I've seen one of these posts every 6 months for the last 5 years and not a single one has figured out components yet.
I don't recommend Tailwind CSS
21–30 of 179 posts
Re: I don't recommend Tailwind CSS
#22What is funny with your article is that you talk about tradition, when actually these traditions are based on assumptions which are themselves based on beliefs like : "separation of structure and style are a good thing".
But this belief is only true if the language to describe the structure is html or js which creates not reusable pieces of style/structure.
But when you go for a different approach where everything is functions and strong types (ADT), like when you use haskell for exemple, this debate is over, because you handle EVERYTHING in your code, and stop fragmenting the truth into opaque and dissociated worlds (html, js, css, database, glue, docker, ...).
Re: I don't recommend Tailwind CSS
#23This is such a bikeshedding debate. While you don't recommend it, projects with Tailwind work . Over years. You can onboard new developers to it, able to contribute productively immediately . Likewise, you can pick up work after months or years and don't have to remember or rediscover how your styling layer works. The conventions and class names come really naturally fast, and you can always look it up. It's just not…
I can see this argument both ways. On the one hand, logically you'd expect the last assignment to take precedence, like the style attribute. On the other, conflicting styles don't make sense.
The random outcome, entirely dependent on the Tailwind generation internals, is the worst of all worlds though, it's just an unfortunate side-effect of relying on cascading sheets to drive atomic styles.
Re: I don't recommend Tailwind CSS
#24As a 26+ year frontender, years ago I was against it on so many levels. Until I tried it. Never looked back. Also, inheriting projects with someone else’s code is fine. Just a quick look at the central config and you’re good to go.
100% this. It looks terrible until you try it and it starts making so much sense.
Also works great with agent assisted development.
Re: I don't recommend Tailwind CSS
#25I can immediately spot organizations void of any skilled frontend engineering leadership by their use of Tailwind.
Generally coupled by some memory leaking React soup, solving 2016 SPA problems in 2026.
Likely 30-something years old MIT-bred leetcode ninjas that know little to nothing about front end technologies in the first place. They don't even remember _why_ the industry reached for client-side rendering library at some point. They think it's for interactivity. HN comments are quite telling about it.
Bloated slop is bloated slop, I still have to find a single example proving me wrong, and what's produced on top of react-tailwind by billion dollar companies just confirms my negative bias around the people using it, the results speak for themselves.
Re: I don't recommend Tailwind CSS
#26Tailwind is great. Not sure why you'd use anything else at this point.
Re: I don't recommend Tailwind CSS
#27This is such a bikeshedding debate. While you don't recommend it, projects with Tailwind work . Over years. You can onboard new developers to it, able to contribute productively immediately . Likewise, you can pick up work after months or years and don't have to remember or rediscover how your styling layer works. The conventions and class names come really naturally fast, and you can always look it up. It's just not…
The fact that “text-red-500 text-green-500” resolves by stylesheet source order rather than anything visible in the markup means the “locality of behavior” promise quietly breaks exactly when you compose components dynamically, which is why tailwind-merge exists at all, and needing a runtime dependency to answer “which of my two classes wins?” is a real design smell, not a bikeshed.
It's not true - agents will visibly struggle more with worse code bases. If anything, certain kind of maintainability matters more in this era, than before, because it is so much cheaper to just generate a huge amount of low quality code.
Re: I don't recommend Tailwind CSS
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that “text-red-500 text-green-500” resolves by stylesheet source order rather than anything visible in the markup means the “locality of behavior” promise quietly breaks exactly when you compose components dynamically, which is why tailwind-merge exists at all, and needing a runtime dependency to answer “which of my two classes wins?” is a real design smell, not a bikeshed.
It's not true - agents will visibly struggle more with worse code bases. If anything, certain kind of maintainability matters more in this era, than before, because it is so much cheaper to just generate a huge amount of low quality code.
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Re: I don't recommend Tailwind CSS
#29I see you have a .button, cool! So did you load the entire context of your project into your mind, and calculate every possible iteration of kind, size, color etc this button may have? And once you did that, did you come up with a semantically correct naming scheme that is clear and will not succumb to the inevitable .button_checkout_special_page_cta_widget a particular page will end up requiring?
No? Neither did I. I stopped thinking about CSS entirely almost a decade ago. Thanks Tailwind.
Re: I don't recommend Tailwind CSS
#30Not a big fan of vanilla tailwindcss too, but (from the perspective of someone that needs the job done) "just use modern CSS" as the author suggest is even worse.