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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

#271

Post by ctoth »

K0nserv wrote: post #236
ctoth wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use the web every day as a blind user with a screenreader. I would 100% of the time prefer to encounter the median website written by Opus 4.5 than the median website written by a human developer in terms of accessibility!

That's really interesting. Are you speaking from experience with websites where you know who authored them or from seeing code written by humans and Opus 4.5 respectively?

So I have been using the human-authored web since well... 1999 or so, starting with old AOL CDs. I've obviously seen a lot of human content.

Back in the old days you might have image links and other fun stuff. Then we entered the era of flash. Flash was great, especially the people who made their whole site out of it (2004 + not being able to order ... was it pizza? something really sticks in my memory here.)

Then we entered the era of early Bootstrap. Things got really bad for a while -- there was a whole Bootstrap-Accessibility library people ended up writing for it, and of course nobody actually used the damn thing. The most frustrating thing at this point (2010?) was any dropdown anywhere. Any bootstrap dropdown was completely inaccessible using typical techniques, and you'd have to do something tricky with ... mouse routing? Gods it's been 15 years.

CAPTCHAs for stupid things became huge there for a brief moment -- I remember needing to pass a CAPTCHA to download ... was it Creative drivers? That motivated me to make a service called CAPTCHA-Be-Gone for other blind people for a while.

Then we see ARIA start to really come into its own... except that's a whole new shitshow! So many times you'd get people who thought "Oh to add accessibility, we just add ARIA" and had no fucking idea what they were doing, to the point where the most-common A11y advice these days has become "Don't use ARIA unless you know you need it."

Oh then we had this brief flash (~10 years ago?) of "60 FPS websites!" -- let's directly render to the fucking canvas, that'll be great. Flutter? ... Ick!

Nowadays the issues are just the same as they ever were. People using divs for everything, onclick handlers instead of stuff that will be triggered with keyboard... Stuff that Opus just doesn't do!

I guess I've only been using Opus 4.5 for about a month but just ... Ask it to build something? Use it with a screen reader? Try it!

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

#272

Post by mmcclure »

refulgentis wrote: post #251
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'…

Smells like unnecessary sycophancy: I grep'd Adam in every comment and every single. one. is positive and phrased like this. I grew up on this site, from 20 year old dropout waiter in Buffalo to 37 year old ex-Googler. One of the things I'm noticing me reacting to the last year or two is a "putting on a pedestal" effect that's unnecessary.

I think context matters here. People are being kind to someone who just had to lay off most of their team because, despite their project’s popularity and success (maybe even because of it), a massive change in the ecosystem completely destroyed their business model.

I’ve never been a huge fan of using Tailwind personally, but I deeply appreciated that they were making a (mostly) non-enterprise FOSS model work in an interesting way. It’s a shame that it seems that’s likely dead in the water now.

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

#273

Post by EMM_386 »

KallDrexx wrote: post #122
satvikpendem wrote: post #87

Sadly, selling pre-made components and templates was never a sound business model, especially in the wake of AI. One thing I learned being on HN for so long and launching my own products is that a product is not a business . Don't conflate the two, at your peril. Lots of people make great products but actually turning that into a business is fundamentally a different skill. It seems like Tailwind grew too fast, havin…

Telerik, DevExpress, and a lot of other companies have made profitable businesses that have lasted well over a decade on that business premise. Selling solid and easy to integrate pre-made components has been a pretty good business for a while.

PrimeTek components (PrimeReact, PrimeNG) are MIT licensed open source.

They also have a CSS utility library (like Tailwind).

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

#274

Post by geenat »

I recently had a similar junk PR on my 1,700 star repository: https://github.com/gnat/surreal/pull/56

I'm fairly convinced these are bot / LLM generated; the content is nonsensical garbage.

PS: If an LLM needs a whole seperate fork to understand your content, the LLM is failing at it's job.

PS PS: I want to highlight that the PR itself also seems to be an excuse to get the library quantizor made pulled in as a new dependency. Nasty.

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

#275

Post by SoftTalker »

system2 wrote: post #172

Why would a CSS library turn into a company? How do they even make money while there are hundreds of alternatives? Bootstrap is more than enough for 99.99% of the projects, and it is free.

It solved a problem, people will pay for that.

Now LLMs have removed the problem, so there's declining interest in solutions.

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

#277

Post by nine_k »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #270
risyachka wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Underscoring the parent comment and adding to it: watching technologists on a site called Hacker News cheer on the centralization of power is really something.

There's nothing cheerful in that comment, it describes a danger that inexorably draws nearer and nearer.

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

#278

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #225
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" ?

"You should learn how to vibecode and ship whatever works enough, as fast as possible, to get bought for a wildly disconnected from fundamentals valuation." This may sound flippant, or low quality, but it I assure that it is not intended to be. It is derived from observations of the current tech macro. Quality does not appear to matter, ethics do not appear to matter, sustainability and engineering rigor do not appea…

You might be right but even then this feels fundamentally really immoral

The sell out is the biggest fundamental issue in this equation because it is the part of the equation which doesn't reward Quality,ethics,sustainability and engineering rigor overall.

Welcome to the AI bubble fueling it.

I genuinely don't know but I think AI prototyping/using it for personal use cases are fine but when we completely start to vibecode, if your project is complex enough, you will reach problems and all the other factors/researches point out. In my opinion, for longevity, vibecoding is not the deal.

But as you said, longevity isnt rewarded. I really hate how the system has become of just selling businesses.

I feel like as such the businesses who are truly passionate about their product (because they faced the problems themselves or are heavily interested in it/passionate about it) might win "long term"

To me trust feels the biggest resource in this day and age. Information era has now been sloppified. Trust is what matters now.

I don't know but I will take the slow but overall steady route. There is a sense of commitment with human trust which I feel would set apart businesses and I will try to create side projects with that initiative

One of the ways I feel like acheiving it while still getting the shipfast aspect is that I just build things for myself, vibe coding in this case can help and I launch it for public, if there is interest in any product or smth, I will try to respond and try to add feedbacks fast (perhaps still using vibecoding) but in long term, I try to promise to keep the code lean (usually approx 2-3k lines of code at max) and then if I see prospect and interest about the idea, I have tried to think that a middle way is either rewriting or completely understanding AI generated code to its core and having a very restrictive AI access afterwards any product feels good and then the trust aspect of things can be gained.

I don't know too much about side hustles. I just build things for myself in whatever I want mostly I must admit using vibe code and end up usually sharing it online/deploying it for others as well if it might help.

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