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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

#501

Post by manuelmoreale »

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.

I’m sorry for what’s happening to Tailwind, it clearly sucks, but a library like that is definitely not a key piece of foundational web tech the same way bootstrap and jquery weren’t.

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

#502

Post by zdragnar »

wombatpm wrote: post #416
zdragnar wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real question is, have your actual qualified leads decreased? So much traffic is bogus or looking for something adjacent to what they land on that I'm not entirely convinced AI is at fault here. It very well could be, but I'd love to see a real deep dive rather than potential coincidence.

If you can identify scraping bots, can’t you just serve them pages and pages of Lor Ipsum text

Not every human visits to buy either.

The real signal is conversions. If the percentage of people who visit and then buy / sign up remains constant, while traffic goes down, you can conclude LLMs are part of the cause.

OTOH if traffic goes down but conversions goes up in percentage, then it's hard to say LLMs are having a negative consequence.

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

#503

Post by bgwalter »

infamouscow wrote: post #483
acdha wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The FSF also ignored the SaaS revolution. They put out the AGPL but did not really market it or convert FSF projects to it.

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

#504

Post by [deleted] »

b34r wrote: post #434
geenat wrote: post #274

I 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]

[deleted]

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

#505

Post by satvikpendem »

suyash wrote: post #498
satvikpendem wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're just repeating the same point I'm making. The point is they're not good businesses, hence why Envato pivoted and Tailwind soon might need to as well.

You're shifting your argument, first you said it's not a business. Any business can be good/bad depends on climate and over time. It was a business and many busienss in the current era of AI will face such challenges. All business just need to constatly adapt over time aka innovate.

> first you said it's not a business

You're misunderstanding what I'm saying, I was not talking about Tailwind Labs not being a business, I am saying that in general, products are not businesses by default. In that case, my argument is the same as it has been, agreeing with your last 3 sentences.

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

#506

Post by trinix912 »

retrocog wrote: post #405

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 t…

That's no better than robots.txt, it's simple to bypass and with the current LLM tech there's lots of plausible deniability regarding the output.

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

#507

Post by WA »

stevoski wrote: post #228
freedomben wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Maybe. One data point isn't all that useful, but I never would have bought it if it weren't for the model he chose. I will never, ever do a subscription for something like that.

Right, but you can do a one-off purchase to get the product as it existed at the time. Instead they offered all future improvements in the price. This is not sustainable once your customer growth dies down, as it eventually did.

Not entirely true. They had one product at first. I think it was UI kit. The full app templates that came later were a separate product and they charged again. However, you’re right insofar as they added more templates to the later product for free.

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

#508

Post by shimman »

stevoski wrote: post #228
freedomben wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Maybe. One data point isn't all that useful, but I never would have bought it if it weren't for the model he chose. I will never, ever do a subscription for something like that.

Right, but you can do a one-off purchase to get the product as it existed at the time. Instead they offered all future improvements in the price. This is not sustainable once your customer growth dies down, as it eventually did.

Their customer growth wasn't exactly dying down tho, it was massively disrupted. That is a key distinction that should be noted.

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

#509

Post by andruby »

It seems like every (coding) AI model out there is generating html with TailwindCSS styling.

@adam: this is just an idea. Have you tried reaching out to OpenAI, Anthropic et al to become sponsors of tailwind? Could that be a viable revenue path?

Maybe you could offer LLM friendly docs to them, or access to something valuable for them? Or maybe they’re just happy to sponsor.

Tailwind and its popularity make LLM’s more valuable, so I’m sure the model makers want Tailwind to thrive.

Any other monetization ideas to help Adam?

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