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Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

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Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#201

Post by tylerchilds »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #152
tylerchilds wrote: post #146

I’ll be honest. I’m a contributor to this. I’ve been CSS since the mid 2000s and I have a lot of it memorized by heart. My team uses tailwind, therefore I use tailwind But I don’t want to reconfigure my mental model to think in esoteric shorthand, when I already have vanilla web tech memorized. So I just write some code to match the design and then I let an llm transform it into what my team expects. I’m sharing in t…

Every project I worked on that used CSS was a mess. It's always 1000 line SCSS files and nobody knows what is going on there.

Yeah, I’m not advocating for css or against tailwind

Just sharing that the root cause is most developers don’t want to pick up an additional syntax when they already have the fundamentals

The main problem is the premise of tailwind

Every single web design on earth is a compound opinion on like a few hundred popular properties and values

They put all that in one style sheet

Which became the one style sheet on earth

Which made it possible to summon all those styles directly from within our apps

Tailwind is like the chess of utilities. There’s only so many opening and closing moves that running a business on it is incredibly difficult, given supply and demand.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#202

Post by bkorte »

simlevesque wrote: post #138
zeusly wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I didn't ask how to do a bait and switch to offer a good free product and later ask for more money or else I'm going to make it worse. But I guess nuance is hard to understand. Also it's always funny when someone tries to look up your past instead of giving convincing arguments.

There is no bait and switch and it's ridiculous to suggest there is.

They have a free product and a paid product. They've used the documentation as an awareness channel for the paid product. The paid product influences and pays for the free product. A tail as old as time.

They're not asking you to buy the paid product and they're not saying they are going to make it worse. Did you even read thread? He literally says "I totally see the value in the feature and I would like to find a way to add it."

Not prioritizing it now does not make the product worse, it just doesn't make it better in this particular way today.

How is this hard to understand?

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#203

Post by cultofmetatron »

really surprised tailwind didn't get ahead of this by providing some sort of mcp interface and custom agent for designing design systems and autogenerating ui code directly based on the user's project. if it worked out of the box or with a few clicks via en extension, it would be a killer feature.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#204

Post by system2 »

throwaway2026-2 wrote: post #174

I feel like you don't need engineers anymore. Bad news for all of us, but its just a fact of life.

Maybe they don't, since CSS is the easiest to tap into in terms of programming. Database-driven software still heavily relies on seasoned engineers and cannot be messed with AI.

For something basic like CSS, it is true. Ask ChatGPT or Claude Code to come up with any Tailwind template, and it will spit out within seconds for free, and even integrate it into the project effortlessly. This approach does not apply to heavy software such as a comprehensive CRM or another type of CRUD platform.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#205

Post by tannhaeuser »

> 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.

Not a Tailwind user but I really appreciate the honesty. Is the brutal impact of AI as a cause established though? It appears creation of new web sites is down, but that doesn't mean the business has gone to LLMs like suggested; it could as well mean that there are simply no sites being created at all.

Especially as

> Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever.

and

> the docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products

ie. data is lacking.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#206

Post by risyachka »

freedomben wrote: post #6

Very sad to hear, I bought Tailwind UI years ago and although it was a lot more expensive than I wanted, I've appreciated the care and precision and highly recommend buying it (It's now called Tailwind Plus) even still (maybe even especially now). Mad props to Adam for his honesty and transparency. Adam if you're reading, just know that the voices criticizing you are not the only voices out there. Thanks for all you'…

What most don’t realize is that this will happen to most businesses in all categories as more people rely on ChatGPT and Claude for discovery.

No discovery - no business.

And same with ads.if OpenAI decides not to add ads - prepare for even faster business consolidation. Those businesses preferred by llms will exponentially grow, others will quickly go out of business

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#207

Post by falcor84 »

inchidi wrote: post #167
blitzar wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is "progress" when tech bros displace traditional workers, but it is "heartbreaking" when a tech bro gets displaced by other tech bros. Whats the 2026 version of "you should learn to code" ?

unfortunately, it doesn't seems like tech bro gets displaced by other tech bros at all and more like corporates running costly ephemeral branding as tech bro by abusing other tech bros works .

What's the difference between tech bros and corporates? Isn't being a tech bro almost by definition about getting to the point where your can sell out your company and your principles?

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#208

Post by ZephyrBlu »

mpeg wrote: post #65
solarkraft wrote: post #29

It’s crazy to me that it was ever a business to begin with. Cool, in a way! But this feels like just going back to normal.

Apparently they were 8+ people, in 2024 team size was 6 and were hiring 2 more [0] and in 2020 they had $2m+ ARR [1]. Honestly, while I feel bad for the people who lost their jobs the news aren't exactly surprising. Overhiring is a game for VC funded OSS like bun, not usually a good idea for bootstrapped companies. [0]: https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-st... [1]: https://adamwathan.me/tailwin…

On his morning walk/podcast thing about the topic he said 75% of the team = 3 developers

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#209

Post by robinhood »

simlevesque wrote: post #120
nullorempty wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hm, families need to eat.

Then why is HTTP, CSS and HTML free ? It's creators need to eat too. Should they start charging for it ?

Your comments in this thread are terrible, all of them. You are part of the reason why working on open source projects is so hard for people who obviously want to do good in this world. Check Adam's work: his work has been a net positive for the OSS community. Go spread your poison and nasty comments elsewhere please.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#210

Post by system2 »

bakies wrote: post #188
magician2229 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I listened to his podcast this morning where he mentions 75% of their four person engineering team was laid off (only the founders and one engineer remain) https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...

75% is a lot more dramatic than 3 people geez

Welcome to the age of clickbait and fake drama.
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