> 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. [...]
> 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.
I made this point at the time but Tailwind Labs' business model shouldn't exist. It irks people because they wanna blame AI for it but they were coasting and should be happy it lasted this long.
Tailwind's business model existed due to a massive inefficiency in the frontend industry not being able to come to terms with CSS or native components. They surfed the wave of JS frontends becoming ever more complicated. If it wasn't AI and just a human awakening to that fact, realizing that the complexity of modern frontends and Tailwind are not an absolute necessity, they'd have lost business just the same. There are dozens of different ways of writing frontends that have nothing to do with Tailwind.
Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be.
I don't agree with "nor should it be" - the market decided it was clearly needed. And this isn't unique to Tailwind. For decades, companies in many ecosystems (like .NET, JS, etc) have made lots of money selling component libraries that save developers and companies a lot of time. And I even bought UI.sh in April, and it really was great until the models just natively got much better.
I happily paid for Tailwind UI because it was worth it. I paid for ui.sh and got plenty of my $130 (or whatever) value. The market spoke in a good way initially, and now it's sending a different message.
They've just got to do the next thing, which is find an AI-resistant steward of the project now.
"nor should it be" is connected to "being worth millions". It's not that it isn't worth money, but it's more of a lifestyle business than the sort of thing that will drive a tech company with employees, marketing, and conference budgets.
I think if you said "couldn't be a venture backed startup", I'd 100% agree with you. Can't support employees or a marketing budget is a much lower bar, and I think that's perfectly achievable by something like Tailwind (or I guess was prior to AI)
There are several graphing libraries that have been businesses for years. Like Highcharts. A frontend framework used by millions and millions certainly has some value to loads of people.
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" applies to running a business as well as trading. There is no certainty when you're dealing with the individual whims of millions of people.
I’m not sure what their valuation was but single digits millions sounds totally reasonable for a company you’re describing. Just to hire 10 engineers you’ll need to be in low millions
I don't want to diminish the work that any developers do, but a headcount of 10 seems high to me. (Unless some of those are simply "support engineers" who do nothing but support paying customers, but that would go up and down with revenue)
To hire 10 engineers you only need millions in yearly revenue. And millions in revenue does not imply that the business is worth millions. It very well, quite easily, could be worthless.
Just for reference, in the .NET ecosystem there are multiple vendors selling UI component libraries for sums ranging from lower three digits to upper three digits per dev, per year. This was generally considered good value (might no longer be great value post-AI)
As an engineering leader back in the day (2000-2015) I considered it terrific value to license Telerik and others. In fact, it looks like Progress has acquired a large catalog of the most common .NET dev tools over the past ten years.
I think that “lots of money” needs to be put in perspective when thinking about software that’s used by developers. When you compare the size of the market for these kinds of tools compared to a truly massive market for something like an office suite, it looks pretty puny.
Developers are also very fickle and the one constant is change. Sometimes it seems like change for changes sake alone.
I’m not saying that any businesses easy just that it seems to me after seeing a lot of companies come and go, but this is one of the more difficult markets to capitalize on.
It’s hard to name a more pathological market than office suites. You have Microsoft which is lackadaisical about the subject, like maybe they think Office is a place to stuff with thoroughly unwanted AI features. The rest of the market is German zealots who spend all day with bash and emacs who lobby legislatures to subject public servants to off-brand office suites and then the public sector unions go on strike to get Microsoft Office back.
Bundling is one reason who can’t have nice things. Like in my opinion Excel is a lot worse than the others but if customers are thinking about a “suite” they are still going to buy Office to get Word and PowerPoint and can’t save money by switching to a different CSV wrangler or financial analysis tool.
Funny, my opinion is the opposite. Excel is a much better spreadsheet than Word is a word processor or than PowerPoint is a presentation tool.
Of course it’s got quirks and unfortunate relics of its long history, but I reach for it willingly, and I can’t say that about the rest of the Office suite.
Hey do you have any opinion on the current utility of ui.sh? I wanted to buy it but I'm a bit wary of it just not being useful and they don't have a preview of a single skill.
> I happily paid for Tailwind UI because it was worth it.
The business was worth something. But, as the earlier comment questions, was it worth millions? Or was that the free money, tech hype talking? Maybe in a more normal market it would have only been a simple mom and pop.
"The market" for Tailwind only existed due to ignorance and obfuscation fueled by hype for web dev jobs.
Completely artificial market built on propaganda and low interest rate money printing. Same as the rest of SaaS. Nothing about the tech industry since the '08 crash has been organic investment. Was 100% collusion between government and private interests to manipulate public opinion.
> They've just got to do the next thing, which is find an AI-resistant steward of the project now.
Aside; all the leaked emails, chats, and going back further in time, telegrams, letters, travel logs on display in court yet the myth the economy is an organic free market this whole time persists
Such belief is nought but a quirk of biology that allowed humans to latch onto the idea Benevolent but Punitive Sky Wizard watches out for them; total cope. In Wealth of Nations Adam Smith called it the "invisible hand" and later came to realize he was wrong. He reconsidered and concluded the avarice of man will not be stopped by philosophy of national unity.
No, I didn't mean ai-resistant as far as "don't need coding agents" - I use agents to do all my coding now. I'm saying, AI-resistant in the sense that a company like Shopify isn't going anywhere even in the AI world. If anything, they will thrive with more AI-assisted shops coming online.
That gives the Tailwind folks a more steady stream of income.
this. leftpad as a service bullshit SaaS companies somehow raising millions was a temporary insanity driven by ZIRP and incestuous VC money currents. we see the same thing happening now with companies whose products are paper-thin vibecoded wrappers over someone else's models.
The market didn’t decide it was needed, the users just downloaded a bunch of free files and free docs. There isn't any indication there was ever a real market.
Using something free and paying for a product are entirely different things.
> Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be.
But what if people were already selling them, and tailwind showed up, did it better, and people went directly to them to buy what they were offering?
Why shouldn't that exist?
The folks over at Tailwind offered curated, hand-built components that were readily adapted and tuned to your own needs. They did an excellent job making it so you could pick and choose what you wanted, then theme all of it from your tailwind settings with ease. It was excellent.
Sure, similar things existed for less or at no cost. I was content to pay for this, though. It made my work meaningfully simpler at times. It paid for itself.
> Tailwind's business model existed due to a massive inefficiency in the frontend industry not being able to come to terms with CSS or native components.
I don't agree. The pain it addressed on my team was more so that very few people I worked with understood CSS, but tailwind was easy enough for them to work with (particularly in a React context). It was a useful tool in a context where a lot of the people didn't fully understand the tool. They could just pick and choose components and they'd slot into the app well enough. It addressed real pain there.
They surfed a wave for sure, but I think it was mostly that a non-trivial number of people working on the frontend don't understand HTML and CSS very well. That's not their fault at all.
> The folks over at Tailwind offered curated, hand-built components that were readily adapted and tuned to your own needs. They did an excellent job making it so you could pick and choose what you wanted, then theme all of it from your tailwind settings with ease. It was excellent.
They also offered an Open Source CSS framework with the explicit goal of making it easier for you to style your own components. There was always some tension between "make abstraction layer whose adoption depends on users finding it easier to make your own components with than vanilla CSS, which is not unusually hard" and "sell pre-made components". Particularly when there's an abundance of alternative FOSS components/libraries out there[1] in vanilla CSS or even full blown CMS templates for people not wedded to the idea that Tailwind makes things easy for them. Much easier to sell templates or even "premium components" when your USP is integrating them with a backend them rather than merely providing the layer of syntactic sugar supposed to make component styling easy...
