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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

#731

I nearly always use Tailwind, had no idea there was even a Plus offering. Checking the site I see it now but it’s a subtle link. Also wonder if shad/cn had something to do with the reduced usage of plus.

shadcn/ui I'd argue is probably the single biggest factor in the declining Tailwind revenue more so than just LLMs in general.

As said is it is to say shadcn is what Tailwind should've created and maintained for a fee rather than some html/css templates that are easily replicated.

I say this as someone who bought Tailwind+ to support the project many years ago and still use Tailwind every single day.

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

#733

It's insane how much AIs use Tailwind and yet the companies aren't contributing anything. It would be trivial for Anthropic or Cursor to pay something . Would it work to have a new free-use license that explicitly excludes LLMs? Make them pay royalties - you'd have to use something like public license keys. But if Spotify pays a trivial license payment for every stream - Claude could contribute something when it reco…

> It's insane how much AIs use Tailwind and yet the companies aren't contributing anything. It would be trivial for Anthropic or Cursor to pay something.

Paying someone fairly for its contribution to society? This won't pass here in the free world as it sounds like a dangerous communist idea. How are we supposed to become richer than our neighbor that way?

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

#735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should learn to vote for UBI?

UBI will turn Earth into the Earth of the Expanse. I truly believe it would be absolutely ruinous on man. Our psychology is just not built for that.

Maybe. Or maybe it'll turn it into something closer to Earth from Star Trek.

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

#737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you really go looking over years of their post history for this retort?

GP could have remembered simlevesque's past posts and then just double-checked. The hypocrisy the GP noticed is strong enough to warrant a mention.

Bit of a stretch to remember a random post from 9 years ago though

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

#738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's presuming humans don't need money to feed themselves and continue to work.

That's neither here, nor there. AI is destined to destroy software industry , but not itself. Software does not decay by itself (it's literally the whole point of using digital media over analog). Libraries do not "degrade". "Bit rot" is an illusion, a fictitious force like centrifugal force in Newtonian dynamics, representing changes that happen not to a program, but to everything else around it. The current degree…

Until you want a feature that the software doesn't have.

I hear you about damning shitty code which the web industry as a whole is quite responsible for, but I don't see how them dying outright is better.

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

#739
post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

w-full md:max-w-[100px] bg-purple dark:bg-red hover:underline

Good luck writing that as inline style.

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

#740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accessibility is an interesting space for quality because under the ADA you can be sued for it and be exposed to huge liability.

But accessiblity on the frontend is to a large extend patterns - if it looks like a checkbox it should have the appropriate ARIA tag, and patterns are easy for an LLM.

That kind of pattern was easy before AI.

It's just… a lot of people don't see this on their bottom line. Or any line. My awareness of accessibility issues is the Web Accessibility Initiative and the Apple Developer talks and docs, but I don't think I've ever once been asked to focus on them. If anything, I've had ideas shot down.

What AI does do is make it cheap to fill in gaps. 1500 junior developers for the price of one, if you know how to manage them. But still, even there, they'd only be filling in gaps as well as the nature of those gaps have been documented in text, not the lived experience of people with e.g. limited vision, or limited joint mobility whose fingers won't perform all the usual gestures.

Even without that issue, I'd expect any person with a disability to describe an AI-developed accessibility solution as "slop": because I've had to fix up a real codebase where nobody before me had noticed the FAQ was entirely Bob Ross quotes (the app wasn't about painting, or indeed in English), I absolutely anticipate that a vibe-coded accessibility solution will do something equally weird, perhaps having some equivalent to "As a large language model…" or to hard-code some example data that has nothing to do with the current real value of a widget.

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