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Shopify acquires Tailwind

tailwindcss.com

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Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#221

Post by NoDodgeQuestion »

lofaszvanitt wrote: post #129

Oh, bejesus. Shopify awards the Stupefiers. Why would anyone need any kind of framework for CSS?! It's the inherent human need to control something, to package water and sell it as magical water. I've never understood the whole idea. Bootstrap: the hard-to-remember, horrible shitshow forced on frontend devs. And people thought there couldn't possibly be anything lower than that. Then Tailwind arrived. Apparently, fro…

dont like "Cascading", inline css better https://vuejs.org/guide/scaling-up/sfc#what-about-separation...

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#222

Post by spiderice »

dawnerd wrote: post #208
pil0u wrote: post #15

They are buying the people and the brand. Even Adam admitted that AI impacted dramatically their business. Selling UI templates in the current era is likely a dead end, even with a brand as strong as Tailwind. I hope Adam and the team are well and good with this decision. Tailwind is regularly debated here for various reasons, using it helped me have a better understanding of CSS, HTML and design, and made me a bette…

It’s far from dead. All of the AI models struggle with creativity and consistency. There’s always going to be a market for well designed UX.

> There’s always going to be a market for well designed UX

Given the past 3 years, I will never understand how people can be so confident making statements like this

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#223

Post by zelphirkalt »

gherkinnn wrote: post #168
benoau wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it die? How would it die? The vast majority of Tailwind is literally just shorthand for individual CSS properties.

Because what makes it useful , like media queries, can't be put in style attributes. Frankly this whole discussion is just as silly as claiming flex has nothing over table layout.

Then again one should aim to not even need media queries and make things responsive intrinsically, breakpoint-free, continuously. A design where things jump at hard coded viewport widths is not actually a great design.

So at least that part is not so amazing.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#225

Post by bsimpson »

hakunin wrote: post #185
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?

I only do front-end dev occasionally, but these are my 3 goto articles that make me lean towards not using Tailwind: 1: https://www.zolkos.com/2025/12/03/vanilla-css-is-all-you-nee... 2: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/subgrid/ 3: https://railsdesigner.com/custom-elements/ (more Rails specific)

It's my primary role. I started using jsxstyle a dozen years ago alongside React and really liked the ability to style my components in situ without breaking browser architecture assumptions.

I recently had to help out on a vibe coded project that inherited Tailwind (I think from Figma). It was a short assignment so I didn't dig that deep, but I don't understand the value prop of Tailwind. There was no obvious improvement over what I've been used to; in fact, it seemed a lot messier.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#226

Post by jedberg »

With how good LLMs are getting at coding, running a DevTools company with both an open source and commercial component is getting harder and harder to do. It's easier every day to just vibe code the commercial part if you have the open source part.

The ones that are successful provide other services that are still hard to do, like hosting at scale, or running the open source at scale.

Basically, running something at scale is what DevTools companies need to do to survive. Hosting the open source and the data is one type of running at scale, or helping companies run the open source in their own infrastructure is another way to help them run at scale.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#227

Post by dtucjucj »

nickjj wrote: post #202
mermadicsolutio wrote: post #192

I think the bigger issue is that AI is attacking the business model, not necessarily the product. Tailwind can still be massively popular, but if an AI agent can look at the docs/examples and generate 80% of what you'd otherwise pay for, that popularity doesn't translate into customers anymore. Feels like we'll see this happen to a lot of "we already figured this out for you" developer products.

> Feels like we'll see this happen to a lot of "we already figured this out for you" developer products. It has for me at least. I had a solo business for 10 years selling tech video courses (learning Flask, Docker, etc.). It was enough to pay the bills, but for the last few years it has nose dived. For 2026 YTD it has generated $20 / month in revenue but it costs almost triple that to host the courses so I've been l…

[dead]

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#228

Post by sassbadger »

eudamoniac wrote: post #198
vazark wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, Tailwind is just inline CSS with standardised defaults. I think it found its place because most React devs didn't want to bother with CSS

It is used because UI component frameworks make vanilla CSS an awkward an unnecessary tool (the Cascading part). CSS makes sense as designed for styling a document, but not so much for styling atomic components. If we were designing the web and CSS from scratch around the React model, CSS would not be made to cascade, because that is totally unnecessary and usually leads to more issues than it solves. Apart from them…

Thanks for this great explanation of your viewpoint. As an occasional frontend dev who really got into Tailwind, it was always hard for me to explain why I'm so much more productive in Tailwind than in writing CSS. This makes a lot of sense.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#229

Post by pier25 »

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?

There's never been a need to reach for tailwind. It's really a matter of preference.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#230

Post by guywithahat »

It makes me happy to see they'll continue to exist in an organization that benefits from their success. I really enjoy Tailwind and I feel terrible for the people in the company who watched their revenue plummet like that with the advent of AI
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