> Here's a friendly tip for the Tailwind team that you should already know, but I will repeat anyways: If your goal is monetizing your software, then making your software as easy to use for people's workflows, is paramount.
I made the horrible life mistake of starting a company around developer tools, and I would never, ever repeat the experience because of “friendly” stuff like this. I don’t know why software developers are so entitled, but it’s a serious culture problem.
[1] https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
> It's insane to blame everybody else for not being able to create a viable business model from an OSS project. Everybody who is using Tailwind is actually SUPPORTING Tailwind. Everybody who is reporting bugs properly is SUPPORTING Tailwind. Everybody who is collaborating and PRs changes is SUPPORTING Tailwind.
> Tailwind grew a lot due to community acceptance and support, and collaborations.
> The only person to blame here is the CEO/Main maintainer of Tailwind. They've made bad decisions, hired coders without knowing how to make enough money to pay them.
> If you want to monetize a free service, you either know what you do or you make mistakes and lose what you've built. It was always a risk; we are not at fault.
> @adamwathan I respect you for everything you've done, but you need to take a few breaths, take a walk, think, sleep, and come back, ask apologize of the community, and start working on solutions/crisis management.
And you always know that when you open the GH profile of people saying such things, you'll see an empty timeline. This particular user has a single repository which he's committed to a handful of times over the last year and has setup a GitHub sponsorship for it.
I try to remind myself that these types of people are a (loud) minority but it's absolutely soul destroying.
As you note, the tire-kickers were the worst -- people who forked the Linux kernel (with no additional commits) trying to process the entire repo on a free plan, for example, then complaining (loudly) when cut off.
only slop
Well that was an understatement. That issue devolved completely.
Wow that is just, really tragic... AI continues to just decimate this industry. Everyday I'm happy that I am, and have been since about day 3, an AI-hater.
What do we actually know?
1. People are inherently selfish. If you give me this shit for free, I'm gonna use it for free. Obviously everyone is doing this. Spare me the "but I go to this conference or that conference".
2. Code is cheap. Why would I ever pay for something that is not gated behind a service with API limits and costs?
3. Coding as we know it is getting commoditized. That's correct. We are all going to lose our jobs as we know it today. Clearly that's the future. Wake up!
But when making these points, open source devs (and honestly a lot of people on hacker news) whine and complain. I don't really know why I'm leaving this comment - I just feel like I'm at an annoyance breaking point. This guy is obviously struggling to pivot and all the grandstanding and virtue signaling just feels like additional noise and wanting to feel good with very little action.
When you are thinking your days are numbered any cost to develop software (even token budget) is measured. As coding becomes commoditized the ROI in code will drop of that code (capitalism rewards scarcity; not value delivered) and you suddenly become cost conscious. We are moving from a monopoly-moat like market to a competitive cost based market in SWE as AI improves.
Damn
We'll have to adapt mates. Sadly (i dont say this happily) this is a new reality we cant decide on.
$275,000 is almost $23,000 a month. Take that times N amount of employees, and other business overhead, and suddenly $80k a month is literally peanuts.
[1] https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-st...
All the more reason to go closed source. Except for few really vital components that have national security implications (OS/Kernel, drivers, programming languages), which can be funded and supported by universities, Governments etc, I am of the strong opinion that everything else should go closed source.
Enough with this BS. Stop feeding the slop.
I can't find a single example of a software developer who has put out software purely for some altruistic purpose without any returns on that investment (direct or indirect).
Building a sustainable business model was a great way to justify open source. Not anymore.
Frankly, I haven't visited the tailwind page in over six months as well. The AI just does things. Clearly the upsell path for the company is not sustainable.
What would the solution be?
Dude thought he is smart but ended up being an entitled brat.
It’s hard to run a software business.
The money wasn't coming from that.
For the second question, depends on your definition of "meaningful" I guess. I doubt the original goal was to make money. There's OSS less prolific than Tailwind that makes money. Is it unreasonable for those projects to seek ways to compensate their projects?
A better question might be why buyers thought it was worth paying for that "advantage" you want explained. When buyers think a thing like that, someone will fulfill their ask.
If LLMs are eating the revenue stream, that likely gives the answer:
Buyers thought Tailwind meant they didn't have to learn or do a thing in order to achieve an outcome. And someone built a niche around that.
Is it true, and if not, why does it persist? Also not hard to explain given today's approaches to learning and the abysmal state of the ad delivery sites that used to be web search.
It's almost impossible today to find the very few sites that show the standard component lib rendered as web components with modern CSS as supported cross browser -- no single party stands to profit from making that case. You'll see it in parts from other frameworks that aren't trying to do the UI saying "our framework drives native HTML/CSS/JS/WASM" with a few examples, but that's surprisingly unlikely to find from Google with "How do I make my web app look good?" if you don't know which terms to use.
One could probably make a niche living giving modern web-native training for corporates. (Plenty firms purport to offer this, but generally don't really teach past the days of bootstrap.) Price against their recurring licensing costs, and a $10K to $30K class (the type enterprise SaaS products like Hashicorp offers for e.g. Terraform ecosystem) for modern web might even pay better than Tailwind.
Generally, though, arbitrage plays can't be expected to last unless the value-add is actual work others don't want to do, so business model decay is likely to happen to things like Tailwind that have their ideas become standards that get implemented by the browser industry (see Apple and "Sherlocking": https://appdevelopermagazine.com/sherlocked:-the-controversi...
And pretty much none of that is threatened by AI. LLMs learning from code, or articles, found online, are at worst neutral to this, and in many ways beneficial. They're only negative if you're using your contribution as bait to hold your audience, in lieu of a more honest approach of openly selling it to them.
> Building a sustainable business model was a great way to justify open source. Not anymore.
Or poison it. Open Source as a business model was always an anti-competitive hack, similar to "free with ads": drive price down to 0, destroying any other way of making money in this space, including "honest exchange of money for value".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42439059
But I'm merely telling the truth. The fact that people don't like it doesn't change the fact that software engineers are largely replaceable with AI now.
We are seeing the second order effects now that people using AI are not buying software products anymore, leading to layoff of software engineers.
For something basic like CSS, it is true. Ask ChatGPT or Claude Code to come up with any Tailwind template, and it will spit out within seconds for free, and even integrate it into the project effortlessly. This approach does not apply to heavy software such as a comprehensive CRM or another type of CRUD platform.
Today, LLMs make the first type of business much harder.
"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.
Then step aside as the maintainer of the project then and better yet, make something like Tailwind-foundation etc. which is truly open source. Go spend your time building your business, but you can't become the bottleneck and not do anything for something that has become so foundational for Web Dev.
Be Kind, we are all born billionaires with billions of "kindness tokens" in the bank, don't use them sparingly.
Get a grip.
I can empathize with the founder too because I was kind of in their shoes last year. Had been laid off and nearly exhausted my savings but I was more worried about having to let go of folks I employed.
I have done so on countless occasions, but this is about the css "framework".
please refer to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45729809
However, the whole conversation is worth reading (but it's sort of heartbreaking).
Sounds like fairly decent folks, all around.
I think that the OP should update link to this comment
I do wonder though if the llms.txt could actually be used for their benefit? Why not literally recommend the paid upgrades within it?
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46529364 and marked it off topic.
Could you delete my comments too ? Thank you
Also it's always funny when someone tries to look up your past instead of giving convincing arguments.
We are a deeply unserious society.
Anyway; good luck going viral online, everyone. I got lucky, have had generational wealth in my back pocket since birth, am off the hook for you by our social norms. Hopefully it works out for you because I and the rest of us won't be engaged in political action on your behalf. Dance for the organ!
So your answer to "how should open source projects achieve financial sustainability" is "don't even try"?
There's a point where it's too much and it just feels like a trojan horse when later you stop caring for your free users.
It's well worth the money IMHO.
"Our website templates are built using Next.js, so all of the markup is written using React"
And the individual components that make up these templates don't seem to have pricing attached, nor non-React usage examples?
I did buy some of this books. Not the Tailwind UI though.
Adam, you gotta pay bills too. I understand that. And I respect that.
The day a product of mine starts making money, I'll come knocking your door.
Thank you.
https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
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.
I know nothing about marketing, but why would you rely on one single source? Or interpreted differently (as a statement of fact): allow that situation to occur?
Man, you can really feel the anxiety and desperation in Adam's reply.
Part of me wants to say "look what evil VC money does to devs", but that's only a harsh critism of a bystander.
Monetization is a normal path that the successful OSS projects would take. Tailwind went big on the startup route, took a bunch of VC cash a couple of years back, but despite the massive impact on the dev world, they clearly didn't hit the revenue numbers investors expected. Now the valuation bubble popped, and they're forced into massive layoffs. Though to be fair, maintaining a CSS library probably doesn't require that many people anyway.
I really feel for Adam here. He didn't really do anything wrong. Eagering to build a startup after your project blows up is a totally natural ambition. But funding brings risks. Taking other people's money makes you go from being the owner to just another employee real quick. And once you hop on that VC train, you don't really call the shots anymore. Sometimes you can't stop raising or scaling as your own will.
If you find a solid business model, that's great. But if not, well, honestly, a 75% layoff is getting off lightly. At least they still have a chance to keep on.
But he obviously didn't foresee this coming. He’s getting torn between being an OSS maintainer and a CEO who have to be responsible for stackholders and employees. That internal conflict must be brutal. It’s pretty obvious he didn't reject the PR for technical reasons. It's just because the reality hit him hard, and he has to respond to it, even if it goes against his mind as a developer.
Really hope Tailwind pulls through this. Also, this is a lesson worth noting for the rest of us. As indie devs, if you ever get the chance to take VC money, you really gotta think hard about whether you're truly ready for the strings that come attached.
Good luck writing that as inline style.
The hypocrisy the GP noticed is strong enough to warrant a mention.
HTML and CSS are free to use but the W3C is funded by membership fees.
BTW I'm of the opinion that frontend tooling developers should actually try to contribute things to HTML and CSS instead of building "component libraries" on top of them.
If the native controls were good and if the browsers allowed using "uniformly styled" versions of them then there would be no good reason for such libraries to exist.
I have been on HN since 2008, his comment is by far the worst encounter ever in my memory. The sense of entitlement, not only in one comment by literally every single one of them in this thread and despite all the explanation he still believes he is right.
And to top it off he manage to drag HTML and CSS standards into it.
> 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
The author did not in fact, make the project worse, all they did was not accept a change, and that is entirely different than making it worse.
Even those who stood to benefit from the change have not received a degraded experience in comparison to the current state of affairs, but the same experience as the current state of affairs, since no change occurred. It is truly within the author's rights to do this, in any case.
