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Shopify acquires Tailwind

tailwindcss.com

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Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#201

Post by grzes »

hbn wrote: post #175
grzes wrote: post #114

tailwindcss is an anti-pattern that breaks fundamental rule of software engeneering - separation of concerns. just learn how to use CSS - it will benefit you in the long run. i suspect they will be "paywalling" more and more features in the future.

HTML and CSS are not a separation of concerns in anything I've ever built. They're both representing the layout/design. I don't want them separate. You end up having to keep them synchronized anyway, messing with your HTML is frequently gonna break your CSS. Tailwind is infinitely more pleasant to write than a separate CSS file that has to be kept in sync with the HTML.

dude, have you heard about single file components where you have HTML & CSS in one place? XD

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#202

Post by nickjj »

mermadicsolutio wrote: post #192

I think the bigger issue is that AI is attacking the business model, not necessarily the product. Tailwind can still be massively popular, but if an AI agent can look at the docs/examples and generate 80% of what you'd otherwise pay for, that popularity doesn't translate into customers anymore. Feels like we'll see this happen to a lot of "we already figured this out for you" developer products.

> Feels like we'll see this happen to a lot of "we already figured this out for you" developer products.

It has for me at least.

I had a solo business for 10 years selling tech video courses (learning Flask, Docker, etc.). It was enough to pay the bills, but for the last few years it has nose dived. For 2026 YTD it has generated $20 / month in revenue but it costs almost triple that to host the courses so I've been losing hundreds of dollars a year, for years. All while watching LLMs cannibalize ~600 free in-depth blog posts and YouTube videos only to re-sell that information to anyone willing to pay.

It completely flipped my life upside down to where for 20 years I was able to sustain myself doing contract work + courses to having to take full time work. All of this started when AI became popular.

It's all related to a massive loss of traffic to my site which was the entry point to both contract work and the courses. Both sides of the business have been crushed.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#203

Post by ryanbrunner »

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?

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 more like a "page" than super fine grained elements, Tailwind will just make things messy and a higher-level library or writing your own CSS would be a better approach.

I don't think this changes much with AI - right now most models are not terrific at maintaining a huge degree of context in larger projects, so I could absolutely see an agent implementing CSS that works well in isolation but breaks due to the cascade. Maybe that changes in the future, but right now if anything I think Tailwind is well suited to AI because it enforces a certain locality to the changes you're making (i.e. you can reasonably assume that a `text-red-500` class on an element isn't going to break things elsewhere and wll do what it says on the box).

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#207

Post by eudamoniac »

petcat wrote: post #25

I instruct my agents to build UI exclusively with bootstrap 5, jQuery, and HTMX. Every app is fast, responsive, progressive, small, and most importantly: it fits in my brain and I can maintain it. No build step or really any tooling at all.

IMO it is literally not possible for a medium+ jQuery app to fit in a brain or be maintained easily (especially without TypeScript). That's why React et al were invented. It is smaller, faster, no build step for sure, but I would never reach for jQuery for any possibly ambitious app.

If you are using mostly agents and don't actually need to have it in your brain, then I'd probably go with strict TypeScript at the very least for verifiability purposes

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#208

Post by dawnerd »

pil0u wrote: post #15

They are buying the people and the brand. Even Adam admitted that AI impacted dramatically their business. Selling UI templates in the current era is likely a dead end, even with a brand as strong as Tailwind. I hope Adam and the team are well and good with this decision. Tailwind is regularly debated here for various reasons, using it helped me have a better understanding of CSS, HTML and design, and made me a bette…

It’s far from dead. All of the AI models struggle with creativity and consistency. There’s always going to be a market for well designed UX.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#209

Post by wredcoll »

argentinian wrote: post #64
danvayn wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some slight irony in them continuing to make these statements for me. Mostly because Tailwind is still incredibly around (and worth investing in, hence Shopify acquiring them) and AI isn’t anything close to offering a drop in solution. That is to say, AI will implement tailwind when building as there isn’t a good alternative, and otherwise just references these docs for the user so that they don’t have to vi…

Yes. Maybe their business model was never sustainable and now they are unfairly blaming IA as a scapegoat to justify layoffs.

In the long term, no business model is sustainable.
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