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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

#671

Post by throw234234234 »

echelon wrote: post #264
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.

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'…

They commoditized their complement to their hardware/infra, that being software. Good for them and the value of tech will shift to what is still scarce relatively.

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

#672

Post by fud101 »

gf000 wrote: post #35
farhanhubble wrote: post #33

I use Tailwind for connecting dev machines across two continents and as a free user I think it's an amazing product. It breaks my heart to see people losing their jobs because there isn't enough revenue. I can empathize with the founder too because I was kind of in their shoes last year. Had been laid off and nearly exhausted my savings but I was more worried about having to let go of folks I employed.

You might have mistaken tailwind and tailscale. I have done so on countless occasions, but this is about the css "framework".

tbh it annoys me when i want to go to my tailscale console but my browser takes me to tailwindcss which I have never used..

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

#673

Post by cluckindan »

ericmcer wrote: post #107
srameshc wrote: post #10

> 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. Adam is simply trying to navigate this new reality, and he's being honest, so there's no need to criticize him.

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.

And this is why AI coding will eventually degrade into a mess. Enjoy it while it lasts.

AI eats up users caring about $company which makes library, library degrades because nobody is paying, $company goes insolvent, library goes unmaintained and eventually defunct, AI still tries to use it.

Vibe coding with libraries is a fad that is destined to die.

Vibe coding your own libraries will result in million line codebases nobody understands.

Nothing about either is sustainable, it’s all optics and optics will come crashing down eventually.

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

#675

Post by ninefoxgambit »

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…

I wish Adam had addressed the impact of competition in a bit more detail.

Shadcn has definitely taken a big chunk, the premium ecosystem around Shadcn is absolutely exploding. I know. I run https://www.shadcnblocks.com and we saw huge month on month growth in revenue for the entire year.

Even with strong headwinds from AI, I expect our revenue to continue increasing throughout 2026.

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

#676

Post by fud101 »

seanw265 wrote: post #332
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'…

I'll piggyback on this to highlight Refactoring UI as well. It's an ebook by Adam and Steve, though I'm not sure if it's technically part of Tailwind Labs or not. This book taught me so much about modern UI design. If you've ever tried building a component and thought to yourself, "hmm something about this looks off," you might benefit from this book. These days some of the examples might be a little bit dated (fashi…

i've read it and retained nothing. I always wonder what people get out of these hyped things that i'm unable to see.

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

#677

Post by rewgs »

cluckindan wrote: post #673
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.

And this is why AI coding will eventually degrade into a mess. Enjoy it while it lasts. AI eats up users caring about $company which makes library, library degrades because nobody is paying, $company goes insolvent, library goes unmaintained and eventually defunct, AI still tries to use it. Vibe coding with libraries is a fad that is destined to die. Vibe coding your own libraries will result in million line codebase…

I don't see enough people talking about this side of things. Couldn't agree more.

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

#678

Post by csomar »

Aurornis wrote: post #298
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'…

Tailwind did a great job of building a fanbase. Even without LLMs I always thought they were on a collision course with market saturation, though. They generously gave lifetime access for a one-time payment, which was bound to run into problems as free alternatives became better and their core fanbase didn't have any reason to spend more money. Their business model also missed the boat on the rise of Figma and simila…

> Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever.

This is from Adam but I also suspect the same. LLMs has a bias toward tailwind css. I had Claude/GLM multiple times try to add tailwind css classes even though the project doesn't have any tailwind packages/setup.

This is a business model issue rather than tailwind becoming irrelevant.

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

#679

Post by mmcnl »

_qswe wrote: post #617
mmcnl wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter what Tailwind your opinion is. It matters that they built something which definitely has market validation that people were willing to pay for. AI took their lunch AND their lunch money.

I'm not going to dogpile criticism on Tailwind or Adam, whose behavior seems quite admirable, but I fundamentally agree with the thrust of the parent comment. It's unfortunate for Tailwind and anyone who was invested in the project's pre-2022 trajectory, but no one is entitled to commercial engagement by unaffiliated third parties. Here's a similar example from my own experience: * Last week, I used AI to help me pre…

Laws are not intellectual property of individuals or companies, they belong to the public. That's a fundamentally different type of content to "learn" from. I totally agree that AI can save a lot of time, but I don't agree that the creators of Tailwind don't see any form of compensation.

It does not feel not right to me that revenue is being taken from Tailwind and redirected to Google, OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic without 0 compensation.

I'm not sure how this should codified in law or what the correct words are to describe it properly yet.

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

#680

Post by csomar »

rewgs wrote: post #677
cluckindan wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is why AI coding will eventually degrade into a mess. Enjoy it while it lasts. AI eats up users caring about $company which makes library, library degrades because nobody is paying, $company goes insolvent, library goes unmaintained and eventually defunct, AI still tries to use it. Vibe coding with libraries is a fad that is destined to die. Vibe coding your own libraries will result in million line codebase…

I don't see enough people talking about this side of things. Couldn't agree more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Given that countries/cities can go into this state for a very long time without resolution, I am not quite optimistic.

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