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Shopify acquires Tailwind

tailwindcss.com

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Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#391

Post by what »

binary0010 wrote: post #314
autoexec wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If those "variety of services" are worth anything they should remain popular. There are countless ways to advertise them to people. I'm guessing many devs who were regularly browsing their documentation had ad blockers anyway.

Typically here's how it worked: Company creates a free core product, possibly open source, etc. Company creates rich help docs and other useful resources. Customers who use their core free product are frequently engaged with the company and it's helpful resources. Said company offers additional services such as coursework, cloud services, analytics, etc. Since customer knows and trusts the core free product, and know…

> Now, few coders use these learning resources (ai fetches it for them)

This isn’t the problem. The problem is that you don’t need to pay for (or care about) their services when an LLM can easily replicate them.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#392

Post by mock-possum »

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)

I’m a full time front end dev, and I’ve basically accepted at this point that some people are really into tailwind, and some people are not. I’m not, and for a while I strongly preferred working with other devs who were also not… but at this point, LLMs have completely erased that distinction.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#393

Post by nonethewiser »

achierius wrote: post #317
nonethewiser wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Clearly it’s a useful tool if it’s used by so many people and companies. Yeah but its not. Hence the huge layoffs. If they don’t want to find another software development job maybe they could work at a New Jersey gas station. New Jersey protects their gas station attendants.

But Tailwind is still being used? It's just being used by AI now.

The paid product.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#394

Post by quectophoton »

_heimdall wrote: post #384
ryanbrunner wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, if you're going to aggressively componentize whatever you're building (i.e. a button isn't a css class on a simple `a` tag but a distinct component that exists in it's own file somewhere) there's huge advantages to having your styling be associated directly with your components, and Tailwind is a great option (among many) for that. If you're building something where your unit of organization looks m…

Why are your buttons `a` tags?!? Buttons should be `button` tags. Links should be `a` tags.

Reading charitably, when writing that part of the comment they probably were thinking of links that look like buttons, for example the "Get started" link in Tailwind's home page.

Regardless of how that specific one looks like, I wouldn't like if it were replaced by a .

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#395

Post by kingkandu »

I have ~4-5 completely non technical friends who've used LLMs to generate their personal websites, complete with appointment scheduling and payment links. We can't be more than a year out for full store generation with 1 click upload to hosting providers.

I don't think Shopify needs to exist anymore sadly.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#396

Post by sevenseacat »

epolanski wrote: post #308
solarkraft wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It really doesn't.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#397

Post by prophesi »

lemagedurage wrote: post #164
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?

Yeah, Tailwind is great as long as you have some way to reuse markup, like React. You don't have to care about class names and whether CSS defined somewhere else affects styles of a current component at all. That last point makes sense for LLMs as well: all the styles that affect the current file are automatically in context since styling is local. Admittedly, there are other ways to achieve this but the ergonomics o…

The lack of single-file components is one of several reasons I wouldn't reach for React prior to the LLM craze[0]. For personal projects, I love Svelte. You wouldn't need tailwind there for the reasons proposed given their support for it.

[0] Things have probably changed, but Svelte 5 was a litmus test for how recent the data cutoff was for an LLM model. Meanwhile React _especially_ has no reason to change how the framework is used by coders. Thus there's years of scraped tutorials and sites for how to throttle a function or what-have-you in React.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#399

Post by cannonpalms »

what wrote: post #383
jmull wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. Tailwind provides an actual simplifying layer for the (over-)complicated practice of front-end web development. By being well-though-out, well-designed, and very well documented, it actually made web app styling easier/simpler (without hiding or otherwise making it hard to drop into CSS as needed). And it slotted right into the place most web apps have for a CSS/class mechanism. The paid templates extend the app…

> AI can generate the components now at the same time it's doing everything else, so no reason to pay for their templates So the AI can do a better job than the average front end web developer? Maybe you should take it a step further from “no reason to pay for templates”…

It seems to me that this is the way the market is heading. Strange bleeding edge perf or sprawling complexity feels like the last niche of front end engineers. The rest will move further down the stack or be replaced.
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