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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

#311

Post by spoiler »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #152
tylerchilds wrote: post #146

I’ll be honest. I’m a contributor to this. I’ve been CSS since the mid 2000s and I have a lot of it memorized by heart. My team uses tailwind, therefore I use tailwind But I don’t want to reconfigure my mental model to think in esoteric shorthand, when I already have vanilla web tech memorized. So I just write some code to match the design and then I let an llm transform it into what my team expects. I’m sharing in t…

Every project I worked on that used CSS was a mess. It's always 1000 line SCSS files and nobody knows what is going on there.

> and nobody knows what is going on there.

For what its worth, I had the same experience with Tailwind. I regularly see classes that don't have an meaningful outcome.

I don't think the problem is Tailwind or CSS (well, I guess Tailwind is CSS with extra steps but you get the idea) syntax (or any of the CSS preprocessors), but the fact that styling in browsers has accumulated a lot of cruft, and people who haven't "grown up" with it over the years don't fully understand it (I am more competent than most with it and there's still times I screw up).

One thing that's kinda nice about Tailwind is that it made copy-pasting components easier. So people can get something decent without fully understanding what's happening

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

#312

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

This is the actual comment that it's mentioned: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...

However, the whole conversation is worth reading (but it's sort of heartbreaking).

Sounds like fairly decent folks, all around.

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

#314

Post by aiiizzz »

geenat wrote: post #274

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 de…

Sounds shady.

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

#315

Post by motbus3 »

burningChrome wrote: post #295
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

> No discovery - no business. I do SEO as a side gig to my 9-5 as a developer. All four of my freelance companies I work with have seen their traffic drop up to 40% since LLM's have effectively taken over and people are using search engines less and less. We've had to pivot to short form social media advertising which seems to be closing the gap whereas before the majority of our leads were coming from organic search…

Same where I work for 30% on some regions and for those where they put money only saw a minimum increase.

I honestly think the company is run by some good folks that are really trying to do some positive impact. They refuse so all sorts of bs ad-tracking gray area stuff, yet, people don't give a dime.

We caught over and over anthropic and others using shade tactics to bypass bot protection. They get the content, plagiarise it and contribute absolute nothing back. For weeks, openai was crawling our resources on DDOS levels of traffic.

F them. They just are just stealing and making businesses fail. This will be a catastrophe for many but yet, people think there is no relation.

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

#316

Post by elaus »

simlevesque wrote: post #125
simonw wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WTF? So your answer to "how should open source projects achieve financial sustainability" is "don't even try"?

When you start making your open source project worse for your users because you are not making enough out of it I'll choose to use something else. There's a point where it's too much and it just feels like a trojan horse when later you stop caring for your free users.

You keep repeating that he makes his project worse – an active action – while in fact he did not do anything at all, he just refused to change something.

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

#317

Post by romanhn »

robinhood wrote: post #209
simlevesque wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why is HTTP, CSS and HTML free ? It's creators need to eat too. Should they start charging for it ?

Your comments in this thread are terrible, all of them. You are part of the reason why working on open source projects is so hard for people who obviously want to do good in this world. Check Adam's work: his work has been a net positive for the OSS community. Go spread your poison and nasty comments elsewhere please.

As someone who paid for a lifetime license of Tailwind UI, unlike, I strongly suspect, simlevesque - I 100% agree with this. The negativity is completely uncalled for, please take this somewhere else and do some self-reflection.

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

#318

Post by meken »

simonw wrote: post #105

Key comment is this one: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is... > [...] the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around and make sure the people wh…

Thanks for that - the GitHub app “helpfully” collapsed this comment (along with most of the others in the thread), so I was confused how the headline related to this issue.

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

#319

Post by mulmen »

SoftTalker wrote: post #232
Tostino wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, it's one of the only ways forward I can think of while still maintaining markets in some part of the economy...that is, if you care about the human condition at all. Plenty of these tech leaders seem to want to replace humanity though, so this will be an uphill battle.

It's a nice fantasy but completely contrary to human nature.

So is a compiler. Humanity is the conscious altering of nature.

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

#320

Post by FootballMuse »

roblabla wrote: post #198
simlevesque wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd feel lied to if someone offers me a free tool and later the person that controls it chooses to make it worse just to make more money. I got bit by that many times and do my best to avoid it but when it happens it's a stab in the back.

At what point did they make it _worse_? Tailwind didn't remove any existing functionality here. What they did was refuse to merge a PR while they're trying to figure out how to navigate a difficult financial problem, all while being fully transparent about what's going on, and saying that they're open to merging the PR if/when they manage to get things together. This is very different from, say, the minio situation,…

It's not even funcationality to the library code, it's a PR to their docs. If you just want optimized docs for your LLM to consume, isn't that what [Context7](https://context7.com/websites/tailwindcss) already has? Why force this new responsibility to the maintainer.
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