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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

#521

Post by vhiremath4 »

I will be honest. I love open source. But something that really annoys me about the open source community is that the developers take this holier-than-thou approach to backing up maintainers in circumstances like this, but obviously they are not paying with their own money. They are just complaining, and it feels a lot like virtue signaling at worst and pure naivety at best. It feels extremely disengenous at this point, and it's annoying.

What do we actually know?

1. People are inherently selfish. If you give me this shit for free, I'm gonna use it for free. Obviously everyone is doing this. Spare me the "but I go to this conference or that conference".

2. Code is cheap. Why would I ever pay for something that is not gated behind a service with API limits and costs?

3. Coding as we know it is getting commoditized. That's correct. We are all going to lose our jobs as we know it today. Clearly that's the future. Wake up!

But when making these points, open source devs (and honestly a lot of people on hacker news) whine and complain. I don't really know why I'm leaving this comment - I just feel like I'm at an annoyance breaking point. This guy is obviously struggling to pivot and all the grandstanding and virtue signaling just feels like additional noise and wanting to feel good with very little action.

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

#522

Post by Jcampuzano2 »

falloutx wrote: post #459
agentifysh wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i just gave my favorite LLM a screenshot of one of those components and it recreated it perfectly. i paid $0. i dont see how any business model can compete with free. maybe they can focus on branding like Pepsi or Coke and see if developers will make their decisions based on that.

how do you know it recreated perfectly. Is it equally customizable? Is it equally accessible? And your LLM models cost money too. If you use the API keys, you can quickly see the cost.

Being 100% honest even though it sucks to be the truth - it doesn't matter if its customizable or accessible or not because you just ask the LLM to do that for you.

Or ask the LLM to customize it to your specific use case since most people really only really care about their situation - not for it to be customizable to everyones use case.

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

#523

Post by School-Cotton »

krainboltgreene wrote: post #411
falcor84 wrote: post #396

Earlier 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]

No, I have the same question as that other poster. It is not a bad faith question.

There are a lot of problems that would be solved immediately if "we" (i.e. all of humanity, or all of the U.S. or some other country) decided collectively to do something: climate change, nuclear weapons proliferation, war, and so on. But that's effectively wishing for magic -- there is no way to get everyone to collectively agree on something, so unless you explain how to cope with that fact, you haven't actually made any progress.

Given that I personally don't control humanity as a hive mind, what can I do to fix this problem? You haven't proposed an answer to that.

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

#524

Post by whstl »

ZeroConcerns wrote: post #211
freedomben wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you ignore this part of my comment: > 95% of the value I get is the components and things If you want (and only want) a pre-built site that just needs populated with content and maybe minor tweaks to things, then yeah it's React world. However I've rarely found that any template site (Tailwind or otherwise) is close enough to where it doesn't need medium to major surgery to meet my needs, at which point it's…

> If you want (and only want) a pre-built site No, I want to be able to @import "tailwindcss" without feeling guilty. > I've rarely found that any template site Well, meet https://basecoatui.com -- and there's more where that came from. So, ehhm, no, I'm not ignoring the salient part of your comment: you are ignoring the entire point of my post, which is that if Tailwind had a non-React monetization strategy, things…

You were linking to their React-only offering above, but the actual Tailwind Plus website is this one: https://tailwindcss.com/plus

The Tailwind UI blocks are a similar offering to Basecoat, and are available in non-React format.

The "Tailwind React Templates" are not really similar to Basecoat.

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

#525

Post by swagasaurus-rex »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #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.

Before LLMs, Google was showing highlights which took crawled content and displayed it on google search results, meaning they’d get less traffic on their site while google stole their content.

It’s unfortunate that google helped kickstart the world wide web but now they’re extracting everything while polluting search results with ads

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

#526

Post by wredcoll »

satvikpendem wrote: post #414
toomuchtodo wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You should learn how to vibecode and ship whatever works enough, as fast as possible, to get bought for a wildly disconnected from fundamentals valuation." This may sound flippant, or low quality, but it I assure that it is not intended to be. It is derived from observations of the current tech macro. Quality does not appear to matter, ethics do not appear to matter, sustainability and engineering rigor do not appea…

> Quality does not appear to matter, ethics do not appear to matter, sustainability and engineering rigor do not appear to matter I don't know why people keep saying this, as if quality, ethics and sustainability mattered before and every developer was a pure artisan of their craft. In reality, having been in many companies and looking at their codebases, it has always been slop, with very few exceptions.

Yeah, no kidding. I was alive 20 years ago, this isn't like talking about the 1800s, what exactly was different with the craftsmanship and ethics back then?

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

#527

Post by LanceJones »

pier25 wrote: post #347
burningChrome wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No discovery - no business. I do SEO as a side gig to my 9-5 as a developer. All four of my freelance companies I work with have seen their traffic drop up to 40% since LLM's have effectively taken over and people are using search engines less and less. We've had to pivot to short form social media advertising which seems to be closing the gap whereas before the majority of our leads were coming from organic search…

I'm not sure if this is comparable to the yellow pages vs the internet. Google became profitable in 2001 whereas OpenAI et al are still operating at a huge loss. Even with ads it's not clear whether LLMs can be profitable unless they increase prices significantly.

OpenAI could be profitable (easily) if it stopped training new models. Whether they will make that choice or not, who knows.

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

#529

Post by nickjj »

okokwhatever wrote: post #288
nickjj wrote: post #129

I'm happy to see this, not because I wish Adam failure. I am a Tailwind user myself and use it in all of my projects. Generally am a fan of Adam and respect his business. The happy (in a bad way) part is seeing very successful projects like Tailwind get financially fucked by AI. It means it's not just me. I am a small tech course creator who was able to make a living for 10 years but over the last 3 years it has tank…

Hey! you just discovered media piracy dude! Congrats!

That's an interesting way to think about it.

I discovered media piracy long ago, but it was very acute before AI because only a small amount of folks pirated this type of content. I ignored them and put 0% energy into it because I wanted to focus on the happy path of people not pirating the content.

If you think of AI as pirating media, it's providing that media to everyone in a context specific form so yes it is a pretty interesting analogy. Not quite a 1 to 1 match but the end outcome is the same and that's all that matters here.

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

#530

Post by K0nserv »

lone-cloud wrote: post #361
K0nserv wrote: post #48

Earlier 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…

It's not that hard to build a design system with decent accessibility. Just use shadcn ui components instead of rolling your own.

It's not really a refutation of my point about how building a good component library is hard, to suggest using another component library. Of course, if you use one it's easier, that was my entire point.
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