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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

#481

Post by lloydatkinson »

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 don't even know what Envato is from looking at their own website. Maybe some companies don't need to exist if they can't even explain themselves.

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

#482

Post by tills13 »

ericmcer wrote: post #107
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.

Tools like Tailwind are one of the few cases where I totally believe it when the CEO says "we are cutting jobs because of AI". Sucks that anytime you ask AI to generate a site for you Tailwind will have an impact on that.

It's just interesting because most of the talk is programmers talking about AI taking their job by replacing them not taking their job because it's taking away revenue from the business.

Reminds me of the problem with Google & their rich results which wiped out and continues to wipe out blogs who rely on people actually visiting their site vs. getting the information they seek without leaving Google.

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

#483

Post by infamouscow »

acdha wrote: post #369
deckard1 wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If my timelines are correct, the FSF ousted RMS before ChatGPT came out.

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

#484

Post by suyash »

usef- wrote: post #435
suyash wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the era of buying templates is over, when you can get a tool that listens to you patiently, iterates again and again till you're satisfied for pennies, why would you pay hundred's for a template that is there for anyone else to buy as well.

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

#485

Post by digitalPhonix »

typeofhuman wrote: post #463
port11 wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the critics in the thread are… odious. I’ve written down some of the GH handles, because if I’m ever hiring again, I wanna make sure I’d never hire some of these folks. I don’t understand how someone can display such contempt towards the maintainer of a thing they’ve used for free.

[flagged]

> pejudice: an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge

(Or some such variation of “making an opinion before having information”)

It might be unfair but port11 made the opinion of not wanting to work with people after observing their behaviours so it is not prejudice.

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

#486

Post by pests »

satvikpendem wrote: post #410
pests wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Isn't that an article about using a frontend aesthetics prompt in order to avoid the AI tells? A lot of the with-aesthetics pages look pretty good imo.

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

#488

Post by tazjin »

port11 wrote: post #440
freedomben wrote: post #6

Very 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. Tha…

My current take is that if you start an open-source project now, you should go full AGPL (or similar copyleft license), and require a CLA for contributors.

If your thing ends up actually good you now have a defence against exploitation, and a way to generate income reliably (by selling the code under a different license). afaik, organisations like the FSF even endorse this.

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

#489

Post by willio58 »

Wow. This is wild. I have a mix of empathy for the guy and also a feeling like he has no idea what he's doing running a business.

> Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework.

So his idea is to make Tailwind less modern than competitors by throwing a wrench in this tool that makes it easier to write tailwind with AI, simply because he thinks the only way Tailwind can make money is if actual human beings come to read the docs site? If that's the case, your income is based on products that's are not high enough value to potential customers, or you're marketing it poorly, or both.

> And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around and make sure the people who are still here are getting their paychecks every month.

I get priorization but this isn't really that. He's not saying "I'll get to this when I find some time. Busy with high-priority business-related things right now.". He's saying "AI is going to be the end of profits for tailwind and instead of coming up with an alternative income stream I'm going to just block anything making tailwind easier to use with tailwind. And also stop complaining about it."

It sucks to fire people, but that doesn't mean you have to spread the flames out to open source contributors trying to make tailwind better for everyone. Look for new income streams, ideally ones that can be sold to people that control the money in companies (that isn't often the devs that are in your docs).

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

#490

Post by porker »

seanw265 wrote: post #332
freedomben wrote: post #6

Very 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'll piggyback on this to highlight Refactoring UI as well. It's an ebook by Adam and Steve, though I'm not sure if it's technically part of Tailwind Labs or not. This book taught me so much about modern UI design. If you've ever tried building a component and thought to yourself, "hmm something about this looks off," you might benefit from this book. These days some of the examples might be a little bit dated (fashi…

FWIW I found Practical UI [1] a more actionable book than Refactoring UI. Both are similar but I found it covered the material in a more accessible way.

1. https://www.practical-ui.com/

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