They also happened to have the misfortune of designing it in a way which is particularly easy for AI which doesn't have to tradeoff time spent making design decisions and figuring out how to achieve those from the docs vs dollars spent buying components to minimally tweak.
[1]tbf, I always thought the Tailwind creators' designs were more tasteful than the average CSS mixin library even though I didn't think the same about the syntax...
> There was always some tension between "make abstraction layer whose adoption depends on users finding it easier to make your own components with than vanilla CSS, which is not unusually hard" and "sell pre-made components"
We wouldn't need doctors if we had a box you could walk into that cured all ailments.
We won't need software engineers once you can crudely specify requirements and have a machine turn them into rigid requirements with a solid data model, flexibility to extend, infrastructure to run, and monitoring and recovery to maintain reliability.
if you mean this in a reductionist way for humans, i dont think most of us think we’re omniscient
my point more broadly is that if you have an incomplete spec, any entity implementing it either needs to be omniscient or make assumptions about the intended behaviour of the system. if constraints or invariants aren't part of the spec it might be difficult or outright impossible to make the right assumptions.
so while LLMs might be writing all of the code in the future, someone will still need to create the spec + verify it. and often the spec is not really possible to know until implementation begins...
ive been using astra on a project that isn't even that complex in the grand scheme of things, and it still fails to make the right assumptions. of course i could just give it a full complete spec right?! except i didn't know what the right assumptions were either until implementation anyways. so to some extent they were unknowable to me, and thus unknowable to the llm no matter how powerful.
I do think in the future humans will probably write very little code themselves, but the work will be all about specification + verification and that means system design, which is the stuff I care about anyways. maybe I won't develop rsi when I get older :)
im not swe by trade, in fact I would love it if what you said was true because I could consolidate various kinds of businesses into one holistic infrastructure and demolish all the competitors.
Tailwind’s business model was entirely legitimate, pre-AI. Humans can only hold so many ideas in their heads, and panes in their IDEs. Shorthand class names let them stay in their render hierarchy while drawing from a logical and consistent design library, without going to another file for styling… or (the hardest thing in CS) choosing good semantic class names!
Of course, enterprises eventually hit a wall in the covered functionality, need customizations and library management, and an official consulting team is there to help - no different than any open source model throughout history.
That they were more vulnerable than most to agentic coding doesn’t make it a bad idea.
It sounds like your criticism is about their product, not about their business model.
The business model of having a popular product with great documentation, which leads free users to additional paid services, seems like a very valid business model.
Even the criticism you have for their product is along the lines of "the product only worked because they identified a problem in the market; If someone else identified it, this product wouldn't even be needed!". Which is, well, true, but also true for almost any other successful product.
Most of my clients over the years have been very successful businesses in industries and niches that I never imagined could support a multi-million dollar enterprise. A lot of the time I was surprised that the entire business model was even a thing.
My point is that just because you find the success of Tailwind Labs surprising does not mean that it "shouldn't" be a multi-million dollar business. Neither you nor I get to decide that.
This is such a poor comment. It starts talking about the business model, but it’s just a “Tailwind shouldn’t exist at all” argument. Clearly it’s a useful tool if it’s used by so many people and companies.
>Clearly it’s a useful tool if it’s used by so many people and companies.
Yeah but its not. Hence the huge layoffs. If they don’t want to find another software development job maybe they could work at a New Jersey gas station. New Jersey protects their gas station attendants.
Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be.
Arguably many websites and apps desperately need a good component library because it's very clear the UI sucks without one. Lots of people spending a few thousand dollars on their UX is not unreasonable at all, so the best-in-class library (whether that's Tailwind is a separate point) should be able to make a lot of money.
You could easily level the same argument at any library: "This thing is simple so it shouldn't be worth millions." That's just the wrong way to look at how selling works. If you make something that solves a lot of people's pain point (Tailwind) you're going to make a lot of money until someone else sells something that makes it even easier (AI). That is a tale as old as time, and the fundamental basis of how startups disrupt incumbents in an industry.
That’s like saying a carpenter doesn’t understand woodworking because they sometimes buy pre milled lumber. Or that landscaper a doesn’t understand mowing because they don’t trim each blade of grass individually.
I don't agree with the other commenter. The point you make is a fair one.
However, I think the real information in your comment is that there are people making websites and web apps who aren't frontend developers. They're likely fullstack who are much more backend focused, and who do the frontend more out of necessesity than enjoyment. Tailwind enables those people who aren't experts in frontend to make things for the web without the necessary expertise to write CSS themselves.
That's why it's valuable - the point of Tailwind is that it solve the pain point (not knowing CSS) with money instead of time. But now people can solve it with AI instead.
This is a poor analogy, but maybe we should consider CSS as a lower level language than Tailwind, similar to JVM bytecode to Java. There are plenty of people who will tell you that a real Java developer understands the bytecode, but that doesn't stop people writing code in Java without knowing the lower level.
> Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be.
Depends what you mean. I think it’s totally reasonable for a small team with a great reputation to offer a well-made component library and make millions of dollars from it. But I would never expect that to be a reliable source of recurring income, and certainly not enough to support a team of well-paid engineers, designers, marketers, etc. indefinitely.
To be honest, I wonder if AI is even the right thing to blame here, or just a timing coincidence. Is it not the case that they simply sold their UI library to roughly everyone who was in the market for a high-cost component library?
That was certainly not overnight. The biggest disruption they personally did was offering a better alternative to Bootstrap. More customization, JIT compilation that allowed for custom class interpretation without any added CSS, proper flex consideration, removing unused library classes in the production compilation step, etc.
Beyond this, you should really be thanking things like Shadcn for the “date picker disruption”. It is a component library which arguably could’ve existed without Tailwind ever existing.
Nonsense. There have been perfectly good free date picker widgets available for every era of web development, going back to clunky server-rendered html templates.
Seriously. I always wonder who makes these comments, then I remember I'm old and there are people who don't remember every era of the web. Although, it's still incredibly weird to essentially claim that Tailwind solved date pickers.
You have to remember the biggest appeal of tailwind is that it throws away the entire cascade of css. The people that reach for it are choosing it because it offers less functionality, and is therefore simpler to reason about. I hesitate to say they don't understand css, I'm sure some of them do, but in my experience the devs that reach for it are the same who deride css and make statements such as "I have better things to do than learn css"
I think there's plenty of developers that are perfectly competent with CSS who still reach for Tailwind.
You're right that Tailwind throws away the cascade, or at least enables developers not to have to think about it (under the hood, Tailwind 4 uses pretty modern cascading features like layers), but people aren't reaching it because of a lack of understanding, they're reaching for it because as front-ends get increasingly componentized, the cascade becomes less and less of a benefit and more of an obstacle to be worked around, and something that gets that obstacle out of the way becomes more attractive.
I'm quite versed in CSS but tailwind has convenient abstractions on top. It's like "why you need C if you have assembler". I don't remember when I wrote raw CSS last time. Even global styles I tend to express via @apply.
