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AI is a business model stress test

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Re: AI is a business model stress test

#211

Post by hdjrudni »

ahussain wrote: post #203
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…

People like tailwind because it feels like the correct abstraction. It helps you colocate layout and styling, thereby reducing cognitive load. With CSS you have to add meaningless class names to your html (+remember them), learn complicated (+fragile) selectors, and memorise low level CSS styles. With tailwind you just specify the styling you want. And if using React, the “cascading” piece is already taken care of.

Those are the same selling points as CSS-in-JSS libs like Styled Components. Or CSS Components.

Except your last point about "low-level CSS styles" which I'd argue is a weak point. You really should learn the underlying CSS to gain mastery of it.

Not arguing for one thing over another, just saying Tailwind really never had anything to offer me personally, but maybe if I wasn't already proficient in CSS and the other 2 options didn't exist it might hold some appeal for me.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#212

Post by DrewADesign »

emilsayahi wrote: post #210
DrewADesign wrote: post #182

> AI didn't kill Tailwind's business. It stress tested it. The earthquake didn’t destroy the building — it stress tested it.

In software (and business in general!), innovation is expected. If you built a building in San Francisco that couldn't handle a relatively minor earthquake you could argue it would be a 'stress test'.

If you’re right that AI’s impact on business is akin to a ‘relatively minor earthquake in San Francisco,’ a lot of investors are going to be really fucking bummed out.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#213

Post by [deleted] »

mrgoldenbrown wrote: post #26
bob1029 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we do probably need some kind of industry organization to maintain these things. In the case of CSS, we already have that: https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Overview.en.html

Are you saying the www consortium should be paying to keep Tailwind development and maintenance going? The css standard is not the same as a usable library of components.

[deleted]

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#214

Post by [deleted] »

zephen wrote: post #193
aurareturn wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tailwind is open source. Anyone can contribute to it, including an LLM. If the founder of Tailwind quits on it, others who deem Tailwind valuable enough will continue to maintain it.

> others who deem Tailwind valuable enough will continue to maintain it. We have seen several examples in the last couple of years where this is simply not true enough. There are multiple open source projects that do not receive enough TLC.

[deleted]

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#215

Post by amrocha »

zarzavat wrote: post #208
ahussain wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People like tailwind because it feels like the correct abstraction. It helps you colocate layout and styling, thereby reducing cognitive load. With CSS you have to add meaningless class names to your html (+remember them), learn complicated (+fragile) selectors, and memorise low level CSS styles. With tailwind you just specify the styling you want. And if using React, the “cascading” piece is already taken care of.

The point of CSS is specifically to separate styling and semantics, so that they are not tightly coupled. If you were writing a blog post you would want to be able to change the theme without going through every blog post you ever wrote, no? If I'm writing a React component I don't want it tightly coupled to its cosmetic appearance for the same reason. Styling is imposed on elements, intrinsic styles are bad and work…

You’re kinda late to the party. 15 years ago that was the way to build UIs, but componentization changed that. Now we reason about UIs as blocks, not as pages, so collocation of logic, markup, and style makes the most sense.

Not to say that every component should be unique, generic components can be built in an extensible way, and users can extend those components while applying unique styling.

Theming is also a solved issue through contexts.

Reducing coupling was never a good idea. Markup and styling are intrinsically linked, making any change to the markup most likely will require changes to the styling, and vice versa. Instead of pretending we can separate the two, modern UI tools embrace the coupling and make building as efficient as possible.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#216

Post by never_inline »

hdjrudni wrote: post #211
ahussain wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People like tailwind because it feels like the correct abstraction. It helps you colocate layout and styling, thereby reducing cognitive load. With CSS you have to add meaningless class names to your html (+remember them), learn complicated (+fragile) selectors, and memorise low level CSS styles. With tailwind you just specify the styling you want. And if using React, the “cascading” piece is already taken care of.

Those are the same selling points as CSS-in-JSS libs like Styled Components. Or CSS Components. Except your last point about "low-level CSS styles" which I'd argue is a weak point. You really should learn the underlying CSS to gain mastery of it. Not arguing for one thing over another, just saying Tailwind really never had anything to offer me personally, but maybe if I wasn't already proficient in CSS and the other…

Can you suggest a best place to learn CSS in-depth, from first principles? (as opposed to, say, simple tutorials)

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#217

Post by amrocha »

hdjrudni wrote: post #211
ahussain wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People like tailwind because it feels like the correct abstraction. It helps you colocate layout and styling, thereby reducing cognitive load. With CSS you have to add meaningless class names to your html (+remember them), learn complicated (+fragile) selectors, and memorise low level CSS styles. With tailwind you just specify the styling you want. And if using React, the “cascading” piece is already taken care of.

