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Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

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Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#271

Post by jrjeksjd8d »

DoesntMatter22 wrote: post #44
jrjeksjd8d wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AI issue was that their docs advertise their paid offerings. When AI plagiarizes the docs it doesn't include the ads.

When you say plagiarizes, do you mean they are publishing their own docs without ads? Or you mean when the AI is reading the docs instead of a person they ignore the ads?

People don't just ask AI to produce a Tailwind app, they also ask AI specific questions that are answered in the docs. When the AI regurgitates the answers from the docs they don't visit the actual docs. Like the Google answer box in search results stealing clicks from the pages that produce the content.

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#272

Post by mexicocitinluez »

IsTom wrote: post #258
exceptione wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we accidentally found a more meaningful chance for having a discussion about LLMs. As CSS is limited in scope, ultra-well defined, testable and declarative, this should be a home run for LLMs.

> limited in scope, ultra-well defined, testable Are we talking about the same CSS?

lol People don't realize that Tailwind democratized styling for a lot of people who didn't want to or didn't know how to write CSS. We're not going back to writing hand-crafted CSS with or without LLMs. LLMs, by their nature, work better with Tailwind since it needs a much smaller context to make the right decision.

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#273

Post by FelipeCortez »

Maro wrote: post #253
andruby wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question isn't "what is the lowest cost that a CSS library could be maintained for" The question is rather, how can the most popular UI system (especially for AI models) have a healthy business model? Think of the immense value that Tailwind is bringing to all the companies and developers using it. Surely there should be a way for the creators to capture a small slice of that in our economic system.

> the most popular UI system (especially for AI models) Like others earlier in the thread I'm symphatetic to this company/project, but your code/project being referenced often in AI output in itself doesn't imply that the thing needs to be a business. bash, curl, awk, Python code with numpy imports, C++, all sorts of code is constantly being generated by AI, doesn't mean curl or numpy should be its own company, or th…

> doesn't mean curl or numpy should be its own company, or that the AI Labs need to fund them.

you'd be surprised

https://numpy.org/about/#sponsors https://curl.se/sponsors.html

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#274

Post by patates »

Maro wrote: post #253
andruby wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question isn't "what is the lowest cost that a CSS library could be maintained for" The question is rather, how can the most popular UI system (especially for AI models) have a healthy business model? Think of the immense value that Tailwind is bringing to all the companies and developers using it. Surely there should be a way for the creators to capture a small slice of that in our economic system.

> the most popular UI system (especially for AI models) Like others earlier in the thread I'm symphatetic to this company/project, but your code/project being referenced often in AI output in itself doesn't imply that the thing needs to be a business. bash, curl, awk, Python code with numpy imports, C++, all sorts of code is constantly being generated by AI, doesn't mean curl or numpy should be its own company, or th…

When very important tooling does not have very impressive funding, you get the xkcd 2347 situation very quickly.

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#275

Post by AltruisticGapHN »

spankalee wrote: post #106
spockz wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don’t understand this idea that seems to be prevalent to let the LLM generate everything from scratch instead of using existing battle tested frameworks. Be it for css or backend code. Good modular design of software and separation of concern are still important for debugging and lifecycle. For (instructing) the llm it will also be easier if it uses frameworks as the resulting code of the project itself will…

CSS simply doesn't need a framework - there's no "from scratch". For humans or LLM authors. Tailwind is a lot of overhead conceptually and tooling wise to just not have to write classnames, and it's actually anti-modular.

That's not the full picture.

If you're a senior CSS developer you will invariably reach a point of using "object oriented CSS" which is where you combine classes to an effect.

At that point you're not far off Tailwind. TW just took it all the way.

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#276

Post by plagiarist »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #220
tpmoney wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say you're paying your devs $100k / year. All in costs on those devs are probably $150k or so. That means your $1m / year will fund 6 full time developers with a little left over. This podcast from the CEO[1] says their engineering team was 4 people and the remaining staff is the 3 owners, the 1 remaining engineer, and one part time customer support person. So assuming every full time person was costing $150k i…

The question is still why you need multiple devs worth 150-250kpa to maintain a CSS library.

