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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

#681

Post by Hammershaft »

paxys wrote: post #641
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #231

Something’s wrong when a key piece of foundational web tech is staring down unsustainability. Tailwind is almost ubiquitous these days. It needs to continue to exist. Small businesses being eaten by AI is a net negative, because they’re in a unique position whereby they need to actually have to listen to customers vs just optimizing for a rando middle manger’s promotion in BigTech.

This "key piece of foundational web tech" was released 5 years ago and gained prominence maybe 2-3 years ago. Let's not exaggerate its impact. We were perfectly fine before Tailwind and will be fine after it.

We were not fine before Tailwind, we aren't fine now, and we won't be fine after it until the day we finally recognize that CSS is a terrible foundational standard that deserves to be replaced.

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

#682

Post by ratatougi »

mooreds wrote: post #471
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'…

> Btw the Tailwind newsletter/email that goes out is genuinely useful as well, so I recommend signing up for that if you use Tailwind CSS at all. What is the signup link? I googled a bit but couldn't find it.

I think it's https://tailwindcss.com/blog

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

#683

Post by 7bit »

port11 wrote: post #444
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.

Some of the critics in the thread are… odious. 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. I don’t understand how someone can display such contempt towards the maintainer of a thing they’ve used for free.

I wrote down your handle, so if you are ever hiring, I will be able to skip your toxic place.

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

#684

Post by timeon »

llmslave2 wrote: post #605
immibis wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's your goal, you probably shouldn't call the class bg-blue? It should be bg-blue-but-purple-on-mobile. But then it's definitely so specific it's the wrong way to select a style. If you want the page background to be blue but purple on mobile, write that in your CSS with a selector of "body" instead of ".bg-blue-but-purple-on-mobile"

The point being you can't do this with inline styles: "bg-purple md:bg-blue"

Yes but you should not use inline style for that (nor Tailwind).

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

#685

Post by pluralmonad »

windowshopping wrote: post #658
port11 wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> What's wrong with microsoft and github?

Pull up a chair. This is going to take while...

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

#686

Post by tomaskafka »

yen223 wrote: post #639
pmarreck wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

That’s because LLMs are just databases of (mostly stolen) human data.

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

#687

Post by heavyset_go »

tazjin wrote: post #488
port11 wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could never afford Tailwind UI but then again I don’t really use Tailwind. That said, as an open-source styling solution, they could be supported in other ways. A lot — and I really mean a lot — of websites are built with Tailwind, yet very few consider donating or buying what they have to offer. Plenty of F/LOSS is in the same state: businesses extract all value they can from open-source, but put back nothing. Tha…

My current take is that if you start an open-source project now, you should go full AGPL (or similar copyleft license), and require a CLA for contributors. If your thing ends up actually good you now have a defence against exploitation, and a way to generate income reliably (by selling the code under a different license). afaik, organisations like the FSF even endorse this.

AGPL is my first choice of license, but its efficacy does not necessarily come from its teeth, but from the aversion legal departments have towards the license. It's similar to how the GPL used to be, or still is, treated. Along with compatibility with other AGPL projects, that's the reason I use the license.

There are situations that the AGPL does not cover that could be considered leeching from the commons.

I think we need stronger licensing, and binding contracts that forfeit code recipients' right to fair use in order to hinder LLM laundering, along with development platforms that leverage both to limit exploitation of the commons.

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

#688

Post by _qswe »

mmcnl wrote: post #679
_qswe wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

I see what you're getting at, but CSS is as much an open standard as the law. Public legal docs written against legal standards aren't fundamentally dissimilar to open source libraries written against technical standards.

While I am all for working out some sort of compensation scheme for the providers of model training data (even if indirect via techniques like distillation), that's a separate issue from whether or not AI's disruption of demand for certain products and services is per se harmful.

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

#689

Post by stephenson »

waffletower wrote: post #538
port11 wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the critics in the thread are… odious. 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. I don’t understand how someone can display such contempt towards the maintainer of a thing they’ve used for free.

I am one of those critics, but I never used Tailwind. A layoff of that magnitude is horrific, but if what they are describing as their business model is true, they really really need to rethink it. I wonder what the size of their marketing team is like, and if they were involved in the layoffs. Seems like they need some help there. I found the "downvote" spam in that thread, for reasonable posts, to be quite off-putt…

The 75% of the team is 3 out of 4 developers. There are no marketing.

Left are the three owners of tailwind, one engineer and one ops+customer service + partner sails person.

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

#690

Post by [deleted] »

waffletower wrote: post #538
port11 wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the critics in the thread are… odious. 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. I don’t understand how someone can display such contempt towards the maintainer of a thing they’ve used for free.

I am one of those critics, but I never used Tailwind. A layoff of that magnitude is horrific, but if what they are describing as their business model is true, they really really need to rethink it. I wonder what the size of their marketing team is like, and if they were involved in the layoffs. Seems like they need some help there. I found the "downvote" spam in that thread, for reasonable posts, to be quite off-putt…

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