A bunch of people have already said this but I also have known CSS very well (being using it since its release) and even enjoyed it. Butt the moment I saw someone using Tailwind I thought, "I want that!" The idea that Tailwind is for, or rather only for, people who don't know CSS is very misguided. That said, I'm back to using vanilla CSS.
Don't forget that, in my opinion very positive way, it also normalized the concept of "uniform measurements". Every instance of `rounded-md` is the same on a site.
Indeed, I don't know what to make of such a bizarrely nonsensical assertion. Age and lack of experience doesn't really explain it, because all the poster needed to have done was make the simplest sort of web search. It's so wrong, it's... not even wrong.
Your analysis is fundamentally flawed because you’re conflating the Tailwind’s business model, which is based on the actual realities of the market, and your ideal for how frontends should be developed.
There are millions of Single Page, and other “complex” web apps. You not liking it does not invalidate anything.
I think many of the purchases of Tailwind UI were basically donations with extra steps. Many, myself included, wanted to support their work. The prebuilt components were nice, but you can find open source components and/or commercial ones on places like ThemeForest for about $20.
>Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be.
Neither creating a VSCode wrapper and putting an LLM with tools and valued billion dollars (cursor). But thats the demand and supply.. As long as AI was not there Tailwind would have continued it success journey - until a new tiny(at least initially)/shiny/minimal framework comes along
> I made this point at the time but Tailwind Labs' business model shouldn't exist.
It doesn't anymore. There are tens of thousands of businesses that have only been able to exist for a short time due to gaps in the market and technology. Video rental, started with video tapes, died with DVDs and didn't really make it into the bluray era. Owning DVDs came down to $20, no reason to drive across town and rent one for $6. But then Redbox was able to slip into that gap, putting lots of discs in a vending machine, those are cheap and they went everywhere! It was a buck a night! But then streaming killed that DEAD. Had tapes been cheap from the get go Blockbuster never would have existed, but studios decided to ignore that revenue for ages.
I don't see any reason the business model shouldn't exist, though yes their scale was a challenge IMO.
Selling off the shelf, tested components and themes isn't a bad business. I'd firmly put it in the lifestyle business category, I just wouldn't expect it to sustain multiple high paid engineers on fulltime salary and benefits.
A relatively popular WordPress theme on ThemeForest could bring in $30k on a good month in the market's prime. Nowadays the number is much more humble.
It's not really a moral argument that there shouldn't be a business model but more an opinion that you might now consider verified as a correct one that the business model just wasn't there. I agree that there probably never was one.
Selling to developers just is very hard. The reality of course is that this competes in a space full of other people's OSS attempts at solving the same problem. That just puts an upper limit on what you can charge and who is going to even consider paying at all. And whatever that is, it was nowhere close to what they needed it to be.
AI made the whole proposition less valuable. I actually like tailwind as a solution. But it was always a short cut for people who didn't want to reinvent all the low level CSS hackery on every project they did. It's why I like and used it as well. But I stopped doing these things manually at this point. AI coding tools will happily spit out the raw CSS as well. And the irony of course is that because of tailwind's popularity, generating it was easy as well.
strongly agree except that "million-dollar business" is such a low bar these days that I might argue a larger number is needed for the point to stand.
People are reacting foolishly to the word shouldn't here. It's not a "moral" shouldn't; it doesn't meant anything like "shame on them for existing". It's a technical criticism: the only reason this business was ever viable is that the rest of the ecosystem is in such a sorry state that it became worth spending money on this thing that should have been trivial.
A similar claim would be: Jquery shouldn't have existed, because browsers could have done a not-terrible job in the first place to the point that its existence was necessary. They didn't, so it did exist, but it shouldn't have had to.
Telerik has been around awhile and makes $60 million a year and their business model is selling essentially UI components at the heart of it for Microsoft UI frameworks. There is also SyncFusion and DevExpress.
Its crazy, but there is clearly money to be had in this.
> Tailwind's business model existed due to a massive inefficiency in the frontend industry not being able to come to terms with CSS or native components.
No, it wasn't. It's a CSS utility library. I've been writing CSS for 15 years. I didn't choose Tailwind because I couldn't come to terms with CSS or native components.
Tailwind provides an actual simplifying layer for the (over-)complicated practice of front-end web development.
By being well-though-out, well-designed, and very well documented, it actually made web app styling easier/simpler (without hiding or otherwise making it hard to drop into CSS as needed). And it slotted right into the place most web apps have for a CSS/class mechanism.
The paid templates extend the approach to components. The business model is that the credibility they establish with the free high-quality CSS/class system makes people willing to pay for the templates, which then goes over well because the templates are good and useful, saving a lot of development time. BTW, their templates solves a different problem than native components -- I suspect you're dismissive of their business model due to not actually understanding it.
Of course, it's all moot now. AI can generate the components now at the same time it's doing everything else, so no reason to pay for their templates. (Plus, tailwindcss probably doesn't build the credibility as much anymore either because devs aren't using it (their AI might be, but without the direct contact it doesn't have a chance to build that open-the-wallet credibility.)
Tailwind templates give you a quick way to get good, functional, customizable components. LLMs give you a quicker way to get good-enough, functional customizable components. You have to pay for LLMs too, but you aren’t getting the LLM just for the components, and component generation is included.
Looking ahead, maybe LLM subscription prices will eventually have to go way up to justify the huge valuations AI companies have. So maybe this could change, but it won’t be until anyone making a living from template has had to move on, so we aren’t going back to when that was a thing.
It seems to me that this is the way the market is heading. Strange bleeding edge perf or sprawling complexity feels like the last niche of front end engineers. The rest will move further down the stack or be replaced.
I come to similar conclusions when scanning dev newsletters and I fail to skip over an ad link. Based on the value proposition presented in the one-liner I wonder they exist then wonder whether I really understand "tech industry" as it currently is ...
> the frontend industry not being able to come to terms with CSS
What does this even mean?
There’s nothing wrong with a company taking something complex and making it simple, and they absolutely deserve to be paid for making millions of developers lives easier
Sort of a weak and dismissive take. Tailwind saw a problem in the market, addressed it, and made money for a while. Why shouldn't that business model exist? It exists across SO MANY other industries.
People pay for aspirin, not vitamins, and Tailwind is aspirin.
I agree that a CSS library is not really worth a big business. But nobody has woken up: AI makes writing tailwind classes more convenient than ever and that’s what people seem to do.
This sort of critique could be made about almost any industry or individual business. The whole premise of almost any industry is lubricating some friction between the idealized and the reality.
Having said that, sure they were utterly doomed. For that matter, Shopify is utterly doomed as well. Businesses like that will continue to exist, but in no universe is it a $230B space.
There is some slight irony in them continuing to make these statements for me. Mostly because Tailwind is still incredibly around (and worth investing in, hence Shopify acquiring them) and AI isn’t anything close to offering a drop in solution. That is to say, AI will implement tailwind when building as there isn’t a good alternative, and otherwise just references these docs for the user so that they don’t have to visit the website, so it’s not like it’s being used less.
If you think about it, the site docs garnering traffic (beyond potential tailwind labs conversions) is more of an indicator of a code or design smell than anything. That’s just my 2 cents as a guy who used to look up their docs constantly to confirm a pattern I was implementing, as tailwind classes were never really as self-evident as tailwind labs liked to believe they were IMO.