I am wondering why are there three owners for a commercial CSS library?

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#277

Post by agloe_dreams »

tpmoney wrote: post #199
ricardobeat wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No ill will towards the team, but isn’t it almost absurd that a CSS library is funded to the tune of 1m+ yearly and is still in financial difficulty? It is technically complete. There is no major research work or churn like in React, no monstruous complexity like Webpack.

Let's say you're paying your devs $100k / year. All in costs on those devs are probably $150k or so. That means your $1m / year will fund 6 full time developers with a little left over. This podcast from the CEO[1] says their engineering team was 4 people and the remaining staff is the 3 owners, the 1 remaining engineer, and one part time customer support person. So assuming every full time person was costing $150k i…

The answer really is that they were spending an amount of that money on devs who were working on tailwindUI / Plus - their paid product.

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#278

Post by easymuffin »

ricardobeat wrote: post #104
mdasen wrote: post #14

This is good, but it doesn't necessarily mean that Tailwind is out of the financial difficulty that we talked about yesterday. You can sponsor Tailwind for as little as $6,000/year. 29 companies were already sponsoring Tailwind including 16 companies at the $60,000/year level. Maybe Google AI Studio has decided to shell out a lot more, but it could also be a relatively small sponsorship compared to the $1.1M in spons…

No ill will towards the team, but isn’t it almost absurd that a CSS library is funded to the tune of 1m+ yearly and is still in financial difficulty? It is technically complete. There is no major research work or churn like in React, no monstruous complexity like Webpack.

Agree and compared to the Zig Software Foundation (more complex work and lower salaries/costs) https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials/ , the amount of money required to run Tailwind CSS seems quite high (or Zig quite low, depending how you view it). IMHO it’s too high and mostly profits from popularity and right framework at the right time for LLMs, but as others mentioned shadcn probably also contributed to people using shadcn components causing less TW UI sales and less visits to their docs page. The CSS framework seems mostly done and supports most browser CSS features, so I’m wondering if it still requires that many devs? Also wondering what they are going to do now with all the new partnership money flowing in. I’d prefer the OSS money flow to be more balanced, but yeah I guess the market decides.

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#279

Post by doodlesdev »

mexicocitinluez wrote: post #272
IsTom wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> limited in scope, ultra-well defined, testable Are we talking about the same CSS?

lol People don't realize that Tailwind democratized styling for a lot of people who didn't want to or didn't know how to write CSS. We're not going back to writing hand-crafted CSS with or without LLMs. LLMs, by their nature, work better with Tailwind since it needs a much smaller context to make the right decision.

   > We're not going back to writing hand-crafted CSS with or without LLMs.
A lot of us have never stopped writing hand-crafted CSS. Also, in my experience, Gemini 3 Pro is an absolute monster at writing layouts and styling in pure CSS with very basic descriptions of what I want (tested it while I was experimenting with vibe coding in some sleepless night LOL).

There are still a lot of developers who loathe using Tailwind and avoid touching it like the plague. Handwritten CSS still offers more opportunities for optimization and keeps your markup much cleaner than spamming utility classes everywhere (I understand the appeal of rapidly iterating with it, though).

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#280

Post by doodlesdev »

vidyesh wrote: post #208
leecommamichael wrote: post #45

How did a CSS library make any money at all? How did a CSS library have employees?

If Tailwind wasn't making that much money, they wouldn't have been able to keep developing Tailwind up to this level of sophistication. To be specific, they had 4 staff engineers and had to fire 3 of them[1]. [1] https://socket.dev/blog/tailwind-css-announces-layoffs#:~:te...

   > they wouldn't have been able to keep developing Tailwind up to this level of sophistication.
You imply that'd be a bad thing, but I'd beg to differ.
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