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Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
651–660 of 893 posts
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#652The PR author posted a TikTok link [1] the thread later explaining their position. Their behaviour seems very unprofessional to me. Mayve the just want to increase engagement to their accounts. Tailwind definetly made the right call here. [1] https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZThLjg284/
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Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#653Quoting Adam,
> And 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.
> 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.
NYT and other Billion dollar media house can sue the AI companies for copyright violations and get into cozy deals. But the individuals and small companies are left in lurch.
Instead of ganging up on developers for not making their product LLM friendly, they should force the AI companies to ensure that a part of their $20 or $200 goes to the sources of the data used in the LLM responses.
Something like Ad words, where people whose content is used by LLMs can register as a publisher and get compensated.
Oh it wouldn't be sustainable AI companies? Whose fault is that?
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#654Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#655Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#656Earlier 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.
OpenAI could be profitable (easily) if it stopped training new models. Whether they will make that choice or not, who knows.
Google and Anthropic probably won't stop training though.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#657While I'm sure AI is partially to blame, I feel like the real problem is that (1) they don't have a sensible business model and (2) they have saturated their market. There are relatively few individuals and organizations out there with products that are worth spending vendor money on, especially for something like a CSS library. Companies that do have this need are ready to spend BIG. Tailwind charges a one-time fee…
They had a business model good enough to employ a few people. Not every business needs to be Google’s Adsense.
LLMs are clearly to “blame” here. You can make any component with LLMs from scratch or it will expertly use one of the many existing UI frameworks.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#658Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. You can block accounts on GitHub and add a note as to why. Might be simpler and more accessible later on than a random TXT (plus, it probably updates if they change their username). Note that blocking also means they can’t contribute to your repos. Which you may not care about anyway.
Thank you, that’s indeed much cleverer. Unfortunately I’ve closed my account this year, trying to put my money where my mouth is and not furthering the goals of GitHub or Microsoft.
What's wrong with microsoft and github? I can't lie, between this comment and the "writing down people's github handles out of spite just in case" you are coming off as someone with a lot of grievances.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#659Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just doing nothing isn't great for the "human spirit", but UBI doesn't mean people can't find their own goals to pursue. The idea of something where people are not longer required to work to survive is hard to accept since many people haven't seriously considered how they could meaning outside of their careers
I could ask every one of my coworkers what they would do and they would have a realistic answer. I don't really have sympathy for people attached to their careers. They did that to themselves.
counterpoint : my father had realistic expectations for what he wanted to do post-retirement.
what actually happened was that he sat around purposeless because it turns out that the motivation of producing a paycheck or product was actually the reason he did things. He stopped showering, became depressed, and neglected his health.
And this isn't an uncommon reaction to the open-ended 'free-form' life post-retirement. Some people very realistically need to have some level of structure imposed on their life or otherwise be taught how to create that structure themselves. I think this will be a very real problem whenever UBI gets closer to reality.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#660The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such things. While I understand that this has been difficult for him and his company... hasn't it been obvious that this would be a major issue for years? I do worry about what this means for the future of open source software. We've lo…
Is AI making component libraries redundant? Or is it just making it really easy to use free component libraries? (Or is it really more about traffic to the documentation site and thus eyeballs on the sales pitch?) I'm making an app using ShadCN, which is pretty good and free -- maybe Tailwind Plus would be significantly better, I don't know, I had to consider the possibility that this project never makes any money so…
I think all kinds of libraries are becoming redundant. Unless the library solves significant technical problems its likely AI will generate whatever you need. Even tailwind itself is kind of unnecessary, I've used it a lot, but recently been just using AI to generate raw css on side projects, I feel it works pretty well. Tailwind is really a developer convivence, it made things pretty fast to style, but now I don't really think it has anywhere near the advantages it did. If you aren't writing tailwindcss but generating it, almost all the advantage is gone. Only thing it kind of provides is a set of defaults / standards