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Shopify acquires Tailwind

tailwindcss.com

301–310 of 433 posts

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#301
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.

I feel it's better for LLMs. For each class name, the LLM doesn't have to go out and consume CSS files and read all the cascading rules and determine what other classes elsewhere might have an effect. It has everything it needs to determine the styling and layout right in its immediate context

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#302
post #86
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?

This is a good discussion: do LLMs change the calculus for DRY? A major point of components is having a single place where you can change design and behavior across your entire codebase. With LLMs you can with very good accuracy tell them to change the look of "all buttons that are confirmation buttons in modals but not in the login modal". Doesn't matter if there are 10 such buttons or 1000, it'll take a few seconds…

LLMs change the calculus on DRY in some cases. I would say it's still very much a no-no on the frontend side of things. Code repetition is directly correlated with bad loading performance. When you're optimising for people on slow mobile connections, your HTML/JS/CSS being 500KB instead of 1.5MB matters a lot.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#303
post #201
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTML and CSS are not a separation of concerns in anything I've ever built. They're both representing the layout/design. I don't want them separate. You end up having to keep them synchronized anyway, messing with your HTML is frequently gonna break your CSS. Tailwind is infinitely more pleasant to write than a separate CSS file that has to be kept in sync with the HTML.

dude, have you heard about single file components where you have HTML & CSS in one place? XD

You're destroying your own argument.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#304
post #65
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 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…

Telerik has been around awhile and makes $60 million a year and their business model is selling essentially UI components at the heart of it for Microsoft UI frameworks. There is also SyncFusion and DevExpress.

Its crazy, but there is clearly money to be had in this.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#305
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.

yes, but it will be the size of the market for smiths, coopers, and arkwrights.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Never stop posting, you are doing great.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#307
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 like vanilla CSS, but agents in my experience seem to deliver more uniform results when using tailwind.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#308
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 agree that a CSS library is not really worth a big business. But nobody has woken up: AI makes writing tailwind classes more convenient than ever and that’s what people seem to do.

Wait till you find out AI writes even better css without the tailwind crap.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#309
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 see any reason the business model shouldn't exist, though yes their scale was a challenge IMO. Selling off the shelf, tested components and themes isn't a bad business. I'd firmly put it in the lifestyle business category, I just wouldn't expect it to sustain multiple high paid engineers on fulltime salary and benefits.

A relatively popular WordPress theme on ThemeForest could bring in $30k on a good month in the market's prime. Nowadays the number is much more humble.
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