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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

#871

Post by jmtame »

port11 wrote: post #824
jmtame wrote: post #812

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice, nothing like a little personal bias to inject into an interview process. If you can't handle criticism and you're just looking for sycophants, you're probably not the type of employer or hiring manager most people want to work for anyway.

Oh, it’s not the criticism. It’s the hatred, the vile attacks on open-source maintainers. I wouldn’t want to work with people like that, would you?

Fair enough, I tend to avoid overly negative people. Criticism can come from a good place to suggest improvements (radical candor), but agreed that some of the comments are just personal attacks. I think we're both in agreement that those aren't people we'd want to work with.

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

#873

Post by hiccuphippo »

biztos wrote: post #387
sosodev wrote: post #26

The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such things. While I understand that this has been difficult for him and his company... hasn't it been obvious that this would be a major issue for years? I do worry about what this means for the future of open source software. We've lo…

Is AI making component libraries redundant? Or is it just making it really easy to use free component libraries? (Or is it really more about traffic to the documentation site and thus eyeballs on the sales pitch?) I'm making an app using ShadCN, which is pretty good and free -- maybe Tailwind Plus would be significantly better, I don't know, I had to consider the possibility that this project never makes any money so…

I've known of the paid components for years and never thought of buying them. It's so easy to build things with Tailwind that it never crossed my mind.

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

#876

Post by gnarlouse »

ben_w wrote: post #860
gnarlouse wrote: post #859

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they only get paid when people find value in what AI is producing for them The people "finding value in them" are other people with money to throw at businesses: investors, capital firms, boards & c suites. I'm not sure anybody who has been laid off because their job got automated away is "finding value" in an LLM. There's a handful of scrappy people trying to pump out claude-driven startups but if one person can s…

> https://www.palantir.com/ What's the dark pattern here, exactly? "Selling military-adjacent stuff with an edgy vibe" isn't what's meant by a dark pattern.

In the sense that a dark pattern is anything designed to trick people into doing something they didn't necessarily consciously want to do, the entire AI industry is an oligarch's wet dream of a dark-pattern: every day we're teeing them up latent information on human-level patterns of control that I promise you LLM providers are foaming at the mouth to replicate. Like if you've got an effective "doing" system, and you've got an effective "orchestrating" system, that's AGI. Deployed at scale, at competitive cost, and even a 1.1x improvement over regular workforce, that's game for anybody but billionaires. There will be a slow dynamic deplatforming of regular people, followed by an extermination. Palantir is building the rat poison and maid service.

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

#877

Post by BoorishBears »

causal wrote: post #775
BoorishBears wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The bare minimum they could have done in all these years was build a proper high quality, tightly coupled component library instead of riding this "copy paste your way to a result" trend. Not stuff like shadcn and Tailwind Catalyst, but a proper versioned, tightly coupled UI library with rich theming capabilities made for the 99% of users who aren't skilled enough at design to be cobbling together their o…

I don't understand how a component library would be AI-proof in a way CSS templates are not.

There are more knobs to turn when you have an actual library, and you become a lot less fungible than a random collection of TW classes.

HeroUI faces the same problem, and now their React Native library includes an optional (paid) conpiler solution that makes it faster.

MUI has the same problem but besides templates they have their MUI X data components which aren't limited in complexity to what can be ergonomically copy and pasted to a clipboard.

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

#878

Post by willio58 »

javier123454321 wrote: post #816
willio58 wrote: post #489

Wow. This is wild. I have a mix of empathy for the guy and also a feeling like he has no idea what he's doing running a business. > Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework. So his idea is to make Tailwind less modern than…

I'd be sympathetic to this take if 1. The contribution actually made something useful 2. He actually said anything to the note of "I'm going to just block anything making tailwind easier to use with ai." 3. The contributor was not adding an external library that he authored without mentioning it in the comments I defer 100% to maintainers of a project if an external contributor drops a pr that they are now in charge…

> The contributor was not adding an external library that he authored without mentioning it in the comments

Good point, I made the mistake of skimming and missed that part.

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

#879

Post by agentifysh »

dormento wrote: post #791
i_have_an_idea wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i just gave my favorite LLM a screenshot of one of those components and it recreated it perfectly. i paid $0. Because it's most likely in the training data. I.e., it stole it for you.

Y'know, this is the one time that i thought lawyers wouldn't let it slide. I still don't understand why apparently there aren't _massive_ class-action (or similar) lawsuits worldwide against AI companies. LLMs are full on copyright-removal machines.

lawyers are paid to know legal from illegal thats why they charge thousands of dollars an hour.

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

#880

Post by TeMPOraL »

gnarlouse wrote: post #859
TeMPOraL wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like play out AI, it sucks for everybody except the ones holding the steering wheel Not true. Models don't make owners money sitting there doing nothing - they only get paid when people find value in what AI is producing for them. The business model of AI companies is actually almost uniquely honest compared to rest of software industry: they rent you a tool that produces value for you. No enshittification, no dark…

> they only get paid when people find value in what AI is producing for them The people "finding value in them" are other people with money to throw at businesses: investors, capital firms, boards & c suites. I'm not sure anybody who has been laid off because their job got automated away is "finding value" in an LLM. There's a handful of scrappy people trying to pump out claude-driven startups but if one person can s…

> The people "finding value in them" are other people with money to throw at businesses: investors, capital firms, boards & c suites. I'm not sure anybody who has been laid off because their job got automated away is "finding value" in an LLM.

And the millions with ChatGPT (and other LLM) subscriptions, using it for anything from for-profit and non-profit work to hobby projects and all kinds of matters of personal life.

Contrary to a very popular belief in tech circles, AI is not only about investors. It's a real technology affecting real people in the real world.

In fact, I personally don't give a damn about inverstors here, and I laugh at the "AI bubble" complaints. Yes, it's a bubble, but that's totally irrelevant to the technology being useful. Investors may go bankrupt, but the technology will stay. See e.g. history of rail in the United States - everyone who fronted capital to lay down rail lines lost their shirt, but the hardware remained, and people (including subsequent generations of businesses) put it to good use.

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