Like it just doesn’t make total sense to me to compare library documentation traffic hits to traffic hits that happen in other industries here, or with other products or companies. They aren’t even a traditional SaaS company, not that there really Is one either. Their service or income flow is defined by things like offering Enterprise support or a component library at a premium — things that aren’t simply dictated by or shown through documentation traffic trends; things that were encroached upon by plenty of other things besides AI.
> and worth investing in, hence Shopify acquiring them)
I have nothing against Tailwind, but I think a company with $5 billion in cash reserves and the general context of Shopify may buy a company like Tailwind for community goodwill, to stabilize the technology that they use for their own business model, to acqui-hire the principals, and various other reasons other than Tailwind's business model.
> On the commercial side, we'll no longer be trying to grow the business around Tailwind. All existing customers will of course maintain their access to products like Tailwind Plus and ui.sh, but we're closing sign ups for new customers to focus on Tailwind CSS at Shopify.
I imagine it has to be for their expertise in translating developer intent into practice and refining the shopify specific markup conventions. When I misread the headline as Spotify I couldn't think of why any org, even very front end heavy, would buy them. But continuing to support a language that will always be in it's own lucrative domain makes perfect sense.
I think their business model was sustainable, but depended on SEO. AI made it so people would either use the LLM generated tailwind syntax, or the "AI Overview" at the top of the Google search results and never land on the official tailwind documentation site. Less visits on the official docs meant less people would see the paid offerings, which means less people would buy.
It's possible they could have explored other marketing channels (youtube?), but it seems like the death of SEO for this sort of content lead to the main issues.
I'm not sure if everyone in this thread is familiar with what their business model was. It wasn't "selling tailwind premium" or selling "tailing enterprise support". They sold a library of react components that happened to use tailwind for styling. So their competitors are DIY, Mantine, React-Bootstrap, and similar.
I'm not sure they'd even be classed as competitors to be honest. They floundered massively with the ui kit, most sections of it were very dated and untouched for several years whilst they piddled about with a failed new ui kit that never took off, for which they blamed ai.
The reality was that a big chunk of their initial audience came from Laravel, and as other players emerged and made what was Tailwind UI irrelevant it all seemed to compound into them panicking and making some rather silly business decisions. At one point they had a sizeable team and shipped nothing for a good 8 months, and when they did it was a couple of beautiful but completely impractical landing pages. They just didn't convert it to a sustainable business.
Oh and to add to it, they alienated their paying customers by dropping support for basic js based components in favour of making the entire ui library reliant on heavy js libraries, killing off any interest from most of the Laravel customers who'd been their initial target audience.
What AI replaces isn't Tailwind (AI will reach for Tailwind pretty readily), but the paid ecosystem that was Tailwind's business model. The value of having a pre-built component goes down when building that component is a 10 minute job of an agent.
I think this is reasonable but incorrect. Tailwind didn't say "our conversion rates went down." They said the traffic to their docs site went down.
Their funnel depended on SEO, and LLMs took SEO out of the equation. What you said about the value of pre-built components might also be true but can't be determined from a situation where consumers suddenly all stopped learning that the pre-built components exist. Occam's Razor says it's the funnel.
> the site docs garnering traffic (beyond potential tailwind labs conversions) is more of an indicator of a code or design smell than anything
I've heard this before, but it's really no different than vanilla CSS. My guess is that people started pointing this out is that Tailwind got more non-frontend people digging into styling more where they were hit with how much shit there is in CSS.
Is this supposed to be a plus? When you have indirections they're supposed to provide some abstraction and the abstraction might or might not provide the utilities you desire, but there is a point to it. A near 1:1 mapping is completely useless and just a different syntax for the sake of it.
For me I know CSS quite well, but I would always have to look up some utility names that had no intuitive mapping. line-height is leading, flex-direction has no direct mapping, text-wrap is text but also font size is text, so if trying to do font-size:custom you had to do some weird syntax unlike the other custom value syntax lest it confuse text-[1rem] with a text-wrap rule. There are a lot of these weird decisions.
I love tailwind and will continue to use it, but it isn't perfect in this regard...
As a Tailwind Plus customer I found it very hard to use their templates. I'm not and was not a React developer, so maybe I wasn't the target customer, but as a solo builder the products were too opinionated and too specific to make want to reach for them. I felt like I had to "learn" the template.
They used different technologies for different templates and some even use a 3rd party CMS service that I had no interest in using. Their JavaScript components were non-native, so if I wanted to use any of the interactivity I had to write from scratch.
I think they had an opportunity to grow with AI and with the amount of code that is now being written.
I don't really agree that ML killed their business. I paid for their product early on before it was even done but they never really developed their product. I held out hope to the end of a year and ended up never using my purchase.
Compare that to shadcn, which had visible growing pains and yet reached rocketship fame. Shadcn is evidence that developers were hungry for yet another library, and it's also evidence that users were willing to tolerate rough code on the ride to maturity.
I don't believe Tailwind's component libraries deserved to win.
I agree. I also paid, but the components themselves were hard to use and required quite a bit of work to integrate into our product. For example, most components had a new (slightly different) button and parts of the components didn't have clear boundaries from what I remember.
Besides that, quite quickly there were many other free, and arguably better, alternatives available (like flowbite, preline, daisyui, etc) that I ended up using instead.
I remember that HN discussion, but it seemed to me from the outside that after that post they got Google as a sponsor and I just had assumed the community was rallying together for them a bit.
But I guess not.
Too bad, they seem like such good people. Not that they're dead or something but I don't think this was their ideal end state for Tailwind.
This was after they laid everyone off, so it was just Adam and Steve left. An they surpassed $2M a year in sponsorships a couple of months after that. They were not struggling for cash at all.
Right, and as a consequence lots of very important software (orders of magnitude more important than tailwind) does not have full-time employees. Good for them if they can manage it, but it's a gravy train.
Given how hard it is to build any form of financially sustainable model around an open source project I think we should actively celebrate anyone who manages to build a model that works, not dismiss it as a "gravy train".
I really just think they got lucky, I don't see anything to celebrate. It's like celebrating one of your friends winning the lottery - good for them, but it's not really an indication the system is working well at all.
What you said re moats might be true but can't actually be concluded from the Tailwind story. Traffic to the funnel dropped by more than half. That easily explains their problems, and says nothing about moats.
Tailwind had a solid funnel and a good product. Now they only have a good product. That's enough to kill a business.
If (or more likely when) Google loses money because LLMs are replacing search, that's a story about moats.
I was imagining their moat was having a monopoly on where you go to get documentation for the free product, and that's how they sell the for-profit product. If that monopoly is lost (people get the answers they need without going to the store), the moat is gone.
Noob question, I recall https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49491791 mentioned how the kernel source code and diffs were being crawled excessively. All else being equal, won't all the AI crawling agents mean traffic to docs should at least be stable(presuming changes happen all the time)?
And also the fact that agents are solving anubis level 5 challenges Tailwind would not be able to figure out how much traffic is from people vs bots. So that would mean the traffic should be up...
> The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework.
In lieu of everything else, I'd say that in circumstances like that it's time to adapt to the state of the world and be the jerks that advertise in CLI.
Wow, citing we need to figure out how to pay out bills and rejecting PR based on that is such a douche move. The fact is Tailwind core is an MIT-licensed open source project.
