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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

#781
post #444

> 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.

You can use a product and still be critical, especially when layoffs happen, truth is there are a lot of things we don't know about their finances – tailwind definitely is successful by any metrics, they have corporate sponsors that alone give them a healthy MRR (I count at least $100k/month from the sponsors page alone)

I sympathise that it sucks having to fire people, been there. But it sucks more to get fired.

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

#782
post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, I'm quite curious on what feelings are about still putting it in a public GitHub repo? AI models will train on your codebase, unethical actors will still take it and not pay. Others can give the .zip to Claude and ask it to reimplement it in a way that isn't license infringement. I think it really turns open source upside down. Is this a risk worth taking or best to just make getting the source something tha…

Or maybe ask yourself why are you doing open source in the first place? AI training on your code is success if you care about your code being genuinely helpful to others. It's a problem only if you're trying to make money or personal reputation, and abusing open source as a vector for it.

Just to add to this. Open source for money has been a dead end for a long time, except for the (increasingly rare) situations where people accidentally convert their open source _contributions_ into employment (I accidentally did this back in 2015). Open source for recognition/reputation makes a bit more sense, but it is also becoming increasingly rare. LLMs are super-charging the extinction, but this was also observable in 2021, when I wrote this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29714929 .

Even before LLMs, I have seen people (shamelessly) re-implement code from open source project A into open source project B, without attribution (IIRC, a GPL C++ project [no hate, I use C++ too these days] basically copied the very distinctive AVL Tree implementation of a CDDL C project -- this is a licensing violation _and_ plagiarism, and it effectively writes the C project out of history. When asked about this, various colleagues[1], just shrugged their shoulders, and went on about their lives.). LLMs now make this behavior undetectable _and_ scalable.

If we want strong copyright protections for open source, we may need to start writing _literate_ programs (i.e. the Knuthian paradigm, which I am quite fond of). But that probably will not happen, because most programmers are bad at writing (because they hate it, and would rather outsource it to an LLM). The more likely alternative, is that people will just stop writing open source code (I basically stopped publishing my repos when the phrase "Big Tech" became common in 2018; Amazon in particular would create hosted versions of projects without contributing anything back -- if the authors were lucky they would be given the magnanimous opportunity to labor at Amazon, which is like inventing dynamite and being granted the privilege of laboring in the mines).

The fact is, if we want recognition, we need to sing each others' praises, instead hoping that someone will look at a version control history. We need to be story-tellers, historians, and archivists. Where is my generation's Jargon File?

[1]: Not co-worker, which is someone who shares an employer, but colleague, which is someone who shares a profession.

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

#784

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 yours isn't.

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

#785
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.

I deleted my GitHub for the same reasons.

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

#786

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…

[deleted]

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

#787
Tailwind was far ahead of its time in having an OSS business model overall friendly to users while still being able to fund development (Note: OSS projects like Minio, ScyllaDB and CockroachDB do a far more insidious "open core only", or "crazy licensing fees after x processes/users" , etc). It was great to see OSS succeed financially without ads or punishing users.

"Information should be free", sure, but lets not kid ourselves, these massive new AI companies are making themselves new gatekeepers with new artificial moats for themselves. Information is not federated / distributed anymore.

We need "GPL for AI" that restricts AI scrapers from performing content theft/repackaging.

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

#788
post #764

Seems like their whole business model was based on the fact that tailwind was difficult to use, and now with llm we have a simple way to use it in a good-enough way. They, and other companies, should rather depend on corporate users. Don't let multi-billion revenue companies use your tech for free. Seems like many companies leaned it a bit late, we always have the same news every fewe years (docker, mongodb, terrafor…

> Seems like their whole business model was based on the fact that tailwind was difficult to use

Uhhh no... People already struggle with CSS. No one would use Tailwind if it made it even more difficult. I've used and loved Tailwind for 5 years and some without ever having any components written for me. At worst it's as difficult as CSS (centering a div is not any easier, you just write it in a different place), and in some areas like responsiveness (media queries like screen size breakpoints) the syntax is way easier to read and write.

The problem their business model was solving is first that good design is hard, and second that even if you can design something that looks good, you might not be good at implementing it in CSS. They did those things for you, and you can copy-paste it straight into your app with a single block of code thanks to Tailwind.

You're right that LLMs essentially solved this same issue in a more flexible way that most people would prefer, and it's just one feature of many.

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

#789

I can't get over the Author of the CR addi g his responses on TikTok.. What have we come to?

if the coding agents are already using Tailwind so much, I don't see why he is so adamant on add this to the repo. llms.txt is basically useless, and you need it you can add it to your user claude.md

Oh $DEITY you just reminded me of summer of code.

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

#790
post #620

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'…

> owned by everyone There's no such thing. Even if on paper "everyone" has an ownership share, in practice it's going to be a relatively small number of people who actually exercise all the functions of ownership. The idea that "everyone" can somehow collectively "own" anything is a pipe dream. Ownership in practice is control--whoever controls it owns it. "Everyone" can't control anything. > I really like AI models,…

> we as customers are better off because things we want are cheaper

Why privilege that side of the equation over "we as workers"? Being a customer isn't all there is to life. I happen to spend quite a bit more time working than shopping.

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