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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

#71

Post by freedomben »

ZeroConcerns wrote: post #66
freedomben wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, yeah the templates are React/Next.js, but the components and things are not (they are what I described above). Templates are great but 95% of the value I get is the components and things

So, my initial reaction that "Tailwind Plus" only offers apparent value for React users is... entirely valid?

Only if you ignore this part of my comment:

> 95% of the value I get is the components and things

If you want (and only want) a pre-built site that just needs populated with content and maybe minor tweaks to things, then yeah it's React world. However I've rarely found that any template site (Tailwind or otherwise) is close enough to where it doesn't need medium to major surgery to meet my needs, at which point it's usually faster to just copy together components to what I actually want

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

#72

Post by satvikpendem »

sosodev wrote: post #57
nemomarx wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we need patreon equivalents for open source development?

It already exists. Tailwind has had GitHub sponsorships enabled for years but only 5 people have ever given them money that way.

Meanwhile Evan You of Vue JS was making something like 200k just from Patreon before starting void(0) which is venture backed, it's all a marketing problem because I don't think anyone knew their GitHub sponsors even existed, people just don't seem to use it in general.

I don't know why Tailwind needed anyone more than Adam, I understand that more people makes the work go faster such as for their Rust compiler but then you run into money problems like this.

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

#73

Post by mpeg »

sp4cec0wb0y wrote: post #56
solarkraft wrote: post #29

It’s crazy to me that it was ever a business to begin with. Cool, in a way! But this feels like just going back to normal.

A lot of open source projects attempt to become a business in some form or another (or vice versa). Great examples of this include Astral (creators of UV and Ruff), TursoDB, TigerBeetle, etc etc etc. People want to get paid for the project they work on. Some of their business models will fail. This is probably a case of tailwind growing their engineering team faster than they should have when the AI writing was on th…

I think a problem is that tailwind has no moat compared to most of those. If it never received any further updates today it would still be effectively feature-complete, save for the occasional new css features.

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

#74

Post by huflungdung »

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.

[dead]

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

#75

Post by K0nserv »

sosodev wrote: post #67
K0nserv wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked on a design system previously I think most people, especially non-frontend developers, discount how hard something like that is to build. LLMs will build stuff that looks plausible but falls short in a bunch of ways (particularly accessibility). This is for the same reason that people generate div-soup, it looks correct on the surface. EDIT: I suppose what I'm saying is that "The paid products Adam ment…

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

Oh no I'm very cynical about that.

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

#77

Post by bjord »

jolt42 wrote: post #7

AI taking jobs by users avoiding ads. It makes me wonder how widespread this is and what other "not so obvious" job-taking effects it has.

That's not what they're talking about here, though, is it? They have premium offerings as well, which LLMs are causing people to not buy.

Put another way: Adam said traffic to their docs was down 40% and revenue was down 80%. I don't think it's purely traffic-driven revenue.

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

#78

Post by SkyPuncher »

stevoski wrote: post #46

As a fellow business owner, I’ll always feel bad when business owners need to make these types of decisions. I bought Tailwind UI - I always thought it was a critically bad business decision from their end to keep giving me additional new stuff for free. It seemed to me that it should have been a subscription. However, knowing nothing about the inside of their business, I have no idea how that would have affected the…

I think it’s simple that people aren’t using CSS frameworks because the AI creates CSS on its own.

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

#79

Post by ceejayoz »

sosodev wrote: post #57
nemomarx wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we need patreon equivalents for open source development?

It already exists. Tailwind has had GitHub sponsorships enabled for years but only 5 people have ever given them money that way.

They have off-GH sponsorship that's much more widely subscribed.

https://tailwindcss.com/sponsor

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

#80

Post by random_duck »

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.

Agreed. Also I could not imagine being in his shoes, it must be heartbreaking seeing all his work burn like this.
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