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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

#41

We bought Tailwind UI and it was very good and I learned a lot of nice tricks from it. Real shame, and I fear it is just the start of the impacts of AI on our industry.

It is clearly the beginning of the end of many small shops in the supply chain. I hope bigger fish buy them so the tech can be more integrated into future AI products, but I doubt they will be smart enough to do that.

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

#45

How does something like Tailwind lead to a company big enough that you can layoff 75% of the engineering team?

I don’t know how big the “team” was, but 75% suggests maybe 4 engineers, one left. The next number up that works is 8, and 8 full time engineers to work on tailwind seems like a lot.

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

#46
As a fellow business owner, I’ll always feel bad when business owners need to make these types of decisions.

I bought Tailwind UI - I always thought it was a critically bad business decision from their end to keep giving me additional new stuff for free. It seemed to me that it should have been a subscription.

However, knowing nothing about the inside of their business, I have no idea how that would have affected their viability.

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

#47

How does something like Tailwind lead to a company big enough that you can layoff 75% of the engineering team?

https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/discussions/1467...

In this comment, he says that he had to lay off 3 people.

Not sure if this means it was him+4engs and now it’s just him+1eng or if he’s including himself and he’s working alone now.

But either way, can’t be fun

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

#48
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 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 thing." is wrong. My hunch is that AI has the appearance of eliminating the need for such things.

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

#50
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…

Maybe we need patreon equivalents for open source development?
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