I used to gripe a lot about how Tailwind docs didn't play well with doc aggregators like devdocs.io, or even implement basic browser search engine integration when I was using it regularly. It now makes sense why they wanted to keep their docs scoped to their domain.
They had a very successful economic mechanism design for many years. It's one that thousands of businesses have relied on for decades.
Create great free product, create rich tutorials and docs, people look them up and you can sell variety of services from there.
Then ai companies stole the data, put a $20 pricetag on it and wiped out all those businesses essentially overnight.
If those "variety of services" are worth anything they should remain popular. There are countless ways to advertise them to people. I'm guessing many devs who were regularly browsing their documentation had ad blockers anyway.
Company creates a free core product, possibly open source, etc.
Company creates rich help docs and other useful resources.
Customers who use their core free product are frequently engaged with the company and it's helpful resources.
Said company offers additional services such as coursework, cloud services, analytics, etc.
Since customer knows and trusts the core free product, and knows the company is trustworthy, they may be inclined to purchase something.
Now, few coders use these learning resources (ai fetches it for them), they do not know anything about the company and they never engage with the company to see their additional offerings.
Therefore the company now has to advertise by spending heavily on Google/meta/etc. to a cold audience that doesn't even know who they are, because everyone using their system/sdk/library/etc. doesn't know anything about them because ai just steals all their resources and regurgitates it to the coder.
I think maybe they should have kept building Tailwinds CSS, release new versions, then charge a subscription to teams for their agents to access latest changes in their documents.
In other words, the documents for the latest versions are hidden behind a pay wall.
While everyone else migrates to something else because v4 eventually becomes legacy and the only way to get modern features is to use something open and available. Charging for access to new versions only gives you short-term runway at the expense of giving your entire user base a very good reason to leave.
If people can't get paid to pay their rent and eat to write and support code, how is it relevant what the consumers of the code freeriding get? If the AI machine requires ongoing fuel to improve, they can pay for it.
They don't get paid to write more of it, but maybe we had enough tailwind and invisible boot of market is giving those people a gentle kick to force them to do something else.
Never preferred tailwind. Much simpler to write plain css. It’s easier to create reusable components than what ppl think. CSS hardly has a steep learning curve. Problem with tailwind and many newer css frameworks I see posted even on HN, is they don’t seem to work on older devices, which is a shame. I guess ppl simply test on their latest phones and call it a day. Older ios itself have roughly 7% market share [1], that’s millions of devices that can’t access the web properly.
Why wouldn't Tailwind work on older devices? It's just a bunch of classes. If you're using a feature the browser doesn't support it's not going to work whether it's vanilla css or tailwindcss.
That said, I prefer vanilla CSS. Modern CSS is great.
Serious question: is there a need to reach for tailwind if you are building a new site? Won't using vanilla CSS while taking advantage of the latest features be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining CSS), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?
In my experience, if you're going to aggressively componentize whatever you're building (i.e. a button isn't a css class on a simple `a` tag but a distinct component that exists in it's own file somewhere) there's huge advantages to having your styling be associated directly with your components, and Tailwind is a great option (among many) for that.
If you're building something where your unit of organization looks more like a "page" than super fine grained elements, Tailwind will just make things messy and a higher-level library or writing your own CSS would be a better approach.
I don't think this changes much with AI - right now most models are not terrific at maintaining a huge degree of context in larger projects, so I could absolutely see an agent implementing CSS that works well in isolation but breaks due to the cascade. Maybe that changes in the future, but right now if anything I think Tailwind is well suited to AI because it enforces a certain locality to the changes you're making (i.e. you can reasonably assume that a `text-red-500` class on an element isn't going to break things elsewhere and wll do what it says on the box).
It's common to want things that look like buttons that functionally link to a page.
This isn't really straightforward with the HTML `button` tag so `a` tags that appear like buttons are common. I'm not really proposing something out of the ordinary here, nearly every high level component library that has a built in "button" will support applying them to `a` tags and most likely have that as their primary example of a button.
Reading charitably, when writing that part of the comment they probably were thinking of links that look like buttons, for example the "Get started" link in Tailwind's home page.
Regardless of how that specific one looks like, I wouldn't like if it were replaced by a <button>.
Yeah, Tailwind is great as long as you have some way to reuse markup, like React. You don't have to care about class names and whether CSS defined somewhere else affects styles of a current component at all. That last point makes sense for LLMs as well: all the styles that affect the current file are automatically in context since styling is local. Admittedly, there are other ways to achieve this but the ergonomics of Tailwind are just good. Having nice defaults and good training data is an added bonus.
The lack of single-file components is one of several reasons I wouldn't reach for React prior to the LLM craze[0]. For personal projects, I love Svelte. You wouldn't need tailwind there for the reasons proposed given their support for it.
[0] Things have probably changed, but Svelte 5 was a litmus test for how recent the data cutoff was for an LLM model. Meanwhile React _especially_ has no reason to change how the framework is used by coders. Thus there's years of scraped tutorials and sites for how to throttle a function or what-have-you in React.
It found its place because working on CSS on any non-trivial scale with multiple engineers is painful. The best way to deal with CSS at scale is not to write CSS. And this comes from me who really likes CSS.
CSS is one of my favourite things to do and still is. However, most engineers don't really understand it because most engineers don't really bother learning anything, and as a result you typically end up with a mess.
If someone knows what they are doing and is allowed to make a decent UI library, you can have very clean, efficient styling without libs.
Because what makes it useful , like media queries, can't be put in style attributes. Frankly this whole discussion is just as silly as claiming flex has nothing over table layout.
Then again one should aim to not even need media queries and make things responsive intrinsically, breakpoint-free, continuously. A design where things jump at hard coded viewport widths is not actually a great design.
>inb4 my 1:1 naive mapping of DB to screen works for me
>inb4 the web should be reserved for text documents and hyperlinks and user styles rule and running anything close to applications on the web was a mistake
People like to feel superior to others, so dunking on people using a popular technology tickles some pleasure centers. Considering another viewpoint gets in the way of that, so other viewpoints are ignored.
It's inline CSS, but with all the limitations of inline styles removed. There is a lot of stuff that can't be done with inline styles, like media queries.
It is used because UI component frameworks make vanilla CSS an awkward an unnecessary tool (the Cascading part). CSS makes sense as designed for styling a document, but not so much for styling atomic components. If we were designing the web and CSS from scratch around the React model, CSS would not be made to cascade, because that is totally unnecessary and usually leads to more issues than it solves. Apart from theme variables, in a component system there's no reason to have global CSS anywhere; you'd just style each component in isolation. So when in the React model you typically want no cascades at all, the library that is made for that gets popular.
CSS modules are also a solution to the above, but, once you get rid of cascading, and you have one stylesheet per component, it is again unnecessary to have the one stylesheet in a different file from the one component. There's no benefit to splitting a component and its styles into two files; it just makes it more annoying to edit. So we move the styles essentially inline, with either Tailwind or CSS-in-JS.
Thanks for this great explanation of your viewpoint. As an occasional frontend dev who really got into Tailwind, it was always hard for me to explain why I'm so much more productive in Tailwind than in writing CSS. This makes a lot of sense.
LLMs seem to work well with tailwind which I assume is because there was a lot of tailwind in the training data. As a human I never found tailwind to be particularly easy to work with anyway (mostly because I can't be bothered to learn another CSS framework) so I was constantly checking the docs when manually writing code. But I do like the rigidity it forces, which is probably a good thing for AI coding as well.
