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Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

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Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#111

Post by birken »

ricardobeat wrote: post #104
mdasen wrote: post #14

This is good, but it doesn't necessarily mean that Tailwind is out of the financial difficulty that we talked about yesterday. You can sponsor Tailwind for as little as $6,000/year. 29 companies were already sponsoring Tailwind including 16 companies at the $60,000/year level. Maybe Google AI Studio has decided to shell out a lot more, but it could also be a relatively small sponsorship compared to the $1.1M in spons…

No ill will towards the team, but isn’t it almost absurd that a CSS library is funded to the tune of 1m+ yearly and is still in financial difficulty? It is technically complete. There is no major research work or churn like in React, no monstruous complexity like Webpack.

What kind of headcount do you estimate $1MM/year can reliably support?

That's like ~2 engineers at FAANG.

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#112

Post by _puk »

northern-lights wrote: post #38
mdasen wrote: post #14

This is good, but it doesn't necessarily mean that Tailwind is out of the financial difficulty that we talked about yesterday. You can sponsor Tailwind for as little as $6,000/year. 29 companies were already sponsoring Tailwind including 16 companies at the $60,000/year level. Maybe Google AI Studio has decided to shell out a lot more, but it could also be a relatively small sponsorship compared to the $1.1M in spons…

It seems to be in Google's interest to keep Tailwind CSS afloat. Tailwind CSS is alive -> New / existing projects keep using Tailwind CSS -> more code for Gemini to train upon -> better and fancier UIs being created through Gemini -> popularity and usage of Gemini doesn't go down Of course this applies to any other LLM provider too but I guess Google saw this opportunity first.

I think that keeping tailwind alive means that Gemini Studio:

* Likely gets preferential access to new features and changes in tailwind, keeping it cutting edge

* Keeps a framework alive that Gemini is already good at

If a new framework becomes popular then the amount of training material / material already trained into the model essentially starts from 0.

The mature Frameworks that had plenty of openly available data to train on before everything became locked away are the ones we'll be running with for the next few years. It makes sense to keep it alive.

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#113

Post by babypuncher »

birken wrote: post #111
ricardobeat wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No ill will towards the team, but isn’t it almost absurd that a CSS library is funded to the tune of 1m+ yearly and is still in financial difficulty? It is technically complete. There is no major research work or churn like in React, no monstruous complexity like Webpack.

What kind of headcount do you estimate $1MM/year can reliably support? That's like ~2 engineers at FAANG.

Lots of great engineers will work for way less than a FAANG salary as long as it means not having to work for FAANG. $1m/year still won't get you all that much though.

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#114

Post by zeroCalories »

babypuncher wrote: post #113
birken wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of headcount do you estimate $1MM/year can reliably support? That's like ~2 engineers at FAANG.

Lots of great engineers will work for way less than a FAANG salary as long as it means not having to work for FAANG. $1m/year still won't get you all that much though.

Realistically if you can work on a small and high profile project like tailwind you're gonna be snatched up by someone willing to pay you at or near FAANG levels

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#115

Post by Ameo »

My perspective on this is that maybe Tailwind Labs shouldn't have been a for-profit business, or at least not one of the size that it grew to be.

I was reading a writeup on this history of Tailwind[1] made by Adam Wathan (who created Tailwind).

It seems like he was working on a variety of different business ideas including "Reddit meets Pinterest meets Twitter" and "a developer-focused, webhook-driven checkout platform". He created the basis of Tailwind just to help him build these projects, but it kept getting attention when he would post about his progress building them online.

Here's an important quote from the doc:

"Now at this point I had zero intention of maintaining any sort of open-source CSS framework. It didn’t even occur to me that what I had been building would even be interesting to anyone. But stream after stream, people were always asking about the CSS"

It seems like Adam's main goal was to start a software business, and Tailwind just happened to get popular and became what he pivoted his efforts into. There's obviously nothing wrong with wanting to start a business, but trying to take an open-source CSS framework and turn it into a multi-million dollar business feels unnatural and very difficult to maintain long-term.

To his credit, he did pull it off. He built a seemingly quite successful business and hired a sizable team, and apparently made a decent amount of revenue along the way.

But now, for AI reasons or otherwise, that business is struggling and failing to sustain the scale it was before. To me, it seems like the business is more or less completely separate from the open-source Tailwind project itself. It's, as far as I can understand, a business that sells templates and components built with Tailwind, and it uses Tailwind's popularity to bootstrap customers and sales.

If it were me who ended up building Tailwind, there's no way I would have pursued turning it into a big business. Maybe I would have tried some kind of consulting style, where I'd offer my time to companies evaluating or integrating Tailwind.

Now that Tailwind is getting hundreds of thousands (millions?) of dollars a year in sponsorships, it feels weird to have this for-profit business on the side at the same time.

Maybe it's just my own sensibilities and worldview, but I feel like Tailwind should just be what it is: an extremely popular and successful open-source CSS framework.

[1] https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduc...

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#117

Post by manmal »

nateb2022 wrote: post #109
spockz wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Farming, livestock, arms, school/nursery, medicine, construction, real estate, finance. Basically anything rooted in the physical world and elemental services.

I'd agree with medicine, school/nursery, real estate, and finance but mostly because in those industries the ability to connect with clients at a human level is often more valuable than sheer talent. With farming/livestock, pretty much all of that can become automated. And even in the previous human-centric sectors, there are definitely roles that will be replaced by AI, even if the sector as a whole continues to emp…

I can’t see a good reason real estate wouldn’t go the way car dealerships are going.

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#119

Post by [deleted] »

babypuncher wrote: post #113
birken wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of headcount do you estimate $1MM/year can reliably support? That's like ~2 engineers at FAANG.

Lots of great engineers will work for way less than a FAANG salary as long as it means not having to work for FAANG. $1m/year still won't get you all that much though.

[deleted]

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#120

Post by spankalee »

Klonoar wrote: post #98
spankalee wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it'd be better for AI and web dev if AIs generated real CSS instead. The supposed difficulty of tracking from elements to classes to rulesets is something that AIs can easily handle, and being able to change a ruleset once and have the update apply to all use sites is really good for AI-driven changes. Plus, humans and AIs won't have to wait for Tailwind to adopt new CSS features as they are added. If the AI…

Counter-argument: the cascade in CSS was a massive design mistake and it shows even more in this particular case. With LLM-assisted development you spend more time reading and reviewing the generated code. The cascade in styles is nowhere near as readily apparent as something like Tailwind.

I haven't seen cascades be a problem since the days of monolithic, app-wide stylesheets, and no project I personally know of works that way anymore.

Just about everyone uses component-specific styles with a limited set of selectors where there are very few collisions per property, and pretty clear specificity winners when there are.

If the alternative to the cascade is that you have to repeat granular style choices on every single element, I'll take the cascade every time.

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