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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

#631

Post by kelnos »

falloutx wrote: post #442
figassis wrote: post #128

Today, 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.

And that's totally fine what Lovable is doing. Tailwind offers an MIT-licensed library that anyone is free to use without paying for it. Tailwind's paid offering is optional, and many businesses won't need it. Just as non-paying users of OSS are not entitled to anything from the maintainers, maintainers are not entitled to revenue from users who are complying with the license terms of their free offering.

As an open source developer myself, it concerns me that so much of what we do us under- and un-funded, but that's the licensing model Tailwind chose. If you want something different, then release it under the AGPL (or something else that businesses aren't comfortable using, or cannot use), and charge for commercial licensing for any use of your product. Yes, you'll have fewer users, but that may be the trade off you need to make in order to build a sustainable business.

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

#632

Post by kelnos »

simonw wrote: post #105

Key comment is this one: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is... > [...] 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 wh…

I feel like if their docs are their only funnel into their commercial product, they need to fire their marketing staff and find people who are competent. There are so many other ways they could be reaching potential customers, even those only familiar with Tailwind's free product.

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

#633

Post by kelnos »

3rodents wrote: post #95

The biggest miss from Tailwind is ignoring the rest of the ecosystem. Rightly or wrongly, everyone has moved on to using shadcn's system for components. Tailwind hasn't. Tailwind has excellent components available through Plus which are worth paying for but they're not available where people are, which pushes people towards other libraries built on top of Tailwind. I have paid for Tailwind Plus and I like their Catal…

> everyone has moved on to using shadcn's system for components

I played around with shadcn for a new project a year or so ago, decided I really didn't like their fundamental approach of copying code (that now I have to maintain) into my code base. So I ended up using something else (DaisyUI), which has been reasonably nice so far.

I'm just one person (and one not super plugged into the frontend scene), but "everyone" feels like a gross overestimation. I would guess it's not even a majority.

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

#634

Post by kamaal »

theturtletalks wrote: post #86

Tailwind Plus was always tricky since most people would use it for commercial products and that seemed like a grey area based on their licensing. Then shadcn came along and all the Tailwind Plus alternatives (many times recreating the same UI elements that plus has) and then people just copied and used those components and polished further using AI. Before Tailwind got big, Adam released an amazing book about UI/UX c…

>>Adam released an amazing book about UI/UX called Refactoring UI[0] and it really helped me become better and understand subtleties of design.

In the age of AI, if you have Table of Contents. ChatGPT can write the book for you.

Only books I buy these days are in fiction genre. Everything else is derived from facts that already exist some where and AI can derive and write the whole book.

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

#635

Post by nyantaro1 »

YaeGh8Vo wrote: post #360
jesse_dot_id wrote: post #157

Earlier 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.

I don't know why I didn't think about this before, but you are right. This is just wrong.

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

#636

Post by hmokiguess »

antonymoose wrote: post #401
hmokiguess wrote: post #392

I bought their Plus thing a while back and not I can't find myself a reason to use it. If I was considering that purchase in today's landscape, I would surely not buy it. At $299 USD I can have a decent model do the job of writing custom tailored components for me and iterate extensively on them. Hard sell with a "UI Kit" versus a "UI Brain". If I were Adam I would drop to $29.99 and accept the status quo, but not ma…

Im currently considering buying it actually. I’ve landed a decent side-project building out a CRM for a small business that wants to ditch Salesforce. It’s all internal tooling so the customer has no care or need for a highly customized fancy UI and that $299 is peanuts relative to the time saved and my hourly rate. While I could just use Bootstrap it’s starting to feel a bit too dated (subjective).

I recommend buying it, but I would not be surprised if you still end up using some LLM augmented workflow to do the plumbing and integration when using it. It’s not really a one-click install type of thing that you get from it if you get my analogy. Also, if your customer doesn’t care for fancy UI, then more even the case to let the AI design it for you and pick something like DaisyUI or shadcn and their MCPs with Tailwind.

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

#637

Post by kamaal »

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.

Its almost like he is asking users to take a stand between using LLMs and using Tailwind.

LLMs, or Tailwind. Pick one!

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

#638

Post by esperent »

kelnos wrote: post #632
simonw wrote: post #105

Key comment is this one: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is... > [...] 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 wh…

I feel like if their docs are their only funnel into their commercial product, they need to fire their marketing staff and find people who are competent. There are so many other ways they could be reaching potential customers, even those only familiar with Tailwind's free product.

> There are so many other ways they could be reaching potential customers

Like what, exactly, now that most people interact with tailwind purely via AI agents?

I started work on a front end project React/Astro/Tailwind project for the first time in about a year, building out with CLI agents, and one things that's changed compared to a year ago is that I have the entire UI basically working and I haven't even looked at the tailwind classes. I just say yes that's fine but can you improve the width for the sidebar on mobile (obviously paraphrasing here, I write the requirements for the agent carefully) and within a couple of iterations it's working. I keep expecting to have to jump in to manually fix things but so far I haven't needed to.

I worked in FE for years and I know tailwind and CSS quite deeply. But the entire extent of what I've needed to know for this project so far can be summed up as "it's some kind of styling tool". I never had to look at the docs, I never went to their website, or or Twitter or anywhere else that might have worked for marketing.

I did make an informed decision in choosing this stack, but it's equally likely that the AI could have recommended it to me, and the AI entirely set up the project scaffolding and config for me.

So where in this could they possibly have marketed paid components to me? And even if they did, why would I have paid for them when Shadcn is free and was added automatically by the AI?

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

#639

Post by yen223 »

pmarreck wrote: post #536
torginus wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not 100% sure about that - I usually find AI written CSS to be slightly visually flawed and almost always logically flawed. The way you write websites that actually work imo, is you understand how your chosen CSS layout engine works roughly, and try to avoid switching between layout modes - traditional to flexbox to grid to flexbox again down the tree can drive the most brillant devs utterly mad . But seriously,…

> I usually find AI written CSS to be slightly visually flawed and almost always logically flawed. Funny, this also qualifies most of the _human_ written CSS I've seen. !important all the things!

It is funny how things that are hard for humans are also hard for LLMs

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

#640

Post by yen223 »

pests wrote: post #486
satvikpendem wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> completely modern and professional And it looks completely the same, so much so that people can tell it's AI generated now simply due to the gradient, among other design choices LLMs seem to make by default: https://prg.sh/ramblings/Why-Your-AI-Keeps-Building-the-Same...

Isn't that an article about using a frontend aesthetics prompt in order to avoid the AI tells? A lot of the with-aesthetics pages look pretty good imo.

Claude's frontend design skill is an interesting read

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...

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