I feel it's better for LLMs. For each class name, the LLM doesn't have to go out and consume CSS files and read all the cascading rules and determine what other classes elsewhere might have an effect. It has everything it needs to determine the styling and layout right in its immediate context
I’m not sure what to tell you. With only a few exceptions, the shorthand follows a very predictable pattern if you already know the property names. IDE completions help too.
It's my primary role. I started using jsxstyle a dozen years ago alongside React and really liked the ability to style my components in situ without breaking browser architecture assumptions.
I recently had to help out on a vibe coded project that inherited Tailwind (I think from Figma). It was a short assignment so I didn't dig that deep, but I don't understand the value prop of Tailwind. There was no obvious improvement over what I've been used to; in fact, it seemed a lot messier.
A lot of the time the choice comes down to abundance of resources and community support. So if we're comparing tools (e.g. jsxstyle vs tailwind) maybe Tailwind could actually win on those parameters (no actual idea, just guessing based on the number of stars jsxstyle has on Github), but if we're comparing vanilla to [any tool] then vanilla usually takes the cake.
If I was using React, I'd probably like this tool too. The best counter to "community supported" is "so conceptually simple and small that it doesn't need a community". But perhaps that's kind why I'm not big on React in general.
I’m a full time front end dev, and I’ve basically accepted at this point that some people are really into tailwind, and some people are not. I’m not, and for a while I strongly preferred working with other devs who were also not… but at this point, LLMs have completely erased that distinction.
What's "funny" is that newer/modern CSS is often very clunky to write in Tailwind, or unsupported entirely unless you build your own selectors, but AI doesn't understand those well or how broad their support is, so getting AI to write good/modern CSS outside of Tailwind is pretty difficult. I suppose someone could make a new library that is for AI tools that focuses on the latest and greatest in CSS, but there's no market for it any more because AI would just steal it and generate UIs with it.
Yeah this is my main beef with Tailwind. There are lots of modern CSS features that are really nice that you have to hack into Tailwind because they don’t really fit into a utility model.
(Any complex grid model for example. If you haven’t used grid template areas try them out! They are by far my favorite way to do complex responsive layouts)
Vanilla CSS can take advantage of features like that "cascading" part that Tailwind goes entirely against.
If you are styling a site, there's no competition at all. But if you are styling a single interaction-heavy page, it's a lot less work to put all the formatting inline instead of thinking about a descriptive structure and write your CSS around it.
Apparently a lot of people design entire sites one page at a time.
I started with a UI framework thinking I'd need it but over time I realized that I was using it exclusively for button theming and setting the default font. I was using vanilla CSS and vanilla JavaScript and after removing the framework my package sizes reflect that fact.
Tailwind is just conceptually bunch of css inline styles repackaged as classes for performance boost. It was always just shifting complexity around, but offered an immediate perception of productivity gain, because you could just make a quick edit here and there.
I used to use tailwind a lot, but AI has made it redundant largely. There's zero reason to add any library into your stack unless it has significant advantages, tailwinds advantage was largely a developer convenience, and that's not really needed anymore. You can now maintain a design system in CSS really easily and ensure your UI conforms to it using AI tools in a way that seems way more powerful than before.
Believe me, I try all the time. But HTML and CSS are not made for the modern web.
Styling radio buttons, working date inputs, forms that POST automatically, typeahead and server-side validation (eg username already taken.)
You spend all your time reinventing the wheel and then it's buggy and looks like a dog. To say nothing of the inevitable poly fills and Cross-Browser issues.
I have not run into cross-browser differences in a long time. That is differences, that actually mattered and for which I would have had to build any workaround. I have built several websites recently, using vanilla HTML and CSS and solved everything using server-side rendering.
What problems specifically do you see with server-side rendering?
From a security perspective I greatly prefer a client-server approach: you have an unsafe frontend where you care about ergonomy and aesthetics, and a backend which provides an API which handles the security.
Two different worlds and often two different kinds of developpers
I think we actually don't disagree there, but we have a different understanding of the term "server-side". Anything related to security must happen on the server since safety measures in scripts running client-side can be defeated.
SSR (Server Side Rendering) provides the browser with a page that is created on the server (and possibly enhanced/hydrated on the client).
Having a separate backed and frontend allows for separation of duties: the client is responsible for the user-facing content and the backend deals exclusively with data flows. This allows to have several independent clients, machine to machine connections etc.
Whatever arrives to the server is untrusted, and the API (or other interfaces) only verify raw data (a JSON for instance) and there are excellent (backend) frameworks for that.
Mixing the visual content with the data is possible (Django does that for instance) but from a security perspective less efficient (again - separation of duties). It also requires to possible double the work to have an independent API.
In other words, if you separate the two you do not care about security on the front at all, and the one who builds the back can focus on their expertise.
This is a good discussion: do LLMs change the calculus for DRY?
A major point of components is having a single place where you can change design and behavior across your entire codebase. With LLMs you can with very good accuracy tell them to change the look of "all buttons that are confirmation buttons in modals but not in the login modal". Doesn't matter if there are 10 such buttons or 1000, it'll take a few seconds for them to accomplish it.
I'm slowly forming the opinion that nowadays having copy-and-pasted "components", with their whole HTML just repeated over and over, is now a much less worrying thing in a codebase. Even a bloated CSS can be quickly fixed by a LLM.
And like you said: you eliminate the build phase entirely and frontend development ergonomics goes back to how it was in the early 2000s.
So you enjoy reviewing your entire code base and relying on an extremely detailed regression suite just to make simple changes? I don't think AI changes good engineering at all, it just changes who or what is doing it.
It definitely changes some aspects of good engineering.
I'm not a huge AI person but it's obvious a host of great tools we've built to deal with our challenges would not have been significant if we had LLMs.
A very crude example: to translate code into a different language someone would need to write a tokenizer, a parser, an AST and finally a translator. All significant engineering challenges, taking days to finish. Nowadays you can tell an LLM to do that in minutes.
Staying on topic: we could easily argue that CSS wouldn't have existed if LLMs existed and could create table layouts from pasted images in a chat window.
I disagree about your last statement. That only covers the initial creation/generation phase. It ignores the engineering aspect of maintaining that design through the entire lifecycle of the product. How do you evolve that table design?
Sure an LLM can update every table in your project every time you make a change, just as a human could. It also can make mistakes and burn significantly more tokens doing so. Or, it could update one component with a one line change and be done. Easy to verify, less change for mistakes.
Engineering is a discipline and does not change dramatically with the advent of outsourcing it to agents.
> to translate code into a different language someone would need to write a tokenizer, a parser, an AST and finally a translator. All significant engineering challenges, taking days to finish. Nowadays you can tell an LLM to do that in minutes.
Do people do that on a regular basis? The most recurring case of building the above is when someone wants to include a language into a project and they usually don't bother with a translator. The second case is when transpilling (ex. LESS to CSS) and that's more akin to macro and other preprocessing tricks than a full blown translation.
> we could easily argue that CSS wouldn't have existed if LLMs existed and could create table layouts from pasted images in a chat window.
All current UI and Document conceptual models include styles (either as direct properties or separate models) and some does include named styles. The novel aspect of CSS is the Cascading concept, not the styling part. And cascading is obvious when we consider that there was supposed to be user stylesheets for documents. I read epub and user stylesheets (created from UI) is crucial.
