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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

#371

Post by sublinear »

ctoth wrote: post #271
K0nserv wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Then we see ARIA start to really come into its own... except that's a whole new shitshow!

I am not blind, but my experience trying to write accessible web pages is that the screen readers are inconsistent with how they announce the various tags and attributes. I'm curious what you think about the screen readers out there such as NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver, TalkBack, etc. and how devs should be testing their web pages.

Many of the larger corporate clients tend to standardize on the exact behavior of JAWS and I am not sure that is helpful. It's like the Internet Explorer of screen readers.

If you want to know why a page ends up riddled with ARIA overriding everything, that's why. In even the best cases, the people paying for this dev work are looking for consistency and then not finishing the job. It's never made the highest priority work either since testing eats up a ton of time.

To reinforce my original point, I just don't think LLMs can write anything but the most naive code and everyone has opinions and biases completely incompatible with standardization. It's never "done" and fundamentally fickle and political just like the rest of the web.

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

#372

Post by conrs »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #231

Something’s wrong when a key piece of foundational web tech is staring down unsustainability. Tailwind is almost ubiquitous these days. It needs to continue to exist. Small businesses being eaten by AI is a net negative, because they’re in a unique position whereby they need to actually have to listen to customers vs just optimizing for a rando middle manger’s promotion in BigTech.

As an engineer, I want to believe this, but really - does it?

Most folks use frameworks because it's easier than learning how to build it all yourself - things are done for you instead. This niche is now getting eroded by AI and low-code substantially.

Couple that with my experience maintaining frontends that are far too complex for their use cases - e.g. do we really need SPA's, state sync, and reusable components for our admin tool that doesn't reuse components?

This leads me to think there's been bloat here for at least a decade. So, while vibe coding will also lead to bloat, it's easier to work with, and arguably higher value than paying for a specific framework.

It's a tragedy in life that things that are useful don't always get valued, instead being used as a stepping stone for progress, but I'm not sure that has a solution.

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

#373

Post by c-hendricks »

re-thc wrote: post #333
satvikpendem wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the same, and yet on the other hand, how could they have done it differently? People don't want to pay a subscription just to write a DSL of CSS. Perhaps they could've done it per project like some companies, but I don't think it'd be as popular as their lifetime model. Ironic.

MUI sells paid components paid monthly. Definitely doable for the paid product.

I'm not super familiar with tailwind plus, but I am familiar with MUI.

MUIs paid offerings are open-core, you pay for support and a couple of extra features.

Tailwind plus looks like paying for basic components (checkboxes, sidebars, buttons) and it doesn't even offer anything like DataGrid (free with mui).

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

#374

Post by usef- »

pier25 wrote: post #347
burningChrome wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm not sure if this is comparable to the yellow pages vs the internet. Google became profitable in 2001 whereas OpenAI et al are still operating at a huge loss. Even with ads it's not clear whether LLMs can be profitable unless they increase prices significantly.

Google was not profitable until they rolled out ads, either.

The scope of use of AI assistants in people's lives are significantly higher than google search, imo. People use it in far more scenarios already than just information retrieval. That's why some are betting there's a chance it's more valuable than present-day google search.

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

#375

Post by chuckadams »

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…

The ad was "You wouldn't download a car." To which my response was always a loud "HELL yes, I would!"

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

#376

Post by jsk2600 »

tylerchilds wrote: post #201
koakuma-chan wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I’m not advocating for css or against tailwind Just sharing that the root cause is most developers don’t want to pick up an additional syntax when they already have the fundamentals The main problem is the premise of tailwind Every single web design on earth is a compound opinion on like a few hundred popular properties and values They put all that in one style sheet Which became the one style sheet on earth Wh…

>Just sharing that the root cause is most developers don’t want to pick up an additional syntax when they already have the fundamentals

IF they already have the fundamentals. What I see is that more and more developers don't know CSS at all or very little; they only use Tailwind and haven’t worked with CSS extensively before.

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

#377

Post by ironman1478 »

Rumple22Stilk wrote: post #309
ecshafer wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI will turn Earth into the Earth of the Expanse. I truly believe it would be absolutely ruinous on man. Our psychology is just not built for that.

The earth of the expanse is 1000 times better than any time in history.

The life of people on earth doesn't seem better than people now. For connected people it seems great, but for the average joe it seemed awful.

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

#378

Post by ecshafer »

Rumple22Stilk wrote: post #309
ecshafer wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI will turn Earth into the Earth of the Expanse. I truly believe it would be absolutely ruinous on man. Our psychology is just not built for that.

The earth of the expanse is 1000 times better than any time in history.

Did you read the expanse? The earth of the expanse is full of crime and destitution. People apply in the tens of thousands for every lottery slot of school or jobs. People just wallow in nothingness. The people fleet earth for mars and the belt just to have a basic sense of purpose.

If we are to just have UBI. Have basic sustenance for no effort, while we have unlimited entertainment and porn at our finger tips. It would be a disaster. I would literally we rather have make work programs.

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

#379

Post by aaronbrethorst »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #97
prodigycorp wrote: post #24

It's just too ironic and such a shame that LLMs have railroaded the business model of Tailwind when LLMs have made it so much more popular. Does anyone have any backseat driver ideas for how tailwind could make enough money to hire a team to work on the framework?

Make Tailwind Plus an annual subscription, not a one-time purchase. Corporate sponsorships. In-person training focused on big corps. Acquisition.

Just to build on this, Vercel would be an obvious acquisition candidate. It feels up their alley and they make heavy use of Tailwind.

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

#380

Post by acdha »

ecshafer wrote: post #285
elictronic wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should learn to vote for UBI?

UBI will turn Earth into the Earth of the Expanse. I truly believe it would be absolutely ruinous on man. Our psychology is just not built for that.

That’s unproven, but suppose it’s true: what’s your alternative? If we are in fact facing widespread unemployment, what’s going to be better than UBI at avoiding societal collapse? Billionaires paying private armies to contain poor people is a straight-up sci-fi dystopia but even that depends on enough people having money to buy things from their companies.
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