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AI is a business model stress test

dri.es

161–170 of 361 posts

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#161
post #98

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…

Writing CSS manually was never all that pleasant for me, mostly the part about debugging it when it doesn't do what I want.

So I tried Tailwind and it seemed to help.

But now that Claude Opus 4.5 is writing all my code, it can write and debug CSS better than I can use Tailwind. So, CSS it is.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#162
post #150

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…

I meant the CSS modules that are implemented by a build tool. And yes, mea culpa, they are probably a js-only solution, requiring a build tool to correctly interpret a css import (.module.css in the file name is a common convention; but it is tweakable), and the author to use the imported object instead of plain strings, when referring to the class names. But I don't know if having to write `class="styles.foo"` as opposed to `class="foo"` counts as learning. And apart from that, there isn't anything else to learn.

But, given that one would need build tools for tailwind as well, the requirement for build tools couldn't have played a role in the choice between the two.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was too subtle but the issue is less understanding CSS and more collaborating in a team where someone decides to add a specific rule that fixes something applies on every page but makes no sense semantically.

Then do that 100 times to create spaghetti. CSS rule anywhere can affect anything whereas tailwind is more local.

You can also bricklay it along lines of components in React, so you know how X component renders always and it wont look like a pig when tranplanted to the legacy billing screen.

I now recall why I like tailwind! Been backending for a while now (zero regrets lol)

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#164

>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…

> then pick the right license for your business

That's one of the issues with AI, though; strongly copylefted software suddenly finds itself unable to enforce its license because "AI" gets a free pass on copyright for some reason.

Dual-licensing open source with business-unfriendly licensing used to be a pretty good way to sell software, but thanks to the absurd legal position AI models have managed to squeeze themselves into, that stopped in an instant.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#165
post #38

I see "hackers" in these comments are now advocating to make "criminal contempt of business model" a serious thing, instead of a mere meme used to describe draconian copyright and patent laws.

It's a reddit alternative hosted by a venture capitalist firm, the startup culture is much more prevalent here than the hacker culture that inspires the website's tag.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#166
post #98

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…

Imo CSS is not pleasant to use, but Tailwind is at least as bad and furthermore is bad in addition to the CSS badness which it does not fully replace. It is a mystery to me as well how it got so popular.

(I know many people disagree, which is fair enough.)

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#167
One of the biggest shortcomings of Open Source was that it implicitly defaulted to a volunteer model and so financing the work was always left as an exercise for the reader.

Hence (as TFA points out) open source code from commercial entities was just a marketing channel and source of free labor... err, community contributions... to auxiliary offerings that actually made money. This basic economic drive is totally natural but creates dynamics that lead to suboptimal behaviors and controversy multiple times.

For instance, a favorite business model is charging for support. Another one was charging for a convenient packaging or hosting of an “open core” project. In either case, the incentives just didn’t align towards making the software bug-free and easily usable, because that would actively hamper monetization. This led to instances of pathological behavior, like Red Hat futzing with its patches or pay-walling its source code to hamper other Linux vendors.

Then there were cases where the "open source" branding was used to get market-share, but licenses restricted usage in lucrative applications, like Sun with Java. But worse, often a bigger fish swooped in to take the code, as they were legally allowed to, and repackage it in their own products undercutting the original owners. E.g. Google worked around Sun's licensing restrictions to use Java completely for free in Android. And then ironically Android itself was marketed as "open source" while its licensing came with its own extremely onerous restrictions to prevent true competition.

Or all those cases when hyperscalers undercut the original owners’ offerings by providing open source projects as proprietary Software as a Service.

All this in turn led to all sorts of controversies like lawsuits or companies rug-pulling its community with a license change.

And aside from all that, the same pressures regularly led to the “enshittification” of software.

Open Source is largely a socialist (or even communist) movement, but businesses exist in a fundamentally capitalistic society. The tensions between those philosophies were inevitable. Socialists gonna socialize, but capitalists gonna capitalize.

With AI, current OSS business models may soon be dead. And personally I would think, to the extent they were based on misaligned incentives or unhealthy dynamics, good riddance!

Open Source itself will not go away, but it will enter a new era. The cost of code has dropped so much, monetizing will be hard. But by the same token, it will encourage people, having invested so much fewer resources creating it, to release their code for free. A lot of it will be slop, but the quantity will be overwhelming.

It’s not clear how this era will pan out, but interesting times ahead.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the primary feature of CSS is what people don't want from it anymore. If you're building your app with components (web components, react, etc), those become the unit of reuse. You don't need CSS to offer an additional unit of reuse, it only complicates things at that point.

> You don't need CSS to offer an additional unit of reuse Erm. Isn't this one of tailwind's selling points? That you have a set of classes that you keep reusing?

This is technically true, but misses the point. Tailwind classes are fine grained utility classes, the fact that they are CSS classes at all is pretty much an implementation detail.

Compare tailwind classes to bootstrap classes and you'll see what I mean.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#169
post #98

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…

Fe devs who refuse to learn css and instead use tailwind have always struck me as incredibly odd. It's like a carpenter who refuses to use a hammer because they hit their thumb once as an apprentice

I wrote this piece on tailwind a few years back, and little seems to have changed https://pdx.su/blog/2023-07-26-tailwind-and-the-death-of-cra...

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

You solve these problems by creating abstractions in JavaScript (most likely react components), exactly the same way you'd solve any other sort of code duplication.

By using tailwind (or inline styles), you go from two system of abstraction (CSS, JavaScript) to one (just JavaScript).

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