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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

#661

Post by adrianN »

sublinear wrote: post #110
sosodev wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're overestimating how much people care about quality.

It's not that people care about quality, but that people expect things to "just work". Regarding the point about accessibility, there are a ton of little details that must be explicitly written into the HTML that aren't necessarily the default behavior. Some common features of CSS and JS can break accessibility too. None of this code would obvious to an LLM, or even human devs, but it's still what's expected. Without…

Knowing obscure things you need to do for accessibility is actually something I would expect an llm to be pretty good at.

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

#662

Post by sublinear »

adrianN wrote: post #661
sublinear wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that people care about quality, but that people expect things to "just work". Regarding the point about accessibility, there are a ton of little details that must be explicitly written into the HTML that aren't necessarily the default behavior. Some common features of CSS and JS can break accessibility too. None of this code would obvious to an LLM, or even human devs, but it's still what's expected. Without…

Knowing obscure things you need to do for accessibility is actually something I would expect an llm to be pretty good at.

Satisfying constraints like these isn't merely about knowing the spec and having lots of examples. Accessibility requirements are even more subjective than ordinary requirements already are to begin with.

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

#664

Post by throw234234234 »

deckard1 wrote: post #356
echelon wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything open source will be turned against its authors and against ICs. We thought it would give us freedom, but all of the advantage will accrue to the hyperscalers. If we don't build open source infra that is owned by everyone, we'll be owned by industrial giants and left with a thin crust that is barely ours. (This seems like such a far-fetched "Kumbaya, My Lord" type of wishful thinking, that it's a joke that I'…

it's a real shame no one warned us this would happen when a bunch of corporatists and opportunists wrested the term "open source" from the advocates of true freedom in the late '90s. https://www.fsf.org/ But there was money to be made and the friends you thought were friends were just mercenaries with a shiv in their hand.

Open source ended up disrupting the software profession; just not in the way people thought it would.

If we didn't have open source arguably developers would be more secure, way more secure, in the face of AI.

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

#665

Post by throw234234234 »

sosodev wrote: post #26

The 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…

In the face of LLM's it won't be rational for many people to open source their work. People don't want their work/effort being used against them.

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

#666

Post by novoreorx »

> 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 who are still here are getting their paychecks every month.

Man, you can really feel the anxiety and desperation in Adam's reply.

Part of me wants to say "look what evil VC money does to devs", but that's only a harsh critism of a bystander.

Monetization is a normal path that the successful OSS projects would take. Tailwind went big on the startup route, took a bunch of VC cash a couple of years back, but despite the massive impact on the dev world, they clearly didn't hit the revenue numbers investors expected. Now the valuation bubble popped, and they're forced into massive layoffs. Though to be fair, maintaining a CSS library probably doesn't require that many people anyway.

I really feel for Adam here. He didn't really do anything wrong. Eagering to build a startup after your project blows up is a totally natural ambition. But funding brings risks. Taking other people's money makes you go from being the owner to just another employee real quick. And once you hop on that VC train, you don't really call the shots anymore. Sometimes you can't stop raising or scaling as your own will.

If you find a solid business model, that's great. But if not, well, honestly, a 75% layoff is getting off lightly. At least they still have a chance to keep on.

But he obviously didn't foresee this coming. He’s getting torn between being an OSS maintainer and a CEO who have to be responsible for stackholders and employees. That internal conflict must be brutal. It’s pretty obvious he didn't reject the PR for technical reasons. It's just because the reality hit him hard, and he has to respond to it, even if it goes against his mind as a developer.

Really hope Tailwind pulls through this. Also, this is a lesson worth noting for the rest of us. As indie devs, if you ever get the chance to take VC money, you really gotta think hard about whether you're truly ready for the strings that come attached.

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

#667

Post by throw234234234 »

spzb wrote: post #52
sosodev wrote: post #26

The 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…

AI's going to be a whole lot less useful when it doesn't have any open source component libraries to crib from.

I think AI has come as the industry was somewhat maturing and most frameworks/software had previous incarnations that mostly did the same thing or could be done adhoc anyway. The need for libraries as the models get better probably declines as well.

Not all open source but a lot of it is fundamentally for humans to consume. If AI can, at its extreme (still remains to be seen), just magic up the software then the value of libraries and a lot of open source software will decline. In some ways its a fundamentally different paradigm of computing, and we don't yet understand what that looks like.

As AI gets better OSS contributes to it; but in its source code feeding the training data not as a direct framework dependency. If the LLM's continue to get better I can see the whole concept of frameworks being less and less necessary.

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

#668

Post by [deleted] »

mmcclure wrote: post #272
refulgentis wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smells like unnecessary sycophancy: I grep'd Adam in every comment and every single. one. is positive and phrased like this. I grew up on this site, from 20 year old dropout waiter in Buffalo to 37 year old ex-Googler. One of the things I'm noticing me reacting to the last year or two is a "putting on a pedestal" effect that's unnecessary.

I think context matters here. People are being kind to someone who just had to lay off most of their team because, despite their project’s popularity and success (maybe even because of it), a massive change in the ecosystem completely destroyed their business model. I’ve never been a huge fan of using Tailwind personally, but I deeply appreciated that they were making a (mostly) non-enterprise FOSS model work in an i…

[deleted]

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

#669

Post by LouisLazaris »

zamadatix wrote: post #404
password4321 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Referring to TFA (couple of comments on the issue). https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is... https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...

I think they mean where does one sign up to this newsletter.

I'm knee-deep in the tech newsletter niche and I've never seen an official Tailwind newsletter. The only one I subscribe to is a small, unofficial weekly newsletter by Vivian Guillen:

https://tailwindweekly.com/

The only problem is that it seems to have stopped sending in October.

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

#670

Post by throw234234234 »

vhiremath4 wrote: post #521

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 poi…

Because of point 3 most SWE's are also hesistant to pay for software. The positive feedback loop of "I did well out of this so i will support others as well" is over.

When you are thinking your days are numbered any cost to develop software (even token budget) is measured. As coding becomes commoditized the ROI in code will drop of that code (capitalism rewards scarcity; not value delivered) and you suddenly become cost conscious. We are moving from a monopoly-moat like market to a competitive cost based market in SWE as AI improves.

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