One should avoid a sense of entitlement to additional and ever-increasing quantities of free work when free work has already been done.
A change to make the documentation easier for LLM scrapers to inhale.
What would be the point? It would, in no way, improve anything. Probably not even for LLMs.
I am astounded the gentleman responded at all. I think all the talk of money (whilst urgent and catastrophic) is a red herring
No, I want to be able to @import "tailwindcss" without feeling guilty.
> I've rarely found that any template site
Well, meet https://basecoatui.com -- and there's more where that came from.
So, ehhm, no, I'm not ignoring the salient part of your comment: you are ignoring the entire point of my post, which is that if Tailwind had a non-React monetization strategy, things maybe, possibly, might have worked out better.
tailwindcss is and always has been free, so I don't understand why there would be any guilt with using it. Tailwind UI/Tailwind Plus is essentially pre-built components built using tailwindcss, plus some pre-built site templates.
> Well, meet https://basecoatui.com -- and there's more where that came from.
Thanks, that looks great and will be useful to me! However, unless I'm missing something basecoatui is a component library much like what Tailwind UI/Tailwind Plus provides (though organized differently and useful in a different way IMHO). The template sites are essentially complete websites that you just git clone and it's ready to run. Quite different. basecoatui would be very useful to me, whereas template sites rarely ever have been.
> So, ehhm, no, I'm not ignoring the salient part of your comment: you are ignoring the entire point of my post, which is that if Tailwind had a non-React monetization strategy, things maybe, possibly, might have worked out better.
Apologies if that came off harsh, I didn't mean to ascribe any malice to your reply. However, it seems like there's some confusion here about what the Tailwind "templates" are. They aren't a component library, the component library is different and is not React only.
So to summarize, there are two major parts that are different:
1. Templates (pre-built sites that you git clone). React only
2. Pre-built pieces/components that you copy/paste and modify into your existing app.
The Tailwind UI blocks are a similar offering to Basecoat, and are available in non-React format.
The "Tailwind React Templates" are not really similar to Basecoat.
Best read: You are confusing different products. Somebody can do two things and get paid for only one of them.
Worst read: You are really trying to confuse them.
Either you support an economy where everyone gets a meager living wage just for existing and then once that's established you can complain about people trying to make money off open source, or you say "capitalism as it exists is great" and swallow the fact that people who you don't pay don't work for you. Which is it?
/s
They have a free product and a paid product. They've used the documentation as an awareness channel for the paid product. The paid product influences and pays for the free product. A tail as old as time.
They're not asking you to buy the paid product and they're not saying they are going to make it worse. Did you even read thread? He literally says "I totally see the value in the feature and I would like to find a way to add it."
Not prioritizing it now does not make the product worse, it just doesn't make it better in this particular way today.
How is this hard to understand?
Eggcorn klaxon!
I know there may have been some weird stuff going on lately (nginx, redis, etc.) but this is not one of them.
It's okay to be confused, but please do not continue this.
There is a corporate side with other features that has never been free. I pay for it because it's great.
I'm not sure if you're purposefully misstating it at this point or not. Several people have corrected you and you seem to double down incorrectly each time.
Tailwind UI is a phenomenal product, but, there's a simple mathematical reason you cannot sell code like in this way to create a sustainable business
Open source was not ready for this type of businesses that don't give a dam about rights or copyrights.
They can’t retroactively pull the license, and most people would just start using a OSS fork of tailwind if they did.
"I am happy to share that we (the @GoogleAIStudio team) are now a sponsor of the @tailwindcss project! Honored to support and find ways to do more together to help the ecosystem of builders."
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.
> And making it easier for LLMs to read our docs just means less traffic to our docs which means less people learning about our paid products and the business being even less sustainable.
> 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.
NYT and other Billion dollar media house can sue the AI companies for copyright violations and get into cozy deals. But the individuals and small companies are left in lurch.
Instead of ganging up on developers for not making their product LLM friendly, they should force the AI companies to ensure that a part of their $20 or $200 goes to the sources of the data used in the LLM responses.
Something like Ad words, where people whose content is used by LLMs can register as a publisher and get compensated.
Oh it wouldn't be sustainable AI companies? Whose fault is that?
In this comment, he says that he had to lay off 3 people.
Not sure if this means it was him+4engs and now it’s just him+1eng or if he’s including himself and he’s working alone now.
But either way, can’t be fun
The happy (in a bad way) part is seeing very successful projects like Tailwind get financially fucked by AI. It means it's not just me.
I am a small tech course creator who was able to make a living for 10 years but over the last 3 years it has tanked to where I make practically zero. Almost all due to less traffic hitting my blog which was the source of paid course purchases. I literally had to shift my entire life around after 25 years of being a successful contractor because of this.
I hope the world understands how impactful (both good and bad ways) having an unchecked AI scrape the world's content and funnel everything directly through their monetized platform while content creators get nothing in return is.
I don't have paid ads, everything has been organic with the blog being the main funnel into everything. For quite a few years I tried creating a podcast and also have 5+ years of weekly YouTube videos but the traffic back to the courses from those are close to nothing.
Conversion percent rates haven't changed, they have remained consistent.
My figures almost track perfectly with StackOverflow's chart: https://i.sstatic.net/IY0g8JZW.png
I discovered media piracy long ago, but it was very acute before AI because only a small amount of folks pirated this type of content. I ignored them and put 0% energy into it because I wanted to focus on the happy path of people not pirating the content.
If you think of AI as pirating media, it's providing that media to everyone in a context specific form so yes it is a pretty interesting analogy. Not quite a 1 to 1 match but the end outcome is the same and that's all that matters here.
It's really hard to run a company, especially when your product is mostly OSS... Tailwind has helped thousands of companies save (or make) millions of dollars, and AI almost by default uses it to generate beautiful websites. This is such a hard position to be in... to watch your product take off, but your financials plummet. It really sucks how affected the team is after all the good work they've done.
If I was considering that purchase in today's landscape, I would surely not buy it. At $299 USD I can have a decent model do the job of writing custom tailored components for me and iterate extensively on them.
Hard sell with a "UI Kit" versus a "UI Brain".
If I were Adam I would drop to $29.99 and accept the status quo, but not make it lifetime access to try and not piss off existing owners, and I would pivot to building a Frontend AI Agent and a Tailwind Labs Model.
OSS without founders having it's own managed software company is always a difficult position. (e.g. database vendors open source but also have their own company providing managed service and support allowing sustainable development). Hope of getting strong support from companies is unsustainable.
Curious what should be the business model for a library something like tailwind?
They could add a premium features but entry users not allowed to use certain features is a bad experience
Frontend output from LLMs is (in my experience) subpar when compared to human-built components. However, I am not primarily a frontend dev. I would definitely pay for something that let me easily build frontends using vetted components, in ways they were designed to work together.
This seems like something that would sit solidly in the bailiwick of framework designers like Tailwind Labs. But it seems they primarily target frontend developers, so their focus is elsewhere.
Despite any of my preferences, it was real work that deserved a chance. It cannot be denied that AI slurping their content contributed to less paying customers.
IMHO, this is content draught starting to appear. To an extreme, it should lead to no one having any real incentive (possible business, possible recognition, etc) to do new and original stuff.
I don't see a way of changing this. I think jobs will be fine, but content of all kinds (especially code) won't.
I think the solution is one of the big companies with lots of money to acquire tailwind. Specifically Vercel. They use it, their v0 thing uses tailwind allover, they have bought a bunch of open source companies in the past, and they should have deep enough pockets. Last year they acquired tremor blocks, which is a UI library, that uses tailwind!
Makes perfect sense, lets get it done.
Something simple and obvious, like sticking a license file that has certain expected fields in /.well-known. I wouldn't be surprised if this is already being discussed because it would easily allow agents to check for special license requirements that only apply to them, directing them how to share content while remaining in compliance.
I got bit by that many times and do my best to avoid it but when it happens it's a stab in the back.
This is very different from, say, the minio situation, where they were actively removing feature before finally closing development down entirely. Whether tailwind will end up going down this route, time will tell. But as of right now, I find this reading to be quite uncharitable.
By not adding an extra "feature" you deemed as essential?
Even more surprising is this is from an 2012 account.
You found their homepage. You found that they didn’t ask for money, and allowed you to use their product for free. You decided to use it.
And now, they’re liars. How dare they try to make money?
Dude get a better hobby or something lol
The company I work for is going through the same. It is not a product for dev though. We ceased support for many countries now because people see no reason for paying, but after it was gone they said they would pay. If you wait too much for supporting good folks those projects will be gone and only greedy corps will 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.
Most folks use frameworks because it's easier than learning how to build it all yourself - things are done for you instead. This niche is now getting eroded by AI and low-code substantially.
Couple that with my experience maintaining frontends that are far too complex for their use cases - e.g. do we really need SPA's, state sync, and reusable components for our admin tool that doesn't reuse components?
This leads me to think there's been bloat here for at least a decade. So, while vibe coding will also lead to bloat, it's easier to work with, and arguably higher value than paying for a specific framework.
It's a tragedy in life that things that are useful don't always get valued, instead being used as a stepping stone for progress, but I'm not sure that has a solution.
This must be satire. CSS is what's actually foundational; literally, a foundation upon which Tailwind was built.
There's plenty of alternative CSS frameworks.
I can absolutely see why it's difficult to monetize.
Tailwind is not.
AI is disruptive technology - like other tech innovations before it, there will be casualties to incumbents. If anything, this just shows how small businesses with need to be more creative when establishing moats and sustainability in this new landscape.
That said if someone wants a business model, figure out a way to get paid to get AI to make UIs using newer CSS features, because right now it's quite terrible at it.
I'm fairly convinced these are bot / LLM generated; the content is nonsensical garbage.
PS: If an LLM needs a whole seperate fork to understand your content, the LLM is failing at it's job.
PS PS: I want to highlight that the PR itself also seems to be an excuse to get the library quantizor made pulled in as a new dependency. Nasty.
We decided to go with a FOSS component library instead to avoid any potential issues down the road. After re-reading the license page now, I'm still not sure.
I want to use it in an OSS project, does that mean every drive by contributor needs a license?
Does anyone have any backseat driver ideas for how tailwind could make enough money to hire a team to work on the framework?
(Open to any suggestions to feed existing ui components from Tailwind into my projects/llm).
Corporate sponsorships.
In-person training focused on big corps.
Acquisition.
Bootstrap is more than enough for 99.99% of the projects, and it is free.
I agree that it's not obvious to me how or why Tailwind should turn a profit as a business, but there are examples of other similar companies turning profits, no?
