I'm a Tailwind Plus customer in spite of not being the world's biggest Tailwind fan. Even though it really grinds my gears how unreadable markup can be when littered with Tailwind classes, I appreciate the quality and variety of the templates and components available in Tailwind Plus and the constant (free!) updates. So this is a bummer to hear. Many thanks to Adam and the team.
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
#542Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s unproven, but suppose it’s true: what’s your alternative? If we are in fact facing widespread unemployment, what’s going to be better than UBI at avoiding societal collapse? Billionaires paying private armies to contain poor people is a straight-up sci-fi dystopia but even that depends on enough people having money to buy things from their companies.
If we truly hit the point where we have more people than jobs. That we hit AI improving at miraculous paces that we cant even reskill people. I think it would be better to essentially have make work programs. Have basic qualification programs where you are guaranteed a job. People need a purpose. Throw every person capable of getting an engineering or science degree into labs. Massively expand teaching, nurseing and…
This is so fucking dumb. I hate when software engineers try to solve problems. You are good at one thing, do that.
The rest of us will struggle without your help because that's what we been doing. We are literally struggling to fulfill our purposes because we have jobs.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#543Earlier 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.
The business model is strong. AI is stealing traffic/money from creators. That's not a problem with the business model, it's a problem with AI. AI hyperscalers shamelessly monetize other people's work without compensation. Truly an awful dystopia.
If a business model can't withstand being disrupted, it is no longer viable. It's like Uber putting cabs out of business with something better. Selling templates is now no longer viable, and blaming AI will not do anything. As Darwin would say, adapt or die.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#544I bought Tailwind UI, now Plus a couple of years ago. I've also dabbled with a Claude skill that scrapes a "UI block" source from the site and transforms it into a Rails view component. Maybe there's a way to make Plus and LLMs work together rather than compete?
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#545Earlier 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.
I am one of those critics, but I never used Tailwind. A layoff of that magnitude is horrific, but if what they are describing as their business model is true, they really really need to rethink it. I wonder what the size of their marketing team is like, and if they were involved in the layoffs. Seems like they need some help there. I found the "downvote" spam in that thread, for reasonable posts, to be quite off-putt…
Tailwind, not Tailscale.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#546Earlier 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.
The business model is strong. AI is stealing traffic/money from creators. That's not a problem with the business model, it's a problem with AI. AI hyperscalers shamelessly monetize other people's work without compensation. Truly an awful dystopia.
I disagree. The bare minimum they could have done in all these years was build a proper high quality, tightly coupled component library instead of riding this "copy paste your way to a result" trend.
Not stuff like shadcn and Tailwind Catalyst, but a proper versioned, tightly coupled UI library with rich theming capabilities made for the 99% of users who aren't skilled enough at design to be cobbling together their own design systems or editing a Button component directly.
Instead they rode the wave (despite being best positioned to redirect the wave) and they're paying the price.
If it wasn't AI it'd be the first version of MUI that moves on from Material Design 2 as a default. Or Hero UI v3. Or literally anyone who brings sanity back to the space of component libraries and leaves "copy and paste code snippets" behind
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#547Today, I wanted to add tailwind to a new project and realized I had purchased it back in 2022. So I went to the website and realized it had moved to tailwind plus. That’s how distracted I’ve been. To my surprise my access worked and I could still download the full UI kit. I know they promised lifetime, but I did not expect updates forever. This looks like the first issue to fix. I would have no issues paying 20% of p…
Lovable while claiming they are making $250m ARR heaving using Tailwind, doesnt even pay to support tailwind at all. Although with the AI companies you can never trust the numbers as they play the giving free trials and counting as future ARR game.
If you give something away for free, don't complain when people take it for free. Make it AGPL instead then.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#548Multiple tiktok self-promotions in github comments is nuts
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#549Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am one of those critics, but I never used Tailwind. A layoff of that magnitude is horrific, but if what they are describing as their business model is true, they really really need to rethink it. I wonder what the size of their marketing team is like, and if they were involved in the layoffs. Seems like they need some help there. I found the "downvote" spam in that thread, for reasonable posts, to be quite off-putt…
Tailwind, not Tailscale.
thanks :D
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#550Something’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.
> key piece of foundational web tech is staring down unsustainability
This must be satire. CSS is what's actually foundational; literally, a foundation upon which Tailwind was built.