75% it’s 3/4, and plural “we have let go” means 6 people was let go. Or three if that’s a royal “we”.
It says 75% of the engineer team. There might be other roles not affected.
Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
511–520 of 893 posts
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#512I 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…
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>What a horrible thing to do. So sorry I wasted my own personal time on this. People like you drive others out of open source.
Pot, meet kettle.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#513>making it easier for LLMs to read our docs just means less traffic to our docs which means less people learning about our paid products and the business being even less sustainable.
This tells me the problem wasn't AI but the overall business wasn't healthy. Docs don't drive sales.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#514Tailwind should have bought shadcn and started pushing a better subscription model. Shadcn & vercel ate tailwind's lunch imo.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I agree, I'm quite curious on what feelings are about still putting it in a public GitHub repo?
AI models will train on your codebase, unethical actors will still take it and not pay. Others can give the .zip to Claude and ask it to reimplement it in a way that isn't license infringement. I think it really turns open source upside down. Is this a risk worth taking or best to just make getting the source something that's a .zip on a website which the models realistically won't train on.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#516Earlier 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.
They actually re-appointed him to the board in 2021, also before ChatGPT came out: https://www.fsf.org/news/statement-of-fsf-board-on-election-...
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
I bought a Tailwind Plus trial a few years ago and I've been using AI tools since they came out. I typically find the block or template I want to use via the Tailwind Plus site and then feed it into Claude Code and ask the agent to modify them as required. This has been working well for me. I think the problem is that the Internet is absolutely full of people who expect free shit and never even consider paying for it…
Ironically, some of the same people that are ready to pay $200.-/month Claude subscriptions.
You're not wrong.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#518Earlier quoted context omitted.
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It did provide us with lots of non vendors locked products. World has been a better place because of open source.
You have no way way of knowing if that is true whatsoever.
lol the capitalist bloodsucker brigade has arrived, they're almost as bad as the entitled "open source community" bloodsuckers
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#519>making it easier for LLMs to read our docs just means less traffic to our docs which means less people learning about our paid products and the business being even less sustainable. This tells me the problem wasn't AI but the overall business wasn't healthy. Docs don't drive sales.
Doesn't matter. Even if people were for some reason still going to their docs there would simply be no need for the types of paid products they offer - prebuilt template components.
Why pay for a template when AI's can shit out your entire design system and multiple templates in 5 minutes, not to mention competition from other template systems like shadcn that are completely free.
And yes they might not be the best quality but you just prompt it until you like it and then use it as a reference.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#520Wow. 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…
> 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."
I don't really understand how you can find a difference between your sentence with what he wrote:
> I totally see the value in the feature and I would like to find a way to add it.
> 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. 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.
Pretty sure those are the same picture