Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 893 posts

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

#361

Post by lone-cloud »

K0nserv wrote: post #48
sosodev wrote: post #26

The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such things. While I understand that this has been difficult for him and his company... hasn't it been obvious that this would be a major issue for years? I do worry about what this means for the future of open source software. We've lo…

Having worked on a design system previously I think most people, especially non-frontend developers, discount how hard something like that is to build. LLMs will build stuff that looks plausible but falls short in a bunch of ways (particularly accessibility). This is for the same reason that people generate div-soup, it looks correct on the surface. EDIT: I suppose what I'm saying is that "The paid products Adam ment…

It's not that hard to build a design system with decent accessibility. Just use shadcn ui components instead of rolling your own.

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

#363

Post by satvikpendem »

thundergolfer wrote: post #345
satvikpendem wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said Tailwind the company wasn't a business, when I said "a product is not a business" I meant that as advice to creators in general, not in specific to Tailwind; of course it is, it made millions in revenue. What I meant was that even though businesses may exist, having a long-term, durable business model is not always viable.

"selling premade software assets" is a business, and it's the business both Tailwind and Envato were in. Both businesses got hit hard by AI. Check out Envato's homepage now. It's unrecognizable from what it was in 2017, and completely genAI oriented.

I think you're just repeating the same point I'm making. The point is they're not good businesses, hence why Envato pivoted and Tailwind soon might need to as well.

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

#364

Post by acdha »

pier25 wrote: post #336
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

> most businesses in all categories as more people rely on ChatGPT and Claude for discovery What about restaurants, transportation, construction, healthcare, or manufacturing? Will those go out of business too?

The better question is how well they do in a world where you have to pay OpenAI to be included. A local restaurant can likely survive on local advertising, neighborhood traffic, etc. but I’d bet a lot of categories further consolidate to favor larger companies who can negotiate LLM placement deals.

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

#365

Post by agentifysh »

mmcnl wrote: post #348

Wow, this is a grim reality check: AI hyperscalers taking in billions of revenue, while at the same time putting honest business like Tailwind out of work, without any form of compensation. What happened to "you wouldn't steal a car" etc.? It's only illegal if you're not a trillion dollar company? I have trouble expressing how terrible unjust it feels that AI companies are stealing money from the common people. I hav…

this whole "ai is theft" argument is just pure cope. tailwind was always just a thin abstraction over css standards and they only became the industry standard by playing the seo game and dumping docs on the open web for everyone to see. you dont get to claim theft when a model actually learns the patterns you basically forced onto the world for free to build your brand. tailwinds business model was essentially rent seeking on the fact that css is tedious to write manually and now that the marginal cost of production has dropped to near zero they are suprised they cant sell 300 dollar templates anymore.

the car comparison is honestly embarassing for this community to even bring up lol. its not theft to recognize a pattern and its definately not illegal for a company to do what every junior dev has been doing for years which is reading the docs and then not buying the paid stuff. adam built a business that relied on human inefficiency and now that inefficiency is gone. its not a tragedy its just a market correction. if your moat is so shallow that a llm can drain it in one pass then you didnt really have a product you just had a temporary advantage. honestly tailwind should of seen this coming a mile away but i guess its easier to blame "scrapers" than admit the ui kit gravy train is over. move on and build something that actually provides value.

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

#366

Post by krainboltgreene »

falcor84 wrote: post #194
krainboltgreene wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone suggests UBI like this sort of thing is a massive hurricane and we just gotta take it on the chin. Nah man, this stuff isn't happening anywhere else. We can simply say "No, you don't get to ruin the economy for your personal profit."

Well, here you said it; is it over now?

I'm confused, do you not know what "we" means?

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

#367

Post by satvikpendem »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #208
mpeg wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently they were 8+ people, in 2024 team size was 6 and were hiring 2 more [0] and in 2020 they had $2m+ ARR [1]. Honestly, while I feel bad for the people who lost their jobs the news aren't exactly surprising. Overhiring is a game for VC funded OSS like bun, not usually a good idea for bootstrapped companies. [0]: https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-st... [1]: https://adamwathan.me/tailwin…

On his morning walk/podcast thing about the topic he said 75% of the team = 3 developers

I wonder if that includes him or not as the remaining 25% as 1 member.

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

#369

Post by acdha »

deckard1 wrote: post #356
echelon wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything open source will be turned against its authors and against ICs. We thought it would give us freedom, but all of the advantage will accrue to the hyperscalers. If we don't build open source infra that is owned by everyone, we'll be owned by industrial giants and left with a thin crust that is barely ours. (This seems like such a far-fetched "Kumbaya, My Lord" type of wishful thinking, that it's a joke that I'…

it's a real shame no one warned us this would happen when a bunch of corporatists and opportunists wrested the term "open source" from the advocates of true freedom in the late '90s. https://www.fsf.org/ But there was money to be made and the friends you thought were friends were just mercenaries with a shiv in their hand.

Also the FSF squandered its opportunity being RMS’ hobby / support organization and skipped a lot of important discussions, even before the skeevy behavior they’d been ignoring came to light. I used to donate in the 90s but … really feels like that was just flushing cash.

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

#370

Post by satvikpendem »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #331
pier25 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's always 1000 line SCSS files and nobody knows what is going on there It's been 15-20 years since I last saw that. There are tons of solutions on how to easily organize CSS code these days that don't involve TW.

You mean CSS-in-JS?

CSS modules is the native solution. But yes, compile-time CSS in TypeScript like PandaCSS or Vanilla Extract or StyleX (not run-time like Emotion) are also great alternatives.
Post reply on HN