pivot to short form social media advertising which seems to be closing the gap whereas before the majority of our leads were coming from organic search…

Perhaps SEO will become a business to churn out large amount of digestable text with friendly robot.txt and hoping the next AI model learns it? This seem to be the solution, just having a slightly longer turn around time.

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

#344

Post by ksec » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 7:54 PM UTC

robinhood wrote: post #209

simlevesque wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why is HTTP, CSS and HTML free ? It's creators need to eat too. Should they start charging for it ?

Your comments in this thread are terrible, all of them. You are part of the reason why working on open source projects is so hard for people who obviously want to do good in this world. Check Adam's work: his work has been a net positive for the OSS community. Go spread your poison and nasty comments elsewhere please.

> Go spread your poison and nasty comments elsewhere please.

I have been on HN since 2008, his comment is by far the worst encounter ever in my memory. The sense of entitlement, not only in one comment by literally every single one of them in this thread and despite all the explanation he still believes he is right.

And to top it off he manage to drag HTML and CSS standards into it.

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

#345

Post by thundergolfer » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 7:54 PM UTC

satvikpendem wrote: post #296

thundergolfer wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a business. Envato was a billion dollar business in 2017. I agree that AI makes these kinds of businesses vulnerable, but it's overstepping to say that these things aren't businesses.

I never said Tailwind the company wasn't a business, when I said "a product is not a business" I meant that as advice to creators in general, not in specific to Tailwind; of course it is, it made millions in revenue. What I meant was that even though businesses may exist, having a long-term, durable business model is not always viable.

"selling premade software assets" is a business, and it's the business both Tailwind and Envato were in. Both businesses got hit hard by AI. Check out Envato's homepage now. It's unrecognizable from what it was in 2017, and completely genAI oriented.

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

#346

Post by sergiotapia » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 7:55 PM UTC

Before you shame the creator over this, read the thread thoroughly. I don't know what the solution here is tbh.

Frankly, I haven't visited the tailwind page in over six months as well. The AI just does things. Clearly the upsell path for the company is not sustainable.

What would the solution be?

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

#347

Post by pier25 » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 7:55 PM UTC

burningChrome wrote: post #295

risyachka wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What most don’t realize is that this will happen to most businesses in all categories as more people rely on ChatGPT and Claude for discovery. No discovery - no business. And same with ads.if OpenAI decides not to add ads - prepare for even faster business consolidation. Those businesses preferred by llms will exponentially grow, others will quickly go out of business

> No discovery - no business. I do SEO as a side gig to my 9-5 as a developer. All four of my freelance companies I work with have seen their traffic drop up to 40% since LLM's have effectively taken over and people are using search engines less and less. We've had to pivot to short form social media advertising which seems to be closing the gap whereas before the majority of our leads were coming from organic search…

I'm not sure if this is comparable to the yellow pages vs the internet.

Google became profitable in 2001 whereas OpenAI et al are still operating at a huge loss. Even with ads it's not clear whether LLMs can be profitable unless they increase prices significantly.

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

#348

Post by mmcnl » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 7:55 PM UTC

Wow, this is a grim reality check: AI hyperscalers taking in billions of revenue, while at the same time putting honest business like Tailwind out of work, without any form of compensation. What happened to "you wouldn't steal a car" etc.? It's only illegal if you're not a trillion dollar company?

I have trouble expressing how terrible unjust it feels that AI companies are stealing money from the common people. I have no other way to put it.

Also: this will definitely limit the use of AI. People will stop publishing valuable content for free on the internet, if AI scrapers will steal and monetize it.

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

#349

Post by GuinansEyebrows » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 7:55 PM UTC

tqi wrote: post #192

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" ?

When you talk in meaningless terms like "traditional workers" and "tech bros", all it tells me is that you have divided the world into people you like and people you dislike and mourn / celebrate accordingly.

would you prefer "labor" and "class traitors"?

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

#350

Post by codeptualize » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 7:55 PM UTC

Never been a fan of tailwind, but this is kinda sad. Given it's popularity what a sad situation that they aren't getting able to get properly funded.

I think the solution is one of the big companies with lots of money to acquire tailwind. Specifically Vercel. They use it, their v0 thing uses tailwind allover, they have bought a bunch of open source companies in the past, and they should have deep enough pockets. Last year they acquired tremor blocks, which is a UI library, that uses tailwind!

Makes perfect sense, lets get it done.