Nowadays though, that old way is working very well, because of all the things that were added to HTML and CSS, making things, which used to be annoying or difficult mostly easy.
LLMs change the calculus on DRY in some cases. I would say it's still very much a no-no on the frontend side of things. Code repetition is directly correlated with bad loading performance. When you're optimising for people on slow mobile connections, your HTML/JS/CSS being 500KB instead of 1.5MB matters a lot.
Components as in React, Vue, etc requires a complete overhaul in frontend rendering, many dependencies, changes in deployment and even have an impact in organizational structure.
If one wants to do server side rendering with HTML templates like the old days there is no real “components” way of doing it (although declarative Shadow DOM is coming along). Partials are not the same thing.
In that scenario some repetition can give you the benefit of keeping a clean stack with no client side rendering.
Have you tried Astro? It lets you do exactly that: server-side rendering with HTML templates in component form, with css scoped to the component. No shadow dom needed, no JS frameworks either.
Astro is still fundamentally different, it's not server-side rendered in the sense of dynamic pages. I can't, in a language agnostic way, use Astro to receive a request, get data from the database and render an HTML representation of this data. This won't work in a Go, Rust, or whatever server. Astro at a minimum requires its own compiler to build the static assets, a server to serve them, and a custom API to answer the calls so it can build the dynamic part of pages.
Writing CSS in a way that will scale up with the size of your project and team is just as hard as it's ever been, you still have to come up with a convention for doing that, including taking into account what newer features bring to the table. Having to manually edit it was never the pain point.
Personally I still find it really helpful to have a proven framework to rely on so that I can be confident I'll have a reasonably consistent looking UI across a range of browsers, browser versions, screen sizes, and OS even versions.
Bootstrap was/is popular for the same reason. One framework and your site looks decent on almost any device. The downside is a bit like LLM work in that it all ends up looking like a Bootstrap site unless you’re a good designer.
CSS is really good these days. Scope rules and the new selectors available mean you actually have to work hard to mess things up like you did in previous eras
is there a need to reach for compiled languages if you are building a new program? Won't using vanilla assembly while taking advantage of the latest instructions be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining assembly), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?
As someone that hates Tailwind, I think there is actually a use case here. If you are fluent in CSS reaching for Tailwind is probably a mistake. But for better or for worse there are lots of developers who can write HTML and JavaScript (or more likely React) who will not, and do not want to, learn CSS, for them things like Tailwind is a godsent.
I do think Tailwind is overused, but it obviously has some legitimate use case.
Only if you are using a framework like React, where you create generic Button and other components.
Try using Tailwind with server-side rendered frameworks like Rails or vanilla HTML, and you will find yourself repeating the same stuff over and over again. Basically anytime you want e.g. a <button>, you have to repeat all the inline css for it. (There are plugins for Rails that adds "components", but I found it very clunky)
Not really. Every single button that gets rendered has thirty class names attached to it instead of one. It really bloats markup with duplicated classes.
I can't be the only one who has no idea what this means. Do you mean high-abstraction classes that are bound to the DOM arbitrarily, and are difficult to change later? We've had 25+ years to see how that doesn't scale.
Do you mean Tailwind-style functional CSS written by hand? What would be the point of that?
Without tailwind LLMs tend to use inline random colors, random sizes and radiuses. Project becomes an unmaintainable design soup really fast. Even with tailwind first priority is to define dark/light theme with semantic colors. After it's a smooth sail (sort of, routing, forms, state ownership and persistent url state are still an alien concept for clankers).
A few of my teams use tailwind. As someone who used css directly for years, this just means I have to waste time looking up the tailwind equivalent of things I know (if I’m not vibecoding). Strongly dislike it for that. But css management is really bad without it too. If I knew all the tailwindisms, it would probably be a clear winner.
If it's the case that there's almost never the need to reach for it, and I do find myself in that camp, then a harder question is begged, why is it so popular?
I think there's a lot of technologies that are in the category of categoric mistakes to use, but popular enough and inert enough that they don't get dropped.
There might be lots of different explanations depending on the technology, a lot have a reason the moment they are released.
Many third party tech becomes de facto standard at some era, then those features get incorporated into more mainstream tooling like browser css, and at that point the third party tooling exists only because of inertia and adds little value, but increasing supply chain and complexity risk.
Another example on this category is Axios which was essentially a cleaner DX for XMLHTTPRequests in client side javascript before Fetch, and later a polyfill for it. Nowadays it's a blunder to include it, but it ended up in stackoverflow answers and training sets, so it's "safe" to include. Developers that are on the bleeding edge drop it, but those that are catching up and reading tutorials or classes from the previous era, or using llms, use the previous era cutting edge technique, because they aren't evaluating all the parameters of a choice, they are just going with whatever someone else is using, which causes a coalescing around certain central technologies like React, Kafka, Redis.
Regarding Redis, my understanding is that it was popular during one era where databases were used to store state because we didn't know any better and people were moving fast and breaking things, so it was developed as a sort of hack to move things from a database into memory. But nowadays people just use it wherever (because it really is the most blank microservice you can think of, you can slap it anywhere), and people implement it off the bat.
There's lots of more specific reasons why bad third party deps persist. In python there's a library called python-dotenv, which is a categorical mistake to include, but people do it because they come from Node where it is a standard practice. But there's the standard nuance that in Node, it is a built in, but in python it is a third party dependency from a random dev (no offense to the dep dev, only to the users of the dep). It literally is replaceable by calling Open(), write(), and close(), but there it is with a lot of downloads waiting for the day it is targetted and hacked to capture millions of .env files. Personally to me it would be strike 1 of 2 if someone imports it, but there you go.
Yes, there's no reason to import tailwind, it adds nothing, the idea of:
red-color { color: red}
big-text { font-size: 14px}
<p class="red-color big-text"></p>
Is as laughably low quality, the application of a technique in form but not substance, similar to Getters and setters in Java, effectively making every property of a class public, but formally implementing the private keyword and access through functions. 100% a categoric mistake to implement.
I've written elsewhere of a phenomenon where devs avoid lerning a base technology, and rather end up learning a tech on a higher abstraction that ends up being a 1-for-1 of the lower tech, but it gave them the hope that they could avoid doing that learning, and they only drop into that realization by piecemeal ala "we did it not because it was easy, but because we thought it would be easy", and the only cost is that they learned the non-portable version of that technology and now they are vendor-locked professionally into that technology so they will spread it to the next repo, company, job posting and so on.
There's analogues in biology of inert viruses or parasites that don't materially cause damages, but their lifecycle depends on the host. Although to some extent, by competing for resources they always cause SOME damage, but it is important to notice that not all viruses or damages are highly damaging, that's a rare situation of very extreme pathogens, it isn't very beneficial to kill or damage your host. In fact many may be commensal, but there is a tendency to harm.
In conclusion, I think tailwind and such pre-ai slop-deps are more popular because they are inert viral parasites rather than because they provide value.
I tend to agree. Software development history is a long saga of things that are bad and still popular. Think of how popular J2EE, XML, and SOAP were at some point, and they're just miserable to use or maintain.
What's the insult? Tailwind is specifically for people who don't like writing CSS because it avoids various ways CSS works and comes with predefined styles.
