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Shopify acquires Tailwind

tailwindcss.com

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Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#51

Post by danvayn »

simonw wrote: post #6

Here's some context on the impact AI had on the Tailwind Labs business model from January: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is... > But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. [...] > Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever.…

There is some slight irony in them continuing to make these statements for me. Mostly because Tailwind is still incredibly around (and worth investing in, hence Shopify acquiring them) and AI isn’t anything close to offering a drop in solution. That is to say, AI will implement tailwind when building as there isn’t a good alternative, and otherwise just references these docs for the user so that they don’t have to visit the website, so it’s not like it’s being used less.

If you think about it, the site docs garnering traffic (beyond potential tailwind labs conversions) is more of an indicator of a code or design smell than anything. That’s just my 2 cents as a guy who used to look up their docs constantly to confirm a pattern I was implementing, as tailwind classes were never really as self-evident as tailwind labs liked to believe they were IMO.

Like it just doesn’t make total sense to me to compare library documentation traffic hits to traffic hits that happen in other industries here, or with other products or companies. They aren’t even a traditional SaaS company, not that there really Is one either. Their service or income flow is defined by things like offering Enterprise support or a component library at a premium — things that aren’t simply dictated by or shown through documentation traffic trends; things that were encroached upon by plenty of other things besides AI.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#52

Post by mehagar »

nullbio wrote: post #36

As someone who built their entire platform on Tailwind and has been running gpt-6-astra for the last 5 days straight working on the migration away from it because it leaves an irrecoverable pile of slop when your project becomes large enough... Heed my warning. It's not that Tailwind itself is bad. It's good. But agents are notorious for re-inventing the wheel without hard constraints that prevent them from doing it…

What are you switching to?

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#53

Post by invalidusernam3 »

fg137 wrote: post #42

Serious question: is there a need to reach for tailwind if you are building a new site? Won't using vanilla CSS while taking advantage of the latest features be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining CSS), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?

LLMs seem to work well with tailwind which I assume is because there was a lot of tailwind in the training data. As a human I never found tailwind to be particularly easy to work with anyway (mostly because I can't be bothered to learn another CSS framework) so I was constantly checking the docs when manually writing code. But I do like the rigidity it forces, which is probably a good thing for AI coding as well.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#55

Post by ghm2199 »

simonw wrote: post #6

Here's some context on the impact AI had on the Tailwind Labs business model from January: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is... > But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. [...] > Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever.…

Noob question, I recall https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49491791 mentioned how the kernel source code and diffs were being crawled excessively. All else being equal, won't all the AI crawling agents mean traffic to docs should at least be stable(presuming changes happen all the time)?

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#57

Post by tylergetsay »

leftnode wrote: post #47

I thought Laravel would've been the one to scoop them up, but I'm glad they landed with Shopify. Adam's a solid dude and what him and his team have done to commoditize web design is to be lauded. To think it started as a side project and grew to the scale it did. Very impressive work.

How well is Laravel doing nowadays?

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#58

Post by [deleted] »

simonw wrote: post #39
aurareturn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think maybe they should have kept building Tailwinds CSS, release new versions, then charge a subscription to teams for their agents to access latest changes in their documents. In other words, the documents for the latest versions are hidden behind a pay wall.

If you release new versions without documentation it's easy for agents to generate that missing documentation.

[deleted]

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#59

Post by toomuchtodo »

lekevicius wrote: post #16
aurareturn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think maybe they should have kept building Tailwinds CSS, release new versions, then charge a subscription to teams for their agents to access latest changes in their documents. In other words, the documents for the latest versions are hidden behind a pay wall.

That's one way to ensure Tailwind v4 remains forever the only version anyone uses. Agents already are not very responsive to framework changes.

If people can't get paid to pay their rent and eat to write and support code, how is it relevant what the consumers of the code freeriding get? If the AI machine requires ongoing fuel to improve, they can pay for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#60

Post by ghm2199 »

ghm2199 wrote: post #55
simonw wrote: post #6

Here's some context on the impact AI had on the Tailwind Labs business model from January: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is... > But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. [...] > Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever.…

Noob question, I recall https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49491791 mentioned how the kernel source code and diffs were being crawled excessively. All else being equal, won't all the AI crawling agents mean traffic to docs should at least be stable(presuming changes happen all the time)?

And also the fact that agents are solving anubis level 5 challenges Tailwind would not be able to figure out how much traffic is from people vs bots. So that would mean the traffic should be up...
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