I think of Motion (formerly framer motion) for example, which is primarily an animation library: https://motion.dev/
Now LLMs have removed the problem, so there's declining interest in solutions.
Not a Tailwind user but I really appreciate the honesty. Is the brutal impact of AI as a cause established though? It appears creation of new web sites is down, but that doesn't mean the business has gone to LLMs like suggested; it could as well mean that there are simply no sites being created at all.
Especially as
> Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever.
and
> the docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products
ie. data is lacking.
This is happening across a lot of web verticals that previously relied on excellent SEO ranking and click through performance to drive ad revenue/conversions/sales. I have direct knowledge of some fairly catastrophic metrics coming out of knowledge base businesses; it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest that something like Tailwind is suffering a similar fate.
This tells me the problem wasn't AI but the overall business wasn't healthy. Docs don't drive sales.
It’s unfortunate that google helped kickstart the world wide web but now they’re extracting everything while polluting search results with ads
Where on earth did you get that idea? The web existed long before Google - Google just found a unique way to monetise other people’s content
Why pay for a template when AI's can shit out your entire design system and multiple templates in 5 minutes, not to mention competition from other template systems like shadcn that are completely free.
And yes they might not be the best quality but you just prompt it until you like it and then use it as a reference.
LLMs, or Tailwind. Pick one!
They could sell training data too. Though, UIs are relatively solved. But great UIs and criticizing UIs aren't.
Learned a lot from Refactoring UI, and I know (from trying) that it's impossible to make a code review bot based on out of the box sota models today. Vision capabilities are lacking here, and I can see demand for more data here. And Adam's taste likely fits well here.
@adam: this is just an idea. Have you tried reaching out to OpenAI, Anthropic et al to become sponsors of tailwind? Could that be a viable revenue path?
Maybe you could offer LLM friendly docs to them, or access to something valuable for them? Or maybe they’re just happy to sponsor.
Tailwind and its popularity make LLM’s more valuable, so I’m sure the model makers want Tailwind to thrive.
Any other monetization ideas to help Adam?
Oh my days, how cringeworthy.
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, terraform, elastic).
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.
Doesn't matter anyways wether their customers are people who search for shortcuts or people who search for "the best designs".
Their problem was and is that tailwind is used by many of the most profitable companies in the world for free.
Thats so unbelievable stupid. You have corporations paying millions for MS 365 subscriptions, confluence, and other software and basically nothing for a totally optional ui library. If the use of tailwind saves 10 engineering hours per month then it's worth it to pay a few hundred $ for a licence.
Given that their team isn't big they don't even need that many customers. Add a bit consulting for a decent hourly rate and they should be golden.
The more I think about it the more I blame the CEO for poor decisions.
For example, creators behind libraries like Tailwind could sell Claude skills or MCP server solutions.
If I could pay $20 to make my AI agents significantly better at writing state-of-the-art Tailwind code — while knowing that my purchase directly supports the Tailwind community and its long-term sustainability — I would happily do so.
- The value they created (mindshare, shared “standards” for naming properties, and design atoms) and what they charged for (templates that AI can replace) are two different things — and AI has shortened the time it takes for this discrepancy to show up.
- Isn’t almost all of Tailwind’s value actually in that shared semantics (“mt-2” = a small top margin) — not only in users’ heads, but now also in LLM training data? Isn’t it more of a standards organization (like ISO) than a product company (yes, sure, standards are also a product/service)?
- They criticize AI for extracting value, but I wonder if Tailwind's business model is also value extraction from the standards they established.
- And isn’t it almost a miracle that a token library and the idea of “let’s name five margin sizes” (which they weren’t even the first to do - I started with Basscss) could sustain an ~7-person company for so long?
I tried this LLM prompt for deep research: "Tailwind is laying off people. I consider their business much more of a standards body (like ISO) — their main value is the mindshare and shared semantics and design atoms. What business models could they adopt from standard bodies’ business models?"
However, after reviewing the suggestions, I believe tailwind movement is probably not large/important enough to make money in a similar way (sell certification, membership with governance privileges, training ..).
Two interesting ideas: "Keep human docs free, but put machine-optimized “spec corpora” behind licensing (because AI is the channel disrupting them)."
"Stop relying on docs-as-marketing if AI is eating that funnel, and instead monetize the privileges and assurance around the standard (governance, certification, conformance, canonical distribution)."
(Don't get me wrong, I love using Tailwind, but I believe they need to see their business realistically.)
Real shame, and I fear it is just the start of the impacts of AI on our industry.
I was going to write a longer response, but instead I keep reading your last sentence:
> Is normal that this people now use other products more effective how AI for this task.
I think it's too early to tell on that.
Replaced by what exactly? Also, when was the last time a foundational piece of tech powering of the web got replaced by something entirely different?
Also who has decided that CSS is a "terrible foundational standard"?
Tailwind being the default choice for AI UIs is not that different, it can continue to grow in usage but the fundamental need for Tailwind has passed.
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've done to improve web development and I sincerely hope you can figure out a way to navigate the AI world, and all the best wishes.
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.
Their business model also missed the boat on the rise of Figma and similar tools. I can think back to a couple different projects where the web developers wanted to use Tailwind [Plus] components but the company had a process that started in Figma. It's hard to sell the designers on using someone else's component library when they have to redraw it in Figma anyway.
I believe something else has had a much greater impact on Tailwind UI’s business than AI, and that is shadcn, which was released in September 2023. The fact that Adam didn’t recognize this shift and adapt Tailwind UI to align with the shadcn ecosystem is, in my view, the primary reason sales have declined, not AI.
I used Tailwind UI Plus extensively before shadcn, but after its release, I lost the motivation to copy, paste, and manually modify components when I can simply pull free components (or components from another kit) directly via shadcn.
I genuinely hope Adam updates Tailwind Plus and creates a shadcn compatible registry for their components. That alone could significantly boost sales.
I do appreciate that even without an integration, it’s fairly easy to set up vim on one screen and figma on the other and be able to translate the css to TW without any issues or having to constantly look things up.
i wouldn't have bought a sub, but i did pay for tailwind premium (and, frankly, didn't use it like i'd've hoped). however, it was a bit of a Kickstarter investment for me. i like Adam's persona, and was happy to see continued investment down this path.
as many a business knows, you need to bring new initiatives to the table over, or accept that your one product carries all your risk.
thank you for Tailwind, Adam.
This is from Adam but I also suspect the same. LLMs has a bias toward tailwind css. I had Claude/GLM multiple times try to add tailwind css classes even though the project doesn't have any tailwind packages/setup.
This is a business model issue rather than tailwind becoming irrelevant.
This book taught me so much about modern UI design. If you've ever tried building a component and thought to yourself, "hmm something about this looks off," you might benefit from this book.
These days some of the examples might be a little bit dated (fashions come and go), but the principles it teaches you are rock solid.
This sucks to see but was pretty obvious when it became the go to framework for LLMs.
No discovery - no business.
And same with ads.if OpenAI decides not to add ads - prepare for even faster business consolidation. Those businesses preferred by llms will exponentially grow, others will quickly go out of business
I do SEO as a side gig to my 9-5 as a developer. All four of my freelance companies I work with have seen their traffic drop up to 40% since LLM's have effectively taken over and people are using search engines less and less.
We've had to pivot to short form social media advertising which seems to be closing the gap whereas before the majority of our leads were coming from organic search and being ranked high in their respective industries. It certainly takes more effort to craft a script, film it, edit it to add text overlays, animations and catchy effects, but its showing me its being effective in the leads we're generating.
I'm not sure if this is a sort of generational thing back when my parents were so engrained to use the yellow pages and then that stopped once the internet got into the advertising business - but it feels like a similar transition is taking place again.
As many have already told me, "Ignore AI at your peril"
In my limited web dev experience with these tools, they suggest and push Tailwind CSS very often when asked for advice.
The Tailwind company wasn't selling that, though. They were selling premium packages of components, templates, and themes. The demand for that type of material has dropped off significantly now that you can get an LLM to do a moderately good job of making common layouts and components. Then you can adjust them yourself until they're exactly what you want.
What about restaurants, transportation, construction, healthcare, or manufacturing?
Will those go out of business too?
Plenty of F/LOSS is in the same state: businesses extract all value they can from open-source, but put back nothing. That’s mining The Commons. LLMs are just accelerating this trend.
It’s never gonna work in the long run. Let’s go back to writing everything in house then, since we’re 100x more productive and don’t have to pay a dime for other people’s work.
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.
This has always been the case. Sometimes they give back by opening one or more of their components. Other times they don't. I don't see it as a problem. It doesn't usually detract from what's already published.
In cases where it would detract, simply use an appropriate license to curb the behavior.
> LLMs are just accelerating this trend.
LLMs might not prove sufficiently capable to meaningfully impact this dynamic.
Alternatively, if they achieve that level then I think they will accomplish the long stated goal of FOSS by enabling anyone to translate constraints from natural language into code. If I could simply list off behaviors of existing software and get a reliable reproduction I think that would largely obsolete worrying about software licenses.
I realize we're nowhere near that point yet, and also that reality is more complex than I'm accounting for there. But my point is that I figure either LLMs disrupt the status quo and we see benefits from it or alternatively that business as usual continues with some shiny new tools.
As incentivized by temporarily-free licenses.
https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
What is the signup link? I googled a bit but couldn't find it.
Are these components mostly just the HTML styling which would then be easily used in Angular as well, or would it be too much of a hassle to adopt to Angular?
It was never sustainable as a product/business, as this pricing model requires constant growth. What I've seen along the way was a heavy pivot towards React (which left me wanting: I mostly use the Vue components & the HTML/JS components with Astro.js in the projects I work in) and even in the case of React, they haven't managed to arrive at a full, mature component library offering (while others have!).
TL;DR: I'd be struggling to justify it as a purchase for a new user now, even before factoring AI in.
I grew up on this site, from 20 year old dropout waiter in Buffalo to 37 year old ex-Googler. One of the things I'm noticing me reacting to the last year or two is a "putting on a pedestal" effect that's unnecessary.
I’ve never been a huge fan of using Tailwind personally, but I deeply appreciated that they were making a (mostly) non-enterprise FOSS model work in an interesting way. It’s a shame that it seems that’s likely dead in the water now.
> We can't make it easier to use our product because then fewer people will visit our website" is certainly a business strategy.
> You are telling your customers that getting money from them, is more important than providing a service to help them.
Reflexively assuming that unanimous positive sentiment towards someone is itself an indication of a problem is exactly the reason people are writing posts as recently as (double checks) _yesterday_ titled "65% of Hacker News Posts Have Negative Sentiment, and They Outperform" https://philippdubach.com/standalone/hn-sentiment/
Adam is simply trying to navigate this new reality, and he's being honest, so there's no need to criticize him.
