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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

#591

Post by lawrencechen »

They were perfectly positioned to build a Lovable/Bolt/Replit back in the day... might not be too late now either.

They could sell training data too. Though, UIs are relatively solved. But great UIs and criticizing UIs aren't.

Learned a lot from Refactoring UI, and I know (from trying) that it's impossible to make a code review bot based on out of the box sota models today. Vision capabilities are lacking here, and I can see demand for more data here. And Adam's taste likely fits well here.

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

#593

Post by pier25 »

usef- wrote: post #374
pier25 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google was not profitable until they rolled out ads, either. The scope of use of AI assistants in people's lives are significantly higher than google search, imo. People use it in far more scenarios already than just information retrieval. That's why some are betting there's a chance it's more valuable than present-day google search.

IIRC Google had no monetization at all until ads. Even then the cost of providing search with ads is orders of magnitude lower compared to running LLMs.

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

#594

Post by b34r »

llmslave2 wrote: post #571
b34r wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I spent many hours of my personal time on it.

You spent many hours of your personal time trying to enable AI companies to better steal OSS work? Dude get a better hobby or something lol

What? That's not what this does at all. Educate yourself. It has nothing to do with the commercial side of his business, it's just the already public docs in cleaned up pure text form.

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

#595

Post by FuckButtons »

tills13 wrote: post #482
ericmcer wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suppose in the limit that’s likely to be the fate of all other businesses.

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

#596

Post by scoot »

swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #525
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

> google helped kickstart the world wide web

Where on earth did you get that idea? The web existed long before Google - Google just found a unique way to monetise other people’s content

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

#597

Post by robertwt7 »

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'…

yeah this is so sad, I'm an early supporter of Tailwind since v1 and I also bought the tailwind UI as well to support them. I hope this era doesn't discourage the tailwind team or put them out of business

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

#598

Post by stillcompiling »

Rzor wrote: post #430
blitzar wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is "progress" when tech bros displace traditional workers, but it is "heartbreaking" when a tech bro gets displaced by other tech bros. Whats the 2026 version of "you should learn to code" ?

>Whats the 2026 version of "you should learn to code"? Elderly care.

Is it that mass unemployment will lead to caring more for one's family again, resulting in proper family structures that take care for their elders like in the past? I hope so.

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

#599

Post by katdork »

worik wrote: post #239
katdork wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the part you're missing here is that the author here is under no requirement to accept changes to their project and everyone else is welcome to fork it if they disagree with choices made by the author. The author did not in fact, make the project worse, all they did was not accept a change, and that is entirely different than making it worse. Even those who stood to benefit from the change have not received a…

> all they did was not accept a change, A change to make the documentation easier for LLM scrapers to inhale. What would be the point? It would, in no way, improve anything. Probably not even for LLMs. I am astounded the gentleman responded at all. I think all the talk of money (whilst urgent and catastrophic) is a red herring

For sure, yeah.

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

#600

Post by usef- »

pier25 wrote: post #593
usef- wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google was not profitable until they rolled out ads, either. The scope of use of AI assistants in people's lives are significantly higher than google search, imo. People use it in far more scenarios already than just information retrieval. That's why some are betting there's a chance it's more valuable than present-day google search.

IIRC Google had no monetization at all until ads. Even then the cost of providing search with ads is orders of magnitude lower compared to running LLMs.

They made money by licensing their search technology to other sites, as well as selling physical search appliances for businesses. They were considered by some to be struggling to find a way to monetise well.

Computational cost is indeed higher than search (though remember, search has been heavily optimised for many years!), but search and web companies were one of the lowest cost, highest-margin businesses in human existence. Many higher-cost businesses have been supported by ads.

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