Nothing but love to Adam and the Tailwind team (including now-former team members) today. They’ve made huge contributions to web development and it just sucks, sucks, sucks that things have turned out this way. I know he’ll find a way forward, though.
Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
431–440 of 893 posts
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#432The 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…
How does it eliminates the need for simple templates and components? Templates and components are always gonna be more cost effective, back in the day we used to buy simple jQuery components for like 5*$ and even LLMs cant beat that, you will quickly end up with a shittier component with 0 accessibility and end up paying more to the Claude Opus
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see two alternatives, one that people find new ways to do productive work with or in the presence of LLM, or massive social unrest, rebellion, war and/or starving to death, followed by a reset. I.e. the way human nature has responded to similar imbalances in the past.
So, you have no actual thoughts on this topic other than "UBI is bad" is what I hear.
My thoughts are that UBI is not compatible with human nature. It cannot work at societal scale. I'm not sure how I can state it more simply.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#434I 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…
[flagged]
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, you can tell from the tone of his post that he isn't blaming anyone directly. They monetized convenience, and something more convenient came along. I think it's more shocking to everyone how quickly something like that happens.
Exactly the business model wasn't strong enough, just upselling templates for hundreds of dollars which AI can churn in few tokens was easy to disrupt.
It isn't just the product itself: he's saying traffic to the site has dropped substantially, so any product will be harder to sell now for them.
Some people who would buy the higher quality templates don't know that they exist now.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#436Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think you're overestimating how much people care about quality.
LLMs are not that cheaper, a customizable accessible component is still worth hours of work.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#438Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#439Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I have no idea who's this magical "we" in your "We can simply". To me this seems like a textbook coordination problem leading to a tragedy of the commons- even if you got 99.9% of the world into your "we", the remaining "defectors" would have a massive benefit from using AI to replace human labor.
[flagged]
the strong interpretation is that you mean we gotta do something. and it's really not "simply" even because "we" needs to include everyone and whoever is a renegade will get more benefit.
so if "say" is an euphemism for "do" it seems an obvious question what exactly do we "do". that's another reason why it's not "simply". even if everybody was ready to do something as one, if you think everybody just knows what we should do because it's so obvious you'r mistaken.
sure it's asked a bit sarcastic but sarcasm isn't banned right?
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#440Very sad to hear, I bought Tailwind UI years ago and although it was a lot more expensive than I wanted, I've appreciated the care and precision and highly recommend buying it (It's now called Tailwind Plus) even still (maybe even especially now). Mad props to Adam for his honesty and transparency. Adam if you're reading, just know that the voices criticizing you are not the only voices out there. Thanks for all you'…
I could never afford Tailwind UI but then again I don’t really use Tailwind. That said, as an open-source styling solution, they could be supported in other ways. A lot — and I really mean a lot — of websites are built with Tailwind, yet very few consider donating or buying what they have to offer.
Plenty of F/LOSS is in the same state: businesses extract all value they can from open-source, but put back nothing. That’s mining The Commons. LLMs are just accelerating this trend.
It’s never gonna work in the long run. Let’s go back to writing everything in house then, since we’re 100x more productive and don’t have to pay a dime for other people’s work.