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 long relied on value adds in the form of managed hosting, high-quality collections, and educational content. I think the unfortunate truth is that LLMs are making all of that far less valuable. I think the even more unfortunate truth is that value adds were never a good solution to begin with. The reality is that we need everyone to agree that open source software is valuable and worth supporting monetarily without any value beyond the continued maintenance of the code.
> [...] 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. And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around and make sure the people who are still here are getting their paychecks every month. [...]
> 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.
Lots of people make great products but actually turning that into a business is fundamentally a different skill. It seems like Tailwind grew too fast, having 2 million ARR a few years ago and almost 10 employees (200k each is probably the all-in cost anyway for an employee if they're full time with benefits, so I suppose there was barely any profit), whereas they'd probably have been fine with running a Patreon like Evan You did for Vue, and cutting down the number of devs drastically, which I suppose is what they're doing now.
I know they promised lifetime, but I did not expect updates forever. This looks like the first issue to fix. I would have no issues paying 20% of purchase price for an updated version, that gave me access to 12 months of free updates.
Also, what about paid access to skills or MCP server for design systems and components?
I know these may be things he already considered, so don’t want to presume I have an answer. But as a customer, totally willing to support a good product that has supported me.
As an open source developer myself, it concerns me that so much of what we do us under- and un-funded, but that's the licensing model Tailwind chose. If you want something different, then release it under the AGPL (or something else that businesses aren't comfortable using, or cannot use), and charge for commercial licensing for any use of your product. Yes, you'll have fewer users, but that may be the trade off you need to make in order to build a sustainable business.
There are relatively few individuals and organizations out there with products that are worth spending vendor money on, especially for something like a CSS library. Companies that do have this need are ready to spend BIG.
Tailwind charges a one-time fee in the hundreds of dollars range and pledges lifetime support.
When they say revenue is down 80%, it's because everyone already bought their library in its first few years of existence. And looking at their site there is nothing else to spend money on. So how are they planning to sustain their revenue?
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 their viability.
e.g. Tech changes all the time, that isn't an excuse to be a dick. e.g. ok dude, don't expect any future free work from me in the future on any of your projects going forward. Rude AF.)
also, I just realised, that PR is an excuse to get the library he made (https://github.com/quantizor/markdown-to-jsx) used within TailwindCSS :p
I'd go as far as to guess that their revenue isn't down due to AI but because of their lifetime access model combined with shadcn's registry system being much easier to use.
Prediction: Tailwind acquired by Vercel.
> 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 competitors by throwing a wrench in this tool that makes it easier to write tailwind with AI, simply because he thinks the only way Tailwind can make money is if actual human beings come to read the docs site? If that's the case, your income is based on products that's are not high enough value to potential customers, or you're marketing it poorly, or both.
> And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around and make sure the people who are still here are getting their paychecks every month.
I get priorization but this isn't really that. He's not saying "I'll get to this when I find some time. Busy with high-priority business-related things right now.". He's saying "AI is going to be the end of profits for tailwind and instead of coming up with an alternative income stream I'm going to just block anything making tailwind easier to use with tailwind. And also stop complaining about it."
It sucks to fire people, but that doesn't mean you have to spread the flames out to open source contributors trying to make tailwind better for everyone. Look for new income streams, ideally ones that can be sold to people that control the money in companies (that isn't often the devs that are in your docs).
I’m a contributor to this.
I’ve been CSS since the mid 2000s and I have a lot of it memorized by heart.
My team uses tailwind, therefore I use tailwind
But I don’t want to reconfigure my mental model to think in esoteric shorthand, when I already have vanilla web tech memorized.
So I just write some code to match the design and then I let an llm transform it into what my team expects.
I’m sharing in the hopes that the tailwind team can figure out a middle ground because I think a service that can take any valid styled content and output the same result in tailwind would be a niche small language model that solves the use case for why I don’t go to the docs.
While the content is different, it’s much cheaper than Tailwind Plus. If you use AI, it may even be more useful than Plus because of the great agent rules and discord community.
i dont see how any business model can compete with free. maybe they can focus on branding like Pepsi or Coke and see if developers will make their decisions based on that.
Because it's most likely in the training data. I.e., it stole it for you.
Listen to his podcast episode if you want his raw feelings on this - https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
Very happy Tailwind Plus and Insiders customer here.
Before Tailwind got big, Adam released an amazing book about UI/UX called Refactoring UI[0] and it really helped me become better and understand subtleties of design. I even considered printing a personal physical book for my coffee table. If you want to support Adam and don't need Tailwind Plus, this ebook could be a good way.
If it wasn't usable in commercial products, I don't think anyone would pay for it.
In the age of AI, if you have Table of Contents. ChatGPT can write the book for you.
Only books I buy these days are in fiction genre. Everything else is derived from facts that already exist some where and AI can derive and write the whole book.
AI can write a whole book on anything. You can take anything, even make up a phenomenon, and have an AI write a whole factual-sounding book on it.
How that isn't clearly an indicator to you that it produces loads and loads of BS, I'm really not sure.
I have trouble expressing how terrible unjust it feels that AI companies are stealing money from the common people. I have no other way to put it.
Also: this will definitely limit the use of AI. People will stop publishing valuable content for free on the internet, if AI scrapers will steal and monetize it.
If you are using Tailwind, I highly recommend Tailwind Plus. You'll learn so much about what Tailwind can do using that library, and it is so easy to adapt into your own offerings. It is 100% worth it.
Hearing that they're struggling, I may have to also bite the bullet and pick up Refactoring UI.
Note: I am in no way connected to the Tailwind folks other than through my credit card.
Cool, in a way! But this feels like just going back to normal.
Honestly, while I feel bad for the people who lost their jobs the news aren't exactly surprising. Overhiring is a game for VC funded OSS like bun, not usually a good idea for bootstrapped companies.
[0]: https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-st...
[1]: https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduc...
You've got an extra "R" in there. In 2020 their only revenue from was non-recurring lifetime software purchases. Like SaaS if you had a 100% churn rate.
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 recommends a project.
You don't get rich by paying people what they deserve.
These might sound like snide rhetorical questions, but when you start demanding payment, they're very real.
The legal system.
If you see a bunch of Tailwind markup on websites without a license key, you can enforce your license. The LLMs can write the code for you, but they either have to negotiate their own license or instruct users to get their own.
The comparable I am familiar with is Font Awesome. Even if you want a free plan, you still have to create an account and get a key.
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?
For Tailwind, time’s up.
If the engineering team could not be directed to build new products that bring in revenue, then there is no need for them anymore, the opportunity has been exhausted for its maximum yield. Are you going to squeeze blood from a stone?
Agreed, and Adam and Steve made a life-changing amount of money from Refactoring UI and then Tailwind UI. That's a great outcome on its own.
There were originally snippets but it’s not reusable in a proper sense based on components like a design system. Each snippet may have overlaps but you can’t get it together properly.
Next there was catalyst, a react component library but it was barebones and doesn’t tie into the snippets.
And then there were templates, which again is another direction.
It would have been better if it was thought out. Design system. Component library. Snippets built on a solid base.
Sucks that anytime you ask AI to generate a site for you Tailwind will have an impact on that.
AI eats up users caring about $company which makes library, library degrades because nobody is paying, $company goes insolvent, library goes unmaintained and eventually defunct, AI still tries to use it.
Vibe coding with libraries is a fad that is destined to die.
Vibe coding your own libraries will result in million line codebases nobody understands.
Nothing about either is sustainable, it’s all optics and optics will come crashing down eventually.
Reminds me of the problem with Google & their rich results which wiped out and continues to wipe out blogs who rely on people actually visiting their site vs. getting the information they seek without leaving Google.
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'm even suggesting this is possible.)
Tech is about to cease being ours.
I really like AI models, but I hate monopolies. Especially ones that treat us like cattle and depopulate the last vestiges of ownership and public commons.
I don’t understand how someone can display such contempt towards the maintainer of a thing they’ve used for free.
You can block accounts on GitHub and add a note as to why. Might be simpler and more accessible later on than a random TXT (plus, it probably updates if they change their username).
Note that blocking also means they can’t contribute to your repos. Which you may not care about anyway.
Who trusted you with hiring
I sympathise that it sucks having to fire people, been there. But it sucks more to get fired.
The way you write websites that actually work imo, is you understand how your chosen CSS layout engine works roughly, and try to avoid switching between layout modes - traditional to flexbox to grid to flexbox again down the tree can drive the most brillant devs utterly mad .
But seriously, after a certain complexity threshold, it becomes impossible to tell what's going on and why.
And if you don't think about it in advance, it's very easy to reach that threshold, especially if you don't get to write the whole page from scratch, but have to build on the work of others.
AI (and many frontend devs) do write-only CSS - they add classes until the code they write looks right.
But code like that tends to fall apart under multiple resolutions, browsers, screen sizes, devices etc.
I am not a frontend dev, and came pretty late to the frontend party. That said I felt that anything that obscures the raw CSS makes it much harder to deliver UI that works right, as it peppers hidden side effects across your code.
That's why I wasn't too keen on CSS frameworks like Tailwind - I found that when writing frontend code the writing part takes up the minority of the time, it's producing a well thought out layout flow is what is actually the biggest sink of time and effort.
That said, I'm not a frontend dev, and I'm to too good at CSS - but not horrible either - so I defer to the judgement of others who are pros at this, its just my opinion and experience.
Whats the 2026 version of "you should learn to code"?
Just posting the "75%" without context is a bit of an odd choice. He explains why in the podcast, but it still feels like he should have specified immediately to avoid assumptions about scale.
oh, come the fuck on. it's "AI made us do it" drivel that companies began to justify layoffs with in 2023 (!!!).
Tailwind is just another FOTM frontend thing. I saw dozens of them come, gain some popularity, then abruptly disappear once the marketing budget ran out.
EDIT: I suppose what I'm saying is that "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 thing." is wrong. My hunch is that AI has the appearance of eliminating the need for such things.
I think people vastly underestimate just how much work goes into determining the correct set of primitives create a design system like Tailwind, let alone a full blown component library like TailwindUI.
This is probably a good thing. The web would be much better off with fewer design systems.
Or more cynically that it eliminates the need to pay for such things. Claude and friends were no doubt trained on the commercial Tailwind components, so the question becomes whether those models could have done the job of Tailwind UI without piggybacking on the unpaid labour of the Tailwind UI developers. If not then we clearly have a sustainability problem here - someone still has to do the hard work to push things forward, but with the knowledge that any attempt to profit from that work will be instantly undercut by the copyright laundering Borg.
