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AI is a business model stress test

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Re: AI is a business model stress test

#221

Post by halfcat »

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 talking about separation of concerns (SOC), as opposed to locality of behavior (LOB).

This is the insight that Tailwind and others like HTMX made clear: Separation of concerns is not a universal virtue. It comes with a cognitive cost. Most notably when you have a growing inheritance hierarchy, and you either need 12 files open or tooling that helps you understand which of the 482 classes are in play for the specific case you’re troubleshooting. Vanilla CSS can be like that, especially when it’s not one’s primary skillset. With Tailwind you say ”this button needs to be blue”, and consolidate stuff into CSS later once the right patterns of abstraction become clear. Tailwind makes exploratory building way faster when we’re not CSS experts.

SOC is usually a virtue when teams are split (frontend/bavkend, etc), but LOB is a virtue when teams are small, full stack, or working on monoliths (this is basically Conway’s law, the shape of the codebase mirrors the shape of the team).

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#222

Post by andrekandre »

dnw wrote: post #63

I'd note a couple of things: Not to nitpick but if we are going to discuss the impact of AI, then I'd argue "AI commoditizes anything you can specify." is not broad enough. My intuition is "AI commoditizes anything you can _evaluate/assess_." For software automation we need reasonably accurate specifications as input and we can more or less predict the output. We spend a lot of time managing the ambiguity on the inpu…

  > if you are growing and you found AI efficiency then that's great (e.g. FB) but if you're not growing and only thing AI could do for you is "efficiency" then there is a fundamental problem no AI can fix.
exactly, "efficiency" nice to say in a vacuum but what you really need is quality (all-round) and understanding your customer/market

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#223

Post by code_biologist »

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…

I'll add to my sibling commenters and say that there is a long history of critiquing the value of separation of concerns. One of my favorite early talks that sold me on React was "Pete Hunt: React: Rethinking best practices -- JSConf EU" from Oct 2013 [1] that critiqued the separation of concerns of HTML templates + JS popular in the 2000s and early 2010s and instead advocated for componentization as higher return on investment. I think people already saw styling separation of concerns as not particularly valuable at that point as well, just it wasn't clear what component-friendly styling abstraction was going to win.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7cQ3mrcKaY

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#224

Post by jaynate »

I wish I could upvote this more than once. The author gets it, you have to sell outcomes. Not features. Seems like every open source company that doesn’t market an outcome to buyers will face a similar threat. And this particular go to market strategy was “brittle” before AI.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#225

Post by zephen »

jeroenhd wrote: post #164
MangoCoffee wrote: post #156

>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 themse…

Open source software helped to dramatically reduce the cost of paid software, because there is a now a minimum bar of functionality you have to produce in order to sell software.

And, in many cases, you had to produce that value yourself. GPL licensing lawsuits ensured this.

AI extracting value from software in such a way that the creators no longer can take the small scraps they were willing to live on seems likely to change this dynamic.

I expect no-source-available software (including shareware) to proliferate again, to the detriment of open source.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#226

Post by Jaygles »

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…

I do want styles tightly coupled to my React components. The product I work on has tens of thousands of React components.

I don't want to have to update some random CSS file to change one component's appearance. I've had to do this before and every time its a huge pain to not affect dozens of random other components. Other engineers encounter the same challenge and write poor CSS to deal with it. This compounds over time and becomes a huge mess.

Having a robust design system that enables the composition of complicated UIs without the need for much customization is the way.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#227

Post by ViscountPenguin »

Brybry wrote: post #44
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…

> We have a system that clearly creates value, but no longer distributes it in a sustainable way The same thing happened (and is still happening) with news media and aggregation/embedding like Google News or Facebook. I don't know if anyone has found a working solution yet. There have been some laws passed and licensing deals [1]. But they don't really seem to be working out [2]. [1] https://www.cjr.org/the_media_tod…

I'm not sure that I'd call [2] it not working out, just like I wouldn't call the equivalent pressure from the USA to dismantle medicare our public health system not working out.

The biggest issue with the scheme is the fact that it was structured to explicitly favour media incumbents, and is therefore politically unpopular.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#228

Post by journal »

drivebyhooting wrote: post #4

In my opinion LLMs are intellectual property theft. Just as if I started distributing copies of books. This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP. All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license: if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published.

If I was able to memorize every pixel value to reconstruct a movie from memory, would that be theft?

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#229

Post by journal »

iterateoften wrote: post #47
drivebyhooting wrote: post #4

In my opinion LLMs are intellectual property theft. Just as if I started distributing copies of books. This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP. All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license: if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published.

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

that's why i don't add comments to my commits, i don't want them to know the reason for the changes.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#230

Post by kaicianflone »

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…

I haven’t seen this mentioned much, but Tailwind’s rise closely followed a shift away from runtime CSS-in-JS toward build-time, deterministic styling.

Many JSX-era libraries (MUI, styled-components, Emotion) generate styles at runtime, which works fine for SPAs but creates real friction for SSR, streaming, and time-to-first-paint (especially for content-heavy or SEO-sensitive domains).

As frameworks like Next.js, Vue, Svelte, Angular, and now RSC all moved server-first, teams realized they couldn’t scale entire domains as client-only SPAs without performance and crawler issues.

Tailwind aligned perfectly with that shift: static CSS, smaller runtime bundles, predictable output, and zero hydration coupling. It wasn’t about utility classes. It was about build-time certainty in a server-rendered world :)

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