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Shopify acquires Tailwind

tailwindcss.com

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Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#131

Post by bradly »

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.…

As a Tailwind Plus customer I found it very hard to use their templates. I'm not and was not a React developer, so maybe I wasn't the target customer, but as a solo builder the products were too opinionated and too specific to make want to reach for them. I felt like I had to "learn" the template.

They used different technologies for different templates and some even use a 3rd party CMS service that I had no interest in using. Their JavaScript components were non-native, so if I wanted to use any of the interactivity I had to write from scratch.

I think they had an opportunity to grow with AI and with the amount of code that is now being written.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#133

Post by nullbio »

mehagar wrote: post #52
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?

I'm probably going to catch heat for this, because people (I did too, I won't lie) have a visceral reaction to the Javascript for styling, but... StyleX.

It came on my radar a few months ago when I first started noticing this rot problem. Then recently I saw that it was getting quite hyped and people have been singing its praise for solving this exact problem. So I'm giving it a shot.

Can't say for certain whether it will work out well or not yet, but based on the feedback I've been seeing from others, I'm hopeful.

i.e. https://dev.to/adioof/stylex-won-css-in-js-because-ai-agents... (not my blog).

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#134

Post by eitally »

wongarsu wrote: post #105
atonse wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with "nor should it be" - the market decided it was clearly needed. And this isn't unique to Tailwind. For decades, companies in many ecosystems (like .NET, JS, etc) have made lots of money selling component libraries that save developers and companies a lot of time. And I even bought UI.sh in April, and it really was great until the models just natively got much better. I happily paid for Tailwind UI b…

Just for reference, in the .NET ecosystem there are multiple vendors selling UI component libraries for sums ranging from lower three digits to upper three digits per dev, per year. This was generally considered good value (might no longer be great value post-AI)

As an engineering leader back in the day (2000-2015) I considered it terrific value to license Telerik and others. In fact, it looks like Progress has acquired a large catalog of the most common .NET dev tools over the past ten years.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#135

Post by micromacrofoot »

chinathrow wrote: post #76
micromacrofoot wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there's never a need to reach for tailwind, it's just a pathology some people like because someone else did the design work for them

Why insult the millions of users relying on Tailwind?

What's the insult? Tailwind is specifically for people who don't like writing CSS because it avoids various ways CSS works and comes with predefined styles.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#136

Post by nightski »

dlisboa wrote: post #117
nightski wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you enjoy reviewing your entire code base and relying on an extremely detailed regression suite just to make simple changes? I don't think AI changes good engineering at all, it just changes who or what is doing it.

It definitely changes some aspects of good engineering. I'm not a huge AI person but it's obvious a host of great tools we've built to deal with our challenges would not have been significant if we had LLMs. A very crude example: to translate code into a different language someone would need to write a tokenizer, a parser, an AST and finally a translator. All significant engineering challenges, taking days to finish.…

I disagree about your last statement. That only covers the initial creation/generation phase. It ignores the engineering aspect of maintaining that design through the entire lifecycle of the product. How do you evolve that table design?

Sure an LLM can update every table in your project every time you make a change, just as a human could. It also can make mistakes and burn significantly more tokens doing so. Or, it could update one component with a one line change and be done. Easy to verify, less change for mistakes.

Engineering is a discipline and does not change dramatically with the advent of outsourcing it to agents.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#137

Post by Pedro_Ribeiro »

atonse wrote: post #79
dlisboa wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made this point at the time but Tailwind Labs' business model shouldn't exist. It irks people because they wanna blame AI for it but they were coasting and should be happy it lasted this long. Tailwind's business model existed due to a massive inefficiency in the frontend industry not being able to come to terms with CSS or native components. They surfed the wave of JS frontends becoming ever more complicated. If i…

I don't agree with "nor should it be" - the market decided it was clearly needed. And this isn't unique to Tailwind. For decades, companies in many ecosystems (like .NET, JS, etc) have made lots of money selling component libraries that save developers and companies a lot of time. And I even bought UI.sh in April, and it really was great until the models just natively got much better. I happily paid for Tailwind UI b…

Hey do you have any opinion on the current utility of ui.sh? I wanted to buy it but I'm a bit wary of it just not being useful and they don't have a preview of a single skill.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#138

Post by davidpapermill »

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?

Don't do a lot of technical work nowadays, but tailwind is still my go-to. Vanilla CSS just doesn't have nice ergonomics.

With AI I guess you could skip it, but I like to understand the code.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#139

Post by alexcroox »

petcat wrote: post #25

I instruct my agents to build UI exclusively with bootstrap 5, jQuery, and HTMX. Every app is fast, responsive, progressive, small, and most importantly: it fits in my brain and I can maintain it. No build step or really any tooling at all.

I've been thinking the same about the future of frameworks. Many of the complexities in today's frameworks exist for "developer experience", given that's less and less relevant by the month, it will be interesting to see the tech stacks chosen going forward.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#140

Post by matthijs »

threatofrain wrote: post #49
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.…

I don't really agree that ML killed their business. I paid for their product early on before it was even done but they never really developed their product. I held out hope to the end of a year and ended up never using my purchase. Compare that to shadcn, which had visible growing pains and yet reached rocketship fame. Shadcn is evidence that developers were hungry for yet another library, and it's also evidence that…

I agree. I also paid, but the components themselves were hard to use and required quite a bit of work to integrate into our product. For example, most components had a new (slightly different) button and parts of the components didn't have clear boundaries from what I remember.

Besides that, quite quickly there were many other free, and arguably better, alternatives available (like flowbite, preline, daisyui, etc) that I ended up using instead.

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