Not all open source but a lot of it is fundamentally for humans to consume. If AI can, at its extreme (still remains to be seen), just magic up the software then the value of libraries and a lot of open source software will decline. In some ways its a fundamentally different paradigm of computing, and we don't yet understand what that looks like.
As AI gets better OSS contributes to it; but in its source code feeding the training data not as a direct framework dependency. If the LLM's continue to get better I can see the whole concept of frameworks being less and less necessary.
I think it's more shocking to everyone how quickly something like that happens.
(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 wanted free for the first shot. And the LLMs turn out to know it pretty well.
Once I get it built using ShadCN, it's hard to imagine when I'd have time to go redo all the component hackery with another library, even if it were way better.
I guess my point is just that "paid UI components" is a really tough business when there are so many people willing to make components just for the fun/glory/practice. Same with a lot of UI stuff it seems -- I highly respect icon designers, but I'm probably just going to use Lucide.
This is the money quote for me - charging for a different thing than the one that brings the value is unsustainable, and AI is accelerating that realization.
Unfortunately, without free distribution, Tailwind would never gain anywhere close to its current mindshare, so there just might not be an opening there (save for a "this year is a year of Linux on desktop" dream of bots and pnpm install paying with micropayments for each download).
Unfortunately only the Chinese are really being serious about that
The reality is that you need to figure out is that if you want people to pay when they make a ton of money from your code, you should put that in the license.
The issue is that currently you either publish as free & open-source and get tons of traction and usage but little funding, or you publish as paid and get no traction.
The blocker for paid software isn't actually the money itself (this is solvable by just pricing it reasonably), it's all the red tape that someone has to go through to get their company to purchase a license to begin with.
Maybe a marketplace that preemptively does audits, provides insurance, code escrow, licensing, etc ahead of time, that vendors can put their software on it proactively and companies can have accounts where their employees can just open an "app store" and just buy/license software directly? Similar to the AWS marketplace but for libraries.
Wall that's the problem, and it's tractable problem. Seems like tailwind needs a sales strategy beyond hoping people read the docs. And that it gives rise to a perverse incentive--making a less intuitive product to drive the need for documentation--is bound to affect the product.
If LLMs are really the problem, and it seems possible that they are, then you might need to lean in. Maybe selling access to mcps and skills. I'd still bet on hiring someone to chase down some contracts is going to be the easiest way out of the hole though.
Like what, exactly, now that most people interact with tailwind purely via AI agents?
I started work on a front end project React/Astro/Tailwind project for the first time in about a year, building out with CLI agents, and one things that's changed compared to a year ago is that I have the entire UI basically working and I haven't even looked at the tailwind classes. I just say yes that's fine but can you improve the width for the sidebar on mobile (obviously paraphrasing here, I write the requirements for the agent carefully) and within a couple of iterations it's working. I keep expecting to have to jump in to manually fix things but so far I haven't needed to.
I worked in FE for years and I know tailwind and CSS quite deeply. But the entire extent of what I've needed to know for this project so far can be summed up as "it's some kind of styling tool". I never had to look at the docs, I never went to their website, or or Twitter or anywhere else that might have worked for marketing.
I did make an informed decision in choosing this stack, but it's equally likely that the AI could have recommended it to me, and the AI entirely set up the project scaffolding and config for me.
So where in this could they possibly have marketed paid components to me? And even if they did, why would I have paid for them when Shadcn is free and was added automatically by the AI?
I've watched open source projects get lambasted because their developers dared to make a buck. Being conservative with their marketing is what is expected of them even if it isn't fair.
Sounds like they did just that. Ereyesterday.
1) Lower amount of impressions on the google search pages due to the AI answers
2) Lower amount of searches since people are using code generators
I wonder which one it is primarily.
Seems like it was an insanely profitable product, but a risky business.
Another thing to consider, it seems JS devs use more AI for work than .NET devs for example, which might be in more old-school companies and industries. I can't verify this but there seems to be a correlation between companies who use hip new CSS and JS frameworks, and their AI usage, thus accelerating Tailwind Corp's cannibalization by AI, as most vibe coders are building web apps from what I've seen and Tailwind and React are very well represented in the training set.
They also have a CSS utility library (like Tailwind).
i’ve always felt that oss licenses needs to include responsible use terms or something. some orgs dont mind paying for value contributed but you need to provide a structure to do so, even if that is on a voluntary basis.
If anyone from Lovable etc sees these comments, great opportunity for sponsorship where it can make a difference upstream.
Some companies have done this well, at a stage Retool use to sponsor a number of open source libs which greatly helped them with exposure to devs. Surely a better way to spend ad revenue imo.
I still think he was correct. I myself bought tailwindUI as an aspirational purchase, and i doubt people would pay for it as a subscription.
But I think a lot has changed in the last few years. There arent probably as many new developers given the market, and among those there are probably even less that are willing to pay $100+ for a UI library, not when there are competitions like shadcn or radix or many others as free alternative, or when you could just ask an LLM to generate them for you.
Tailwind Labs definitely need to explore new revenue streams, but i dont think UI components is the way to go. Without knowing their internal data, this is just a guess, but I doubt traffic to docs or pipeline to premium products is much of a factor in the decline.
I believe the only way to let Tailwind survive is changing the business model.
LLMs are clearly to “blame” here. You can make any component with LLMs from scratch or it will expertly use one of the many existing UI frameworks.
Not every business should need hyperscaling mega-exit unicorn enshittification.
Lifestyle and small businesses are good and of course these are being crushed by our new oligarchs.
> It's because everyone already bought their library in its first few years of existence
Literally everyone? No new developers being trained? No new tailwind users?
The idea is that subscription businesses have churn, and if you can capture the lifetime value of a customer with your one time price, there isn't any difference (other than people feeling grateful when you add new content for "free").
My takeaway from this thread is: his theory’s great until you discover that your customers are wiling pay *so* much more.
On a more positive note, I’ve been blown away by the (largely, one conspicuous troll-like annoyance aside) positive thoughts in the comments. Maybe it’s not too late?
The one time fee should have been for personal licenses, and a annual subscription for businesses.
That feels fair to me.
Maybe. One data point isn't all that useful, but I never would have bought it if it weren't for the model he chose. I will never, ever do a subscription for something like that.
This is not sustainable once your customer growth dies down, as it eventually did.
I definitely wont even consider it if its a subscription.
Selling UI components is a hard sell to begin with - i think they made the right decision with a one-time point payment at that higher price point. If it were a subscription, i probably would've cancelled it within 2 or 3 months.
This may be an exaggeration.
At least in the React space where there are a ton of libraries like Mantine or React Aria which I use.
I played around with shadcn for a new project a year or so ago, decided I really didn't like their fundamental approach of copying code (that now I have to maintain) into my code base. So I ended up using something else (DaisyUI), which has been reasonably nice so far.
I'm just one person (and one not super plugged into the frontend scene), but "everyone" feels like a gross overestimation. I would guess it's not even a majority.
This is the first time I've seen anyone ever mention it.
shadcn only works in react, tailwind works everywhere
Just trowing a flex-box and a few good ol' css rules does 99.999% of the job usually.
$300 for UI blocks? For what? A div with flex, gap, and padding?
Everyone in your bubble on X maybe.
Shadcn has definitely taken a big chunk, the premium ecosystem around Shadcn is absolutely exploding. I know. I run https://www.shadcnblocks.com and we saw huge month on month growth in revenue for the entire year.
Even with strong headwinds from AI, I expect our revenue to continue increasing throughout 2026.
I don't really understand how you can find a difference between your sentence with what he wrote:
> I totally see the value in the feature and I would like to find a way to add it.
> 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. And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around and make sure the people who are still here are getting their paychecks every month.
Pretty sure those are the same picture
Exactly, when the Renaissance was happening, the printing machine(s) were spreading across the Europe rapidly, priest(s) were trying to prevent the spread of machines because they were copying the books, by hand, which was their income stream.
So they were against it, in the end, they learned their lesson the hard way. It was inevitable, it's the same thing with the LLM(s).
> And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around and make sure the people who are still here are getting their paychecks every month.
Yeah, that is a quite depressing situation, but saying "trying to do fun free things for the community..." is quite contradictory.
Isn't that how that community is created in the first place?
I also don't understand the logical thinking that made them think that, if we make it harder to gather information with LLM(s) or if we do not improve it, people will keep coming to our website, NO!
They would just simply grab something similar, or ask an LLM to use something else, there are hundreds of alternatives, no one, literally no one has moat in the today(s) world.
I believe that if they focused solely on open source, improving the developer experience, creating more libraries, abstraction(s) over the abstraction(s), open source component libraries like shadcn/ui, DaisyUI, Radix etc, their income today would have been much higher than from what they currently have I believe.
There are many, like so many action items that Adam could do, instead of throwing tantrums at people, easiest could have been the sponsor-first business model, which would have scaled out much better I mean, they don't have recurring revenue, OSS sponsorships are mostly recurring, unlike the current model.
I'd say that this is a very interesting situation, I would not blame it on the founder. Nobody saw this coming ...
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 of maintaining with no evidence that it is useful, or that the author of the change will maintain.
Good point, I made the mistake of skimming and missed that part.
Inline style is the thing. That's what tailwind is enabling in a readable way. And inlined style is what makes style more maintainable and less susceptible to override rot.
The separation between form and function is always a bit illusionary, but particularly so with CSS. Almost all markup is written to look a specific way, not a configurable way.
It's been 15-20 years since I last saw that.
There are tons of solutions on how to easily organize CSS code these days that don't involve TW.
For what its worth, I had the same experience with Tailwind. I regularly see classes that don't have an meaningful outcome.
I don't think the problem is Tailwind or CSS (well, I guess Tailwind is CSS with extra steps but you get the idea) syntax (or any of the CSS preprocessors), but the fact that styling in browsers has accumulated a lot of cruft, and people who haven't "grown up" with it over the years don't fully understand it (I am more competent than most with it and there's still times I screw up).
One thing that's kinda nice about Tailwind is that it made copy-pasting components easier. So people can get something decent without fully understanding what's happening
Just sharing that the root cause is most developers don’t want to pick up an additional syntax when they already have the fundamentals
The main problem is the premise of tailwind
Every single web design on earth is a compound opinion on like a few hundred popular properties and values
They put all that in one style sheet
Which became the one style sheet on earth
Which made it possible to summon all those styles directly from within our apps
Tailwind is like the chess of utilities. There’s only so many opening and closing moves that running a business on it is incredibly difficult, given supply and demand.
Like play out AI, it sucks for everybody except the ones holding the steering wheel, unless we hold them accountable for the changing landscape of stake-in-civilization distribution. Spoiler: haha, we sure fucking aren’t in the US.
