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AI is a business model stress test

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Re: AI is a business model stress test

#151

Post by azangru »

hahahahhaah wrote: post #148
azangru wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If suddenly CSS became pleasant to use, Tailwind would be in a rough spot. CSS is pleasant to use. I know I find it pleasant to use; and I know there are quite a few frontend developers who do too. I didn't pay much attention to tailwind, until suddenly I realized that it has spread like wildfire and now is everywhere. What drove that growth? Which groups were the first adopters of tailwind; how did they grow; when…

Is CSS pleasant in teams of fullstack (not CSS specialists)? Not in my experience. It becomes a maze of Chesterton's fences.

I would have understood if tailwind got popular primarily among full-stack or backend developers: people who have neither time nor interest to learn CSS deeply. But, what contradicts this expectation is that one still needs to acquire CSS knowledge to use tailwind, and that some front-end developers seem to prefer it as well. Although I still cannot tell whether there are more front-end developers who prefer tailwind over plain CSS than the other way around.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#152

Post by benjiro »

christophilus wrote: post #112
azangru wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you remember what made it click for you? What was the hard part of writing plain CSS that tailwind made significantly easier?

CSS requires discipline, or you end up accidentally styling something completely unrelated because you were overly general, or overly specific, or accidentally reused a class name. CSS disallows local reasoning. If you’re writing markup for a component, you have to jump between two files. There are plenty of other problems Tailwind solves, but these two alone make me never want to go back.

Ignoring that Tailwind requires that same discipline... Pay close attention how often you end up in a situation where a different color was used, or how dark theme tags have been missing, and so much more.

What if you need to copy a element with tailwind, this later gets altered to include a slightly different style, but wait, now you have a original somewhere else in your code base, that is missing those updates. So you require the discipline just like CSS to keep things up to date.

Tailwind is great if you use it sporadically ... but have you looked at the source code of so many websites that use tailwind? Often their entire html file is a horrible mess million miles long tags.

I am amazed how often people do not even realizes that CSS supports nested Selectors? With nested Selectors, you get the benefit of creating actual component level structures, that can be isolated and shareable. Yet almost nobody uses them. I noticed that most people lack a lot of CSS knowledge, and they find it hard because they never stepped beyond the basics. Nor do they keep up to date.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#153

Post by ajjahs »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #128
iterateoften wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped writing open source projects on github because why put a bunch of work into something for others to train off of without any regard for the original projects

I don't understand this mindset. I solve problems on stackoverflow and github because I want those problems to stay solved. If the fixes are more convenient for people to access as weights in an LLM... who cares? I'd be all for forcing these companies to open source their models. I'm game to hear other proposals. But "just stop contributing to the commons" strikes me as a very negative result here. We desperately nee…

[dead]

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#154

Post by wolpoli »

Tailwind plus is available for one time payment that provides lifetime access to current and future components. With AI cutting off the flow for new buyers, revenue shrivels up much quicker than what it would've been if it was a recurring subscription.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#156

Post by MangoCoffee »

>Open Source was never the commercial product. It's the conduit to something else.

this is correct. If you open source your software, then why are you mad when companies like AWS, OpenAI, etc. make tons of money?

Open Source software is always a bridge that leads to something else to commercialize on. If you want to sell software, then pick Microsoft's model and sell your software as closed source. If you get mad and cry about making money to sustain your open source project, then pick the right license for your business.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#157

Post by andrei_says_ »

heliumtera wrote: post #21

Tailwind Labs relied on a weird monetization scheme. Revenue was proportional to the pain of using the framework. The sudden improvement in getting desired UI without relying on pre-built templates killed Tailwind Labs. There are many initiatives in a similar spot, improving your experience at using Next.js would hurt Vercel. Making GitHub actions runners more reliable, stable and economical would hurt Microsoft. Imp…

I know I’m echoing others’ responses but CSS in 2026 is incredible, easy to use and beautiful.

I find the tailwindcss approach inexcusable and unmaintainable.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#158

Post by owebmaster »

troupo wrote: post #150
azangru wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people prefer it over CSS modules? They also solve the style containment problem, and do not require any effort to set up, or any additional library to learn?

You're probably confusing something with something? CSS Modules are a JS-only third party solution re-invented/re-implemented in a dozen different ways for various JS frontend frameworks. Requires setting up, requires learning an additional library. If you mean these CSS modules: https://github.com/css-modules/css-modules?tab=readme-ov-fil... then they need to be supported by whatever build chain you use. And you lit…

Well no, none of them ?

This is what OP was talking about:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Guides/Nest...

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#159

Post by nojs »

azangru wrote: post #98
heliumtera wrote: post #21

Tailwind Labs relied on a weird monetization scheme. Revenue was proportional to the pain of using the framework. The sudden improvement in getting desired UI without relying on pre-built templates killed Tailwind Labs. There are many initiatives in a similar spot, improving your experience at using Next.js would hurt Vercel. Making GitHub actions runners more reliable, stable and economical would hurt Microsoft. Imp…

> If suddenly CSS became pleasant to use, Tailwind would be in a rough spot. CSS is pleasant to use. I know I find it pleasant to use; and I know there are quite a few frontend developers who do too. I didn't pay much attention to tailwind, until suddenly I realized that it has spread like wildfire and now is everywhere. What drove that growth? Which groups were the first adopters of tailwind; how did they grow; when…

> What drove that growth?

It is a natural fit with component-based frontend frameworks like React. You keep the styles with the component instead of having to work in two places. And it’s slightly nicer than writing inline styles.

The core CSS abstraction (separating “content” from “presentation”) was always flimsy but tailwind was the final nail in that coffin.

Then of course LLMs all started using it by default.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#160

Post by Twixes »

mrgoldenbrown wrote: post #29

Calling it a stress test seems a bit off. Would we say that invention of lightbulbs was a "stress test" for candle related business models? Or would we just say that business models had to change in response to current events.

Drop the "test". Just "stress" – it's cleaner.
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