Those are the same selling points as CSS-in-JSS libs like Styled Components. Or CSS Components. Except your last point about "low-level CSS styles" which I'd argue is a weak point. You really should learn the underlying CSS to gain mastery of it. Not arguing for one thing over another, just saying Tailwind really never had anything to offer me personally, but maybe if I wasn't already proficient in CSS and the other…

You’re right that it’s not much more than a css in js library, but I’ve found myself pleasantly surprised at how efficient I am using it, despite also having years of css experience.

Things like remembering what the flex syntax is, or coming up with a padding system or a colour scheme become very very easy.

I think the editor tooling for tailwind is where most of the benefit comes from.

I also prefer the syntax over direct css in js systems. It’s less characters, which means it’s easier to parse.

Give it a try, you might be surprised!

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#218

Post by porkloin »

renjimen wrote: post #174

> You can't prompt 99.95% uptime on Black Friday. Neither can you prompt your way to keeping a site secure, updated, and running. Uh, yeah you can. There’s a whole DevOps ecosystem of software and cloud services (accessible via infrastructure—as-code) that your agents can use to do this. I don’t think businesses who specialize in ops are safe from downsizing.

Yep - exactly. Ops isn't immune to LLMs stealing your customers. Given that most of the "open source product with premium hosting" models are just reselling hyperscaler compute at a huge markup, the customers are going to realize pretty quickly that they can use an LLM to setup some basic devops and get the same uptime. Most of these companies are offering a middleman service that becomes a bad deal the moment the customer has access to expertise they previously lacked.

I also think he's glossing over the fact that one of the reasons why companies choose to pay for "ops" to run their software for them is because it's built by amateurs or amateurs-playing-professional and runs like shit. I happen to know this first hand from years of working at a company selling hosting and ops for the exact same CMS that Dries' business hosts (Drupal, a PHP-based CMS) and the absolute garbage that some people are able to put together in frameworks like Wordpress and Drupal is truly astounding. I'm not even talking about the janky local businesses where their nephew who was handy with computers made them a Wordpress site - big multinational companies have sites in these frameworks that can barely handle 1x their normal traffic and more or less explode at 1.5x.

The business of hosting these customers' poorly optimized garbage remains a big business. But we're entering into an era where the people who produce poorly optimized software have a different path to take rather than throwing it to a SaaS platform that can through sheer force of will make their lead-weight airplane fly. They can spend orders of magnitude less money to pay an LLM to make the software actually just not run like shit in the first place. Throwing scaling at the problem of 99.95% is a blunt instrument that only works if the person paying doesn't have the time, money, or knowledge to do it themselves.

Companies like these (including the one I work for currently) are absolutely going to get squeezed from both directions. The ceiling is coming down as more realize they can do their own devops, and the floor is rising as customer code quality gets better. Eventually you have to try your best to be 3 ft tall instead of 6.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#219

Post by amrocha »

johnpaulkiser wrote: post #46
theropost wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a real issue here, but I do not think it is as simple as calling it theft in the same way as copying books. The bigger problem is incentives. We built a system where writing docs, tutorials, and open technical content paid off indirectly through traffic, subscriptions, or services. LLMs get a lot of value from that work, but they also break the loop that used to send value back to the people and comp…

There will be no royalties, simply make all the models that trained on the public internet also be required to be public. This won't help tailwind in this case, but it'll change the answer to "Should I publish this thing free online?" from "No, because a few AI companies are going to exclusively benefit from it" to "Yes, I want to contribute to the corpus of human knowledge."

Contributing to human knowledge doesn’t pay the bills though

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#220

Post by solarengineer »

never_inline wrote: post #216
hdjrudni wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are the same selling points as CSS-in-JSS libs like Styled Components. Or CSS Components. Except your last point about "low-level CSS styles" which I'd argue is a weak point. You really should learn the underlying CSS to gain mastery of it. Not arguing for one thing over another, just saying Tailwind really never had anything to offer me personally, but maybe if I wasn't already proficient in CSS and the other…

Can you suggest a best place to learn CSS in-depth, from first principles? (as opposed to, say, simple tutorials)

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

While CSS Zen Garden will likely not accept new submissions, there are many good designs on showcase: https://csszengarden.com/pages/alldesigns/

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