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 patterns, no taking your data hostage, no turning into a service what should've been a product. Just straightforward exchange of money for value.
So no, it doesn't such for everyone except them. It only sucks for existing businesses that find themselves in competition with LLMs. Which, true, is most of software industry, but it's still just something that happens when major technological breakthrough is achieved. Electricity and Internet and internal combustion engines did the same thing to many past industries, too.
the car comparison is honestly embarassing for this community to even bring up lol. its not theft to recognize a pattern and its definately not illegal for a company to do what every junior dev has been doing for years which is reading the docs and then not buying the paid stuff. adam built a business that relied on human inefficiency and now that inefficiency is gone. its not a tragedy its just a market correction. if your moat is so shallow that a llm can drain it in one pass then you didnt really have a product you just had a temporary advantage. honestly tailwind should of seen this coming a mile away but i guess its easier to blame "scrapers" than admit the ui kit gravy train is over. move on and build something that actually provides value.
However, stating that Adam Wathan (AW) "basically forced [Tailwind] onto the world" is nonsense. People chose to adopt it because it solved a problem.
In case you're not familiar with the origins of Tailwind, AW was building a SaaS live on stream, and everyone kept asking about the little utility CSS framework he'd built for himself (rather than the short-lived SaaS).
That's how it all started. Not through a big SEO campaign, or the mysterious ability to force others to choose a CSS framework against their will, but because people saw it, and wanted to use it.
Both of those can be true.
I think it's a bit too late for Tailwind to do that.
>But my point is that I figure either LLMs disrupt the status quo and we see benefits from it
Who's "we"? The only we here will be tech billionaires. We get shiny tools and no job. Is that a good trade-off?
Even better many times, it shows me new insights into doing things.
I haven't bought a book in a while, but Im reading a lot, like really a lot.
The only problem is that it seems to have stopped sending in October.
Or ask the LLM to customize it to your specific use case since most people really only really care about their situation - not for it to be customizable to everyones use case.
The “madness” here was you replying as if I said he wasn’t.
I agree on not wanting a subscription for something like this. But I also acknowledge that if people are still doing work on something post-sale (beyond bugfixes for a pre-defined support period), I should maybe expect to have to pay for that continuing work.
MUIs paid offerings are open-core, you pay for support and a couple of extra features.
Tailwind plus looks like paying for basic components (checkboxes, sidebars, buttons) and it doesn't even offer anything like DataGrid (free with mui).
Shows Tailwind was just too little too late.
Being the one stop knowledge hubs that sucks from everyone else only benefits the leech long term.
With the AI companies, they suck up all freely available and proprietary information, hide the sources, and give information away to consumers for mostly free.
But then again, it wouldn't be a trend if people thought long term, would it?
So my hope is that LLMs become local in a few years.
We've been sitting around 16Gb of RAM on a laptop for 10-15 years now, not because RAM is too expensive or difficult to make, but because there's been no need for more than that for the average user. We could get "normal" laptop RAM up to 16Tb in a few years if there was commercial demand for it.
We have processor architectures that are suitable for running LLMS better/faster/efficiently. We could include those in a standard laptop if there was commercial demand for it.
Tokens are getting cheaper, dramatically, and will continue to do so. But we have an upper limit on LLM training complexity (we only have so much Internet data to train them on). Eventually the race between LLM complexity and processing speed will run out, and probably with processing speed as the winner.
So my hope is that our laptops change, that they include a personally-adapted very capable LLM, run locally, and that we start to see a huge variety of LLMs available. I guess the closest analogy would be the OS's from "Her"; less typing, more talking, and something that is personalised, appearing to actually know the user, and run locally (which is important).
I don't see anything stopping Linux from doing this too (but I'm not working in this area so I can't say for sure).
Obviously we'll face the usual data thieves and surveillance capitalism along the way, but that's part of the process.
This isn't rocket science. If your business can't exist within the law, it doesn't get to exist.
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.
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 that's a .zip on a website which the models realistically won't train on.
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.
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.
It seems like you are very against open source not being an altruistic endeavor. Or that you should not make money with an open source project. I would like to challenge you on that.
Would you say that the Linux Foundation is a net positive on the software ecosystem? How about big open source projects like curl or QGIS? How about mattermost or nextcloud? All of these have full-time employees working on them (The Linux Foundation generated almost 300 million USD of gross revenue in 2024).
I would argue that good monetization is paramount to a healthy open source ecosystem.
Both can be true:
- AI training on your code is success
- AI undermining the sustainability of your project by reducing funding is an issue
Also, I see you haven't changed your mind much on the training LLMs being one of the major benefits of open source since the last discussion we had ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44155746#44156782
I, like everyone started work on OSS because it's fun. The problem comes when your project gets popular - either you try to make it your job or you abandon the project, because at a certain point it becomes like an unpaid job with really demanding customers.
Your environmental mission feels moot if you do a lot to help with greenhouse emissions and then proceed to also dump all the waste in the ocean. Your mission is "accomplished" by your hands and you are recognized as a champion. but morally you feel like you took a step back and became the evil you sought to address.
Now apply that mentality to someone in FOSS who sees their work go into a trillion dollar industry seeking to remove labor as a concept from it, and the rest of society. Even of you are independently wealthy and never needed to make money to get by, you feel like your mission has failed. Even if people give you a pat on your back for the software you made.
Let's say I'm a company and I have this library I've developed at enormous expense. The company is happy to share it so long as competitor X a big multi-national corp doesn't get it for free. Is it better that it gets open sourced as GPL3 with commercial use on application, or better it stays closed source?
Let's say I'm a developer trying to get a job, I pour months of my time into a new project that's open source, of course I want that attached to my reputation, because that's a part of how I get my new job.
The number of people who can code for free and are happy to not attach thier name and to watch as big AI labs profit off their work while they can't afford rent is super close to 0.
I'm not saying it wasn't a good choice at the time.
The problem with lifetime licensing only appears down the road if a company doesn't find a way to expand their offerings.
If you opened a local gym with reasonably priced lifetime memberships you'd probably have an explosion of new customers. You'd then hit a wall where you've saturated the market, can't sell any more memberships, but you have to keep paying employees and rent.
https://hackersincorporated.com/episodes/lifetime-pricing-is...
I believe he succeeding in convincing Sam and Ryan to adopt lifetime pricing for their UI course at https://buildui.com/pricing. I've purchased Build UI, and it was an excellent product, but unfortunately it appears to be completely dead for at least a full year now.
Neither the unannounced death of Build UI nor this apparently financial catastrophe for Tailwind bode well for the prospects of lifetime pricing! Although the problem might be more related to the entire market segment (frontend programming and design courses) than to the particular pricing model.
Jetbrains has done this for decades now with great success and is the standard sales model for most freemium WordPress plugins. Heck, even Adobe had a similar model until they were convinced they could squeeze out even more profit by charging monthly and trapping customers into subscriptions with high cancellation fees (my words, not theirs).
History says yes, and no. Much easier to retain periodic payment on a few engaged businesses than to continually look for people willing to make a one time payment. Especially in professional software.
The premium model just doesn't work unless you stay very lean. Workers need to be continually paid, even if you make your entire audience happy once.
The key thing they need to recognize is that some percentage of their customers are serious businesses that want them to continue developing/maintaining the software, and that these businesses will be supportive as long as the deal is the same for everyone (you can't ask them to pay out of the goodness of their hearts, as then they feel they will be taken advantage of by people who don't pay).
When we switched to a recurring pricing model, I thought it was going to be a disaster. In fact, I got an angry call from exactly one customer (who then remained a customer despite threatening to leave). I got subtly expressed approval/relief from many more.
The book "How to Sell at Margins Higher than Your Competitors" was helpful to me, and might be helpful here as well. The key is to realize that you want to sell to people who really value your product and will pay for it. You don't want to maximize volume, you want to maximize revenue x margin.
You already have an installed base of people who value your product enough to pay for it once, you just have to create a system that enables them to sustain the technology they value in order to get ongoing support/upgrades/fixes/etc. The people who are going to complain on hacker news about recurring pricing aren't the people you want as customers anyway.
If the majority of your customers don't value it that much, then you are pretty cooked. But you may as well find that out directly. If people really don't want to pay for the software, don't waste time creating it for them.
We made the switch about 20 years ago. Since that time, about 70% of our lifetime revenue has come from recurring payments. Had I not had the courage to make the switch, I would be writing now that the business has been an unsustainable mistake, but that would have been false.
cries in gamedev
Sadly my options are to either sell a few thousand copies on pc and deal with complaints on how my game isn't an 80 hour long timesink, or go into mobile and employ all the dark patterns I hate about marketing.
This is put forward with all the humbleness.
This isn't novel either. Expo offers an MCP with its paid subscription, for instance. It's helpful. In fact, I wish the tamagui crew would get on that...
IF they already have the fundamentals. What I see is that more and more developers don't know CSS at all or very little; they only use Tailwind and haven’t worked with CSS extensively before.
I'm not a web dev, I've heard of Tailwind CSS but my actual knowledge is "I know what the CSS in that name means, therefore it's some kind of styling tool".
One of my experiments before Christmas with Claude Code, was to see what it does in pure vibe-coding mode, where I just say "yes" and then see what kind of mess (if any) it made.
It did not use Tailwind CSS. There was a lot of… if a human had done it I'd say "copy-paste" CSS, but I think it just regenerated it all fresh each time rather than actually using the pasteboard? And it was raw CSS, no dependencies that I noticed.
Speaking from years of .NET work in state and federal government, the sort of dev groups that lean on Telerik or DevExpress have less leverage to build new things for themselves than you would expect, so the use of AI inside of them is predominantly for maintaining existing software. Decisions on how things get built at most public agencies still revolve around MS Access and WebForms due to a whole bunch of BS ordinances that legislators put in place; for those sorts of places a reliable vendor can absorb the blame if concerns surrounding accessibility, compliance, or security of your ancient web services crop up, while Claude and Codex put the liability back on your org.
On the software ecosystem? Maybe. For society? Now that's a difficult question, and I haven't really made up my mind on that yet.
On the one hand, OSS in general is a great win in terms of innovation. On the other hand, it pretty much destroyed the ability to make money on software directly in a honest way - exchanging money for providing value. This, in turn, became a major driver of turning everything into subscription, and for the surveillance economy.
We already see a component of this with art, but art actually needs to be displayed unlike code to show its vslue. So they adapt. Tools to keep the machine from training on their work, or more movements into work that is much harder to train on (a 2d image of a 3d model does the job and the model can be shared off the internet). Programming will follow a similar course; the remaining few become mercenaries and need to protect their IP themselves.
