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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

#401

Post by antonymoose »

hmokiguess wrote: post #392

I bought their Plus thing a while back and not I can't find myself a reason to use it. If I was considering that purchase in today's landscape, I would surely not buy it. At $299 USD I can have a decent model do the job of writing custom tailored components for me and iterate extensively on them. Hard sell with a "UI Kit" versus a "UI Brain". If I were Adam I would drop to $29.99 and accept the status quo, but not ma…

Im currently considering buying it actually. I’ve landed a decent side-project building out a CRM for a small business that wants to ditch Salesforce. It’s all internal tooling so the customer has no care or need for a highly customized fancy UI and that $299 is peanuts relative to the time saved and my hourly rate. While I could just use Bootstrap it’s starting to feel a bit too dated (subjective).

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

#403

Post by ZephyrBlu »

satvikpendem wrote: post #367
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No it was the 3 co-founders, a part-time person and 4 engineers. Now they are 3 engineers down.

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

#404

Post by zamadatix »

password4321 wrote: post #269
_JamesA_ wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you referring to signing up for the blog[1] email or something else? It was last updated July 25, 2025. [1]: https://tailwindcss.com/blog

Referring to TFA (couple of comments on the issue). https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is... https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...

I think they mean where does one sign up to this newsletter.

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

#405

Post by retrocog »

Licensing hasn't caught up yet. It probably wouldn't be the worst idea to have a simple content copyright license protocol or standard that works for LLMs?

Something simple and obvious, like sticking a license file that has certain expected fields in /.well-known. I wouldn't be surprised if this is already being discussed because it would easily allow agents to check for special license requirements that only apply to them, directing them how to share content while remaining in compliance.

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

#406

Post by torginus »

pmdr wrote: post #213
srameshc wrote: post #10

> But 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. Adam is simply trying to navigate this new reality, and he's being honest, so there's no need to criticize him.

If there's anything AI coding is good at, it's writing react components and tailwind css.

I am not 100% sure about that - I usually find AI written CSS to be slightly visually flawed and almost always logically flawed.

The way you write websites that actually work imo, is you understand how your chosen CSS layout engine works roughly, and try to avoid switching between layout modes - traditional to flexbox to grid to flexbox again down the tree can drive the most brillant devs utterly mad .

But seriously, after a certain complexity threshold, it becomes impossible to tell what's going on and why.

And if you don't think about it in advance, it's very easy to reach that threshold, especially if you don't get to write the whole page from scratch, but have to build on the work of others.

AI (and many frontend devs) do write-only CSS - they add classes until the code they write looks right.

But code like that tends to fall apart under multiple resolutions, browsers, screen sizes, devices etc.

I am not a frontend dev, and came pretty late to the frontend party. That said I felt that anything that obscures the raw CSS makes it much harder to deliver UI that works right, as it peppers hidden side effects across your code.

That's why I wasn't too keen on CSS frameworks like Tailwind - I found that when writing frontend code the writing part takes up the minority of the time, it's producing a well thought out layout flow is what is actually the biggest sink of time and effort.

That said, I'm not a frontend dev, and I'm to too good at CSS - but not horrible either - so I defer to the judgement of others who are pros at this, its just my opinion and experience.

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

#407

Post by [deleted] »

GuinansEyebrows wrote: post #349
tqi wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you talk in meaningless terms like "traditional workers" and "tech bros", all it tells me is that you have divided the world into people you like and people you dislike and mourn / celebrate accordingly.

would you prefer "labor" and "class traitors"?

[deleted]

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

#409

Post by yCombLinks »

threetonesun wrote: post #354
arnvald wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that jQuery was replaced by other libraries, while Tailwind grows in popularity, but due to AI its creator doesn’t benefit from this popularity as much as before

jQuery was essentially replaced by JavaScript (and browser compatibility) getting better, but it continued to exist and grow because it was the de facto way to DOM manipulation, especially if you had to copy and paste off of Stack Overflow, or roll out a framework based UI. Tailwind being the default choice for AI UIs is not that different, it can continue to grow in usage but the fundamental need for Tailwind has pa…

The difference is jquery went away because better things replaced it (in javascript). If the fundamental need for tailwind has passed why is it's usage growing? It's more that the problem solved by the paid portion of tailwind is now solved by AI.

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

#410

Post by satvikpendem »

pests wrote: post #334
warmedcookie wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want a bunch of tailwind class slop, then yes. Otherwise, A lot of context engineering is needed if you want it to write modular tailwind components properly for large projects where consistency is important.

> Otherwise, A lot of context engineering is needed if you want I am not seeing that. I have a few AI-assisted projects using tailwind and scrolling through it now 99% of it looks... completely modern and professional. I had previously asked it to "completely refactor, a rewrite if needed, all the tailwind/css/app styles. ensure visual and code consistency across pages". Modern coding tools add tons of their own cont…

> completely modern and professional

And it looks completely the same, so much so that people can tell it's AI generated now simply due to the gradient, among other design choices LLMs seem to make by default: https://prg.sh/ramblings/Why-Your-AI-Keeps-Building-the-Same...

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