I honestly think the company is run by some good folks that are really trying to do some positive impact. They refuse so all sorts of bs ad-tracking gray area stuff, yet, people don't give a dime.
We caught over and over anthropic and others using shade tactics to bypass bot protection. They get the content, plagiarise it and contribute absolute nothing back. For weeks, openai was crawling our resources on DDOS levels of traffic.
F them. They just are just stealing and making businesses fail. This will be a catastrophe for many but yet, people think there is no relation.
So much traffic is bogus or looking for something adjacent to what they land on that I'm not entirely convinced AI is at fault here.
It very well could be, but I'd love to see a real deep dive rather than potential coincidence.
Yes.
>> So much traffic is bogus or looking for something adjacent to what they land on that I'm not entirely convinced AI is at fault here.
When I was reviewing our analytics, I noticed a huge uptick in traffic from IP addresses in Sigapore and Beijing. This coincided with spikes from Linux OS traffic that was higher than desktop and iOS traffic which has always been the two highest OS's for our traffic. Add in a huge spike in direct traffic all pointed in one direction - AI bots and crawlers.
The real signal is conversions. If the percentage of people who visit and then buy / sign up remains constant, while traffic goes down, you can conclude LLMs are part of the cause.
OTOH if traffic goes down but conversions goes up in percentage, then it's hard to say LLMs are having a negative consequence.
Google became profitable in 2001 whereas OpenAI et al are still operating at a huge loss. Even with ads it's not clear whether LLMs can be profitable unless they increase prices significantly.
The scope of use of AI assistants in people's lives are significantly higher than google search, imo. People use it in far more scenarios already than just information retrieval. That's why some are betting there's a chance it's more valuable than present-day google search.
Seems to have been my pattern of behavior with all these tools.
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 of churn in webshit ecosystem (whose anti-patterns are increasingly seeping in and infecting other software ecosystems) is not a natural state of things. Reducing churn won't kill existing software - on the contrary, it'll just let it continue to work without changes.
Given that countries/cities can go into this state for a very long time without resolution, I am not quite optimistic.
There are people who will use AI (out of their own pocket for trivial costs) to build a library and maintain it simply out of the passion, ego, and perhaps some technical clout.
That's the same with OSS libraries in-general. Some are maintained at-cost, others are run like a business where the founders try to break even.
1. Plant new trees,
2. Eat fruit from trees, get used to delicious fruit,
3. Planting trees hard, easier to wring out more juice from existing fruit,
4. Forget how to maintain trees, trees die, go to 1.
We are entering stage 3.
Left are the three owners of tailwind, one engineer and one ops+customer service + partner sails person.
You mean custom classes?
I thought we learned years ago that exposure doesn't keep the lights on. That mentality is nothing but entitlement
One comment stated that "it's not our fault the founder was unable to manage his finances to pay his people" well if open source worked the way people try to act like it does, he shouldn't have to pay anyone, right? But here we are
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.
EDIT: Doing the math on the sponsor list, it's probably around $1M in ARR now.
But after just months of being unmaintained, even the best libraries start to rot away due to bugs and vulnerabilities going unfixed. Users, AI included, will start applying workarounds and mitigations, and the rot spreads to the applications (or libraries) they maintain.
Unmaintained software is entropy, and entropy is infectious. Eventually, entire ecosystems will succumb to it, even if some life forms continue living in the hazardous wasteland.
Your original point was that libraries do not need companies behind them. From what you have written here a reason for that is that (web) libraries mostly create churn by introducing constant changes. What I think you follow from that, is that those libraries aren't necessary and that "freezing" everything would not do any harm to the state of web development but would do good by decreasing churn of constantly updating to the newest state.
What I struggle to understand is (1) how does AI fit into this? And (2) Why do you think there is so much development happening in that space creating all the churn you mention? At this point in time all of this development is still mostly created by humans which are likely paid for what they do. Who pays them and why?
Bit rot isn’t some mystical decay, it’s dependency drift: APIs change, platforms evolve, security assumptions expire, build chains break. Software survives because people continuously adapt it to a moving substrate.
Reducing churn is good. Pretending maintenance disappears is fantasy. Software doesn’t decay in isolation, it decays relative to everything it depends on. And it sounds like you don’t know anything about Newtonian dynamics either.
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.
Here's a similar example from my own experience:
* Last week, I used AI to help me prepare a set of legal agreements that would have easily cost $5k+ in legal fees pre-2022.
* I've also started a personal blog and created a privacy policy and ToS that I might otherwise have paid lawyers money to draft. Or more realistically, I'd have cut those particular corners and accepted the costs of slightly higher legal risk and reduced transparency.
* In total, I've saved into the five figures on legal over the past few years by preparing docs myself and getting only a final sign-off from counsel as needed.
One perspective would be that AI is stealing money from lawyers. My perspective is that it's saving me time, money, and risk, and therefore allowing me to allocate my scarce resources far more efficiently.
Automation inherently takes work away from humans. That's the purpose of automation. It doesn't mean automation is bad; it means we have a new opportunity to apply our collective talents toward increasingly valuable endeavors. If the market ultimately decides that it doesn't have sufficient need for continued Tailwind maintenance to fund it, all that means is that humanity believes Adam and co. will provide more value by letting it go and spending their time differently.
It does not feel not right to me that revenue is being taken from Tailwind and redirected to Google, OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic without 0 compensation.
I'm not sure how this should codified in law or what the correct words are to describe it properly yet.
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.
Pull up a chair. This is going to take while...
Well, Microsoft is vile. I won’t expand because there’s plenty online on the topic. And I don’t like their acquisition of GitHub, which has turned into an ecosystem for laundering open-source code through LLMs.
I understand, they have UI kits, books, etc. but just fundamentally, it was never going to be easy to monetize around that long term, with or without AI.
We call that "when the bubble pops". Can't wait.
Funny, this also qualifies most of the _human_ written CSS I've seen. !important all the things!
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 solo it, obviously a giant tech company can compete.
> No dark patterns
> No enshittification
> No taking your data hostage
blank stare they're not taking my data hostage, but they're sure as shit taking my data
I think we just fundamentally disagree on all of this. You may be right, and I hope you are. I go back and forth on whether it's going to be a gentle transition or a miserable one. My money is on the latter.
What's the dark pattern here, exactly? "Selling military-adjacent stuff with an edgy vibe" isn't what's meant by a dark pattern.
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.
You're misunderstanding what I'm saying, I was not talking about Tailwind Labs not being a business, I am saying that in general, products are not businesses by default. In that case, my argument is the same as it has been, agreeing with your last 3 sentences.
Computational cost is indeed higher than search (though remember, search has been heavily optimised for many years!), but search and web companies were one of the lowest cost, highest-margin businesses in human existence. Many higher-cost businesses have been supported by ads.
Not at the scale of a trillion dollars, though. You can't make that kind of money back with eyeballs. You either need government subsidies or insane vertical integration. And if your program threatens to neuter the GDP of a country, I don't know how long subsidies will last. At least not in a democracy. People are so mad about immigrants taking jobs, and this would be 10 times worse (and bipartisan, eventually).
Even then: we're quickly hitting a resource wall as well. Are we really going to go to war just so we can have some dude generate AI sheep memes? Something's got to give.
https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs/5025624008 - "Research Engineer – Cybersecurity RL" - "This role blends research and engineering, requiring you to both develop novel approaches and realize them in code. Your work will include designing and implementing RL environments, conducting experiments and evaluations, delivering your work into production training runs, and collaborating with other researchers, engineers, and cybersecurity specialists across and outside Anthropic."
https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs/4924308008 - "Research Engineer / Research Scientist, Biology & Life Sciences" - "As a founding member of our team, you'll work at the intersection of cutting-edge AI and the biological sciences, developing rigorous methods to measure and improve model performance on complex scientific tasks."
The key trend in 2025 was a new emphasis on reinforcement learning - models are no longer just trained by dumping in a ton of scraped text, there's now a TON of work involved designing reinforcement learning loops that teach them how to do specific useful things - and designing those loops requires subject-matter expertise.
That's why they got so much better at code over the past six months - code is the perfect target for RL because you can run generated code and see if it works or not.
It will instead further distinguish what is AI slop because it doesn't work and be siloed off to people who don't care about the code so can't fix it.
If people want good interoperable production ready code that can be deployed instantly and just works and meets all current standards and ongoing discussions, we've had it for many decades and it's called open source.
I am not seeing that. I have a few AI-assisted projects using tailwind and scrolling through it now 99% of it looks... completely modern and professional. I had previously asked it to "completely refactor, a rewrite if needed, all the tailwind/css/app styles. ensure visual and code consistency across pages".
Modern coding tools add tons of their own content, but none of the above was "a lot of context engineering".
And it looks completely the same, so much so that people can tell it's AI generated now simply due to the gradient, among other design choices LLMs seem to make by default: https://prg.sh/ramblings/Why-Your-AI-Keeps-Building-the-Same...
That's the thing, Tailwind is a layer on top of that to ease development, but almost all web development using LLMs is using Tailwind, not CSS.
The problem Tailwind is running into isn't that anything has been stolen from them, as far as I can tell. It's that the market value of certain categories of expertise is dropping due to dramatically scaled up supply — which is basically good in principle, but can have all sorts of positive and negative consequences at the individual level. It's as if we suddenly had a huge glut of low-cost housing: clearly a social good on balance, but as with any market disruption there would be winners and losers.
If Tailwind's primary business is no longer as competitive as it once was, they may need to adapt or pivot. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're a victim of wrongdoing, or that they themselves did anything wrong. GenAI was simply a black swan event. As a certain captain once said, "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life.".
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...
But there was money to be made and the friends you thought were friends were just mercenaries with a shiv in their hand.
If we didn't have open source arguably developers would be more secure, way more secure, in the face of AI.
You can be and I am sympathetic towards the CEO! I wouldn't accept a PR for cannibalize_my_revenue.txt either. But if we insist on analyzing the issue according to the categories you're describing, it seems undeniable that the CEO is a corporatist, and that he put an unfree license on his repository to stop people from freely modifying or redistributing it.
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, but I hate monopolies. Especially ones that treat us like cattle and depopulate the last vestiges of ownership and public commons.
I would dispute whether the tech giants are "monopolies", since there's still competition between them, but that's a minor point. I agree with you that they treat individual coders like cattle--but that's because they can: because, from their standpoint, individual coders are commodities. And if automated tools, including AI models, are cheaper commodities that, from their standpoint, can do the same job, that's what they'll use. And if the end result is that whatever they're selling as end products becomes cheaper for the same functionality, then economically speaking, that's an improvement--we as coders might not like it, but we as customers are better off because things we want are cheaper.
So I'm not sure it's a consistent position to "really like AI models" but also not want the tech giants to treat you like cattle. The two things go together.
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.
It's not a matter of "privilege". It's simple economics: if the same functionality can be provided more cheaply, that's a gain to everyone. The gain to customers is the most obvious gain, and it's what I focused on in my previous post--but it's also a gain to producers, because it frees up resources to produce other things of value. But the producers have to be willing to change how they make use of resources in order to take advantage of those opportunities.
> I happen to spend quite a bit more time working than shopping.
Then you should be a lot more worried about AI providing the same functionality you were providing as a coder, but more cheaply--because that makes you, or at least you as a coder providing that functionality, a commodity that's no longer worth its cost. So if you want to avoid being commoditized and treated like cattle, you have to change what you produce to something that AI can't do more cheaply than you can.
Don't FOSS by default, unionize, embrace solidarity, and form worker-owned co-ops that aren't run by craven/unrealistic/non-business founders if you want any sort of stability.
According to fair use doctrine, research models would be okay. Models used in education would be okay. Models used for public betterment by the government would be okay, etc
Pie in the sky version would be that models, their output and the infrastructure they run on would be held in a public trust for everyone's benefit. They wouldn't exist without consuming all of the public's intellectual and creative labor and property, therefore they should belong to the public, for the public.
> Tech is about to cease being ours.
On the hardware side, it's bad, as well. Remote attestation is here, and the frog is just about boiled when it comes to the idea of a somewhat open and compatible PC as the platform for general computing.
It was kinda cool while it lasted, glad I got to see the early internet, but it wasn't worth it to basically sign away for my great grandchildren to be peasants or belong to some rich kid's harem.
I fail to see how open source is being "turned against" anyone here.
> we'll be owned by industrial giants
...or how anyone is being "owned by" industrial giants in any way relevant to open source.
> Tech is about to cease being ours.
This doesn't mean anything.
You're just ranting.
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 own design systems or editing a Button component directly.
Instead they rode the wave (despite being best positioned to redirect the wave) and they're paying the price.
If it wasn't AI it'd be the first version of MUI that moves on from Material Design 2 as a default. Or Hero UI v3. Or literally anyone who brings sanity back to the space of component libraries and leaves "copy and paste code snippets" behind
Some people who would buy the higher quality templates don't know that they exist now.
But the broader, more important point: an open source project previously could be funded by using attention to sell other services or add-ons. But that model might be gone if users no longer visit or know the creators.
This has nothing to do with the actual facts or arguments of the case. Our "Justice" system has openly and capriciously emphasized corporate rights over individual rights for at least 50 years now.
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.
They almost completely just give money back if it fails/sucks, and they are still coming out ahead.
Regarding the point about accessibility, there are a ton of little details that must be explicitly written into the HTML that aren't necessarily the default behavior. Some common features of CSS and JS can break accessibility too.
None of this code would obvious to an LLM, or even human devs, but it's still what's expected. Without precisely written and effectively read-only boilerplate your webpage is gonna be trash and the specifics are a moving target and hotly debated. This back and forth is a human problem, not a code problem. That's why it's "hard".
I would 100% of the time prefer to encounter the median website written by Opus 4.5 than the median website written by a human developer in terms of accessibility!
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.
Internal tools and prototypes, both things that quality components can accelerate, have been strong use-cases for these component libraries, just as much as polished commercial customer-facing products.
And I bet volume-wise there's way more of the former than the latter.
So while I think most people who care about quality know you can't (yet) blindly use LLM output in your final product, it's completely ok for internal tools and prototyping.
Copyright is evil. Disliking LLMs doesn't change that.
Back in the old days you might have image links and other fun stuff. Then we entered the era of flash. Flash was great, especially the people who made their whole site out of it (2004 + not being able to order ... was it pizza? something really sticks in my memory here.)
Then we entered the era of early Bootstrap. Things got really bad for a while -- there was a whole Bootstrap-Accessibility library people ended up writing for it, and of course nobody actually used the damn thing. The most frustrating thing at this point (2010?) was any dropdown anywhere. Any bootstrap dropdown was completely inaccessible using typical techniques, and you'd have to do something tricky with ... mouse routing? Gods it's been 15 years.
CAPTCHAs for stupid things became huge there for a brief moment -- I remember needing to pass a CAPTCHA to download ... was it Creative drivers? That motivated me to make a service called CAPTCHA-Be-Gone for other blind people for a while.
Then we see ARIA start to really come into its own... except that's a whole new shitshow! So many times you'd get people who thought "Oh to add accessibility, we just add ARIA" and had no fucking idea what they were doing, to the point where the most-common A11y advice these days has become "Don't use ARIA unless you know you need it."
Oh then we had this brief flash (~10 years ago?) of "60 FPS websites!" -- let's directly render to the fucking canvas, that'll be great. Flutter? ... Ick!
Nowadays the issues are just the same as they ever were. People using divs for everything, onclick handlers instead of stuff that will be triggered with keyboard... Stuff that Opus just doesn't do!
I guess I've only been using Opus 4.5 for about a month but just ... Ask it to build something? Use it with a screen reader? Try it!
I am not blind, but my experience trying to write accessible web pages is that the screen readers are inconsistent with how they announce the various tags and attributes. I'm curious what you think about the screen readers out there such as NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver, TalkBack, etc. and how devs should be testing their web pages.
Many of the larger corporate clients tend to standardize on the exact behavior of JAWS and I am not sure that is helpful. It's like the Internet Explorer of screen readers.
If you want to know why a page ends up riddled with ARIA overriding everything, that's why. In even the best cases, the people paying for this dev work are looking for consistency and then not finishing the job. It's never made the highest priority work either since testing eats up a ton of time.
To reinforce my original point, I just don't think LLMs can write anything but the most naive code and everyone has opinions and biases completely incompatible with standardization. It's never "done" and fundamentally fickle and political just like the rest of the web.
I would love to be proven wrong, truly, because this is a path to the death of craftsmanship, deep knowledge, and to some extent, curiosity, in the domain.
I don't know why people keep saying this, as if quality, ethics and sustainability mattered before and every developer was a pure artisan of their craft. In reality, having been in many companies and looking at their codebases, it has always been slop, with very few exceptions.
The sell out is the biggest fundamental issue in this equation because it is the part of the equation which doesn't reward Quality,ethics,sustainability and engineering rigor overall.
Welcome to the AI bubble fueling it.
I genuinely don't know but I think AI prototyping/using it for personal use cases are fine but when we completely start to vibecode, if your project is complex enough, you will reach problems and all the other factors/researches point out. In my opinion, for longevity, vibecoding is not the deal.
But as you said, longevity isnt rewarded. I really hate how the system has become of just selling businesses.
I feel like as such the businesses who are truly passionate about their product (because they faced the problems themselves or are heavily interested in it/passionate about it) might win "long term"
To me trust feels the biggest resource in this day and age. Information era has now been sloppified. Trust is what matters now.
I don't know but I will take the slow but overall steady route. There is a sense of commitment with human trust which I feel would set apart businesses and I will try to create side projects with that initiative
One of the ways I feel like acheiving it while still getting the shipfast aspect is that I just build things for myself, vibe coding in this case can help and I launch it for public, if there is interest in any product or smth, I will try to respond and try to add feedbacks fast (perhaps still using vibecoding) but in long term, I try to promise to keep the code lean (usually approx 2-3k lines of code at max) and then if I see prospect and interest about the idea, I have tried to think that a middle way is either rewriting or completely understanding AI generated code to its core and having a very restrictive AI access afterwards any product feels good and then the trust aspect of things can be gained.
I don't know too much about side hustles. I just build things for myself in whatever I want mostly I must admit using vibe code and end up usually sharing it online/deploying it for others as well if it might help.
Elderly care.
I suggest and ask for nothing but consistency, irrespective of if you like or dislike the people who are affected.
> It is "progress" when class traitors displace labor, but it is "heartbreaking" when a class traitor gets displaced by other class traitors.
it becomes clear that the original comment was a pointless strawman of a position that nobody holds. A class traitor wouldn't be expressing sympathy about displacement in the first place. It only seemed to make sense because, when you say "tech bro", people superimpose the general category of technologists who think they can make the world better on top of one specific stereotypical guy who believes all the worst things they've ever heard a technologist say.
But chin up, peasant, each and every one of us can dream of one day being a billionaire as well if only we act as wise and as kind as they do.
(I know this was written satirically) but this is a nice example of doublespeak and I immediately got reminded of it.
I wouldn't say that we have reached 1984 level, there is still some decentralization where you can get hosting and then self host from small vps providers as well etc.
Not that most people do such things tho. Internet is still heavily centralized but overall, there are still outlets of escape legally and you are able to sometimes even talk to vps provider owners themselves directly in some cases if they are small enough.
But still, each year although we get away from 1984 the year, we get near to 1984 the book.
Nah man, this stuff isn't happening anywhere else. We can simply say "No, you don't get to ruin the economy for your personal profit."
It feels like UBI is (at best) likely to become as complicated and corrupt as our tax system already is.
This makes me happy that I'm nearing retirement but that switch flipping is being delayed by my hourly rate going up for possessing forgotten knowledge. Sigh...
displaced factory workers mostly drift into janitorial or cab driving sorts of work. Why would it be different for other sorts of workers?
The rest of us will struggle without your help because that's what we been doing. We are literally struggling to fulfill our purposes because we have jobs.
Then use it to pay for services like healthcare and education so that everyone has a safety net and opportunity to thrive without just giving everyone enough cash so that they are incentivized to slack.
The industry wanted all of that and did not get its way after some time. You can ban "AI", make companies respect copyright. You can do all sorts of things.
Since "AI" can only plagiarize, countries that do the above will have an edge (I'm not talking about military applications that can still be allowed or should be regulated like in treaties for nuclear weapons).
If we are to just have UBI. Have basic sustenance for no effort, while we have unlimited entertainment and porn at our finger tips. It would be a disaster. I would literally we rather have make work programs.
The problem is you don't understand how terrible life on earth is currently for the majority of people, you are coddled.
I don't really have sympathy for people attached to their careers. They did that to themselves.
what actually happened was that he sat around purposeless because it turns out that the motivation of producing a paycheck or product was actually the reason he did things. He stopped showering, became depressed, and neglected his health.
And this isn't an uncommon reaction to the open-ended 'free-form' life post-retirement. Some people very realistically need to have some level of structure imposed on their life or otherwise be taught how to create that structure themselves. I think this will be a very real problem whenever UBI gets closer to reality.