I quite like Tailwind. I've had great experiences with it, especially on projects where the skill level of contributors was highly variable.
That said, Tailwind is not as powerful as plain old CSS. It's a bit like training wheels for CSS—you gain some guardrails and prevent newbies from messing things up too badly, but you also give up the power modern CSS affords you.
E.g. I invite you to look at some of Ahmed Shadeed's (https://ishadeed.com) layout tutorials, or whatever you find on the CSS-Tricks/Masters.dev homepage today. It's bonkers what you can do with modern CSS!
Tailwind gives you access some of what's possible with CSS today, and they keep adding support for new features, but it's impossible to express everything CSS is capable of using only utility classes. At some point, you need to write some actual real CSS code.
So personally, it's a tradeoff for me. If I really want the full power of CSS, I use plain old CSS. If I'm willing to trade power for the convenience of Tailwind's built-in design tokens and guardrails, then I pick Tailwind.
Both approaches are good and valid. The right choice is context dependent. With And with LLMs in the mix, it's not that hard to port a Tailwind codebase to plain CSS, or vice versa, so picking the wrong thing doesn't have as high a cost as it used to.
They are buying the people and the brand. Even Adam admitted that AI impacted dramatically their business. Selling UI templates in the current era is likely a dead end, even with a brand as strong as Tailwind.
I hope Adam and the team are well and good with this decision. Tailwind is regularly debated here for various reasons, using it helped me have a better understanding of CSS, HTML and design, and made me a better software engineer. Thanks for building and sharing Tailwind!
Using AI for design will always be derivative. For many cases that is good enough but for good product design, a human element will most likely always be necessary. Until the machine gains the ability to do just that
What are you talking about, there's still a market for handmade watches from switzerland. Literally nobody values AI generated UX. Except people with terrible taste. I see it and I email you and tell you how ugly it is.
The billion dollar AI companies saying desgin is dead are still hiring 100k retainer designers to do their landing page.
You simply have terrible taste if you think otherwise.
We use Claude for design of document templates a lot, and whilst we've built a fantastic pipeline for doing that well, asking Claude to then design anything outside of our guardrails isn't effective.
So I could imagine folks prioritising high quality design of all kinds choosing templates that would guide Claude.
I look at a large number of startup websites and it's very clear which ones are using Claude the excessive CAPS headings alone give it away. They look OK but the Claude aesthetic does leave me wondering whether this is a real business or one person using Claude to build a LP.
> Even Adam admitted that AI impacted dramatically their business.
Even the bossman admitted that AI fired his employees, not the boss.
I guess that’s why people talk so much about leadership this leadership that. I’m learning that leadership is when you are the captain of the ship and the ship goes down you man the lifeboat and mourn your sailors over what the Sea did to them.
In this specific case (Tailwind Labs) I don't understand this sentiment at all. It was a completely bootstrapped company! Its entire existence is due to the many years of difficult work by its founders.
What exact outcome would correctly align with "good leadership" in your view? It sounds like you think the CEO/cofounder should have "gone down with the ship" here -- how does that help anyone if it means the entire company would have failed?
It is common in our industry isn't it? There was another startup that fired all their employees then one month later got acquired by CloudFlare. Hard to not see this as fraud in the loose sense of the word.
Holy shit I had no idea there was a YouTube series, nor that he had a YT channel.
And a recent video is about designing a dashboard with Ai, which is exactly what I been needing from him specifically.
I remember reading the book 6 years ago and I loved how easy it was to understand.
It's also where I first learned about dense UI and was amazed at a before/after example of one. You can clearly see that uncommon common sense he has about UI/UX.
With how good LLMs are getting at coding, running a DevTools company with both an open source and commercial component is getting harder and harder to do. It's easier every day to just vibe code the commercial part if you have the open source part.
The ones that are successful provide other services that are still hard to do, like hosting at scale, or running the open source at scale.
Basically, running something at scale is what DevTools companies need to do to survive. Hosting the open source and the data is one type of running at scale, or helping companies run the open source in their own infrastructure is another way to help them run at scale.
People put things out there for free and the AI companies used that data to replace them. I do wonder if the end result of that is that people will stop putting things out there for free. Open-source development was already a pretty thankless job.
I instruct my agents to build UI exclusively with bootstrap 5, jQuery, and HTMX.
Every app is fast, responsive, progressive, small, and most importantly: it fits in my brain and I can maintain it. No build step or really any tooling at all.
Curious what jQuery brings for you these days? My favorite jQuery features got implemented in the vanilla DOM APIs (document.querySelector and fetch being the big one for me). Now I'm curious if I'm missing out.
jQuery is 30kB, there's not a lot of heaviness. In a world of React, Vue, htmx and what have you, 30kB is nothing.
If you like the syntax and functionality of jQuery, or if you're just use to it now, there's very little reason to no use it, and speed and size certainly isn't a reason. 15 years ago, maybe, but not in 2026.
Makes sense to me. Their motto was "Write less, do more", i.e. its conciseness was a major selling point, but that seems to have been forgotten now that its other selling points have been rendered obsolete.
I recall scripts ending up as little as one-third the size of vanilla JS, when rewritten using jQuery (where the website was otherwise using jQuery anyway).
I've been thinking the same about the future of frameworks. Many of the complexities in today's frameworks exist for "developer experience", given that's less and less relevant by the month, it will be interesting to see the tech stacks chosen going forward.
IMO it is literally not possible for a medium+ jQuery app to fit in a brain or be maintained easily (especially without TypeScript). That's why React et al were invented. It is smaller, faster, no build step for sure, but I would never reach for jQuery for any possibly ambitious app.
If you are using mostly agents and don't actually need to have it in your brain, then I'd probably go with strict TypeScript at the very least for verifiability purposes
(1) Shop Pay is one of the services that I’ve seen grow fastest in market share ever. Like in the last six months it seems like almost every independent online store sees my phone number and offers me a text to pay via shop.
(2) Tailwind is part of the CSSSlop ecosystem that includes of course the original Bootstrap, SASS, Emotion and many similar things that never really worked from an ecosystem perspective because learning the specifics on one CSSSlop framework never means you don’t have to completely understand CSS. CSSSlop just forces you to learn more things and face more cognitive overload.
Now that CSS includes most of what CSSSlop did, you can just use CSS and that’s a good thing. And if AI can answer questions about CSS and save you from trying to find answers in splogs or learning to navigate 50+ spec documents to find definitive answers, isn’t that a good thing?
Glad they have a patron now. I use it in my project (because scoped-css is not yet available in browsers and I do not want to deal much with CSS). LLMs write Tailwind easily, so that's good. And I do not have yet another place where cruft builds up (the CSS files) while they changes to them can silently mess up some UI I did not check.
So thanks Shopify for taking them under your wings.
X-mas wish: that the Servo project gets a proper patron (looking at you, Huawei and Samsung).
Glad to hear the team found a successful exit. Adam bought the tailwindlabs.com domain from me when they started out and he seemed genuinely cool. Hope they keep building tools so many people enjoy using.
I hope Adam (and other Tailwind team members) got handsomely paid as part of this acquisition.
Working on an open source project for 9 years and then getting a sizable bonus in an acquisition that keeps the open source project alive seems like a decent scenario to me.
(I don't think there are any investors involved here.)
Really happy for Adam and the rest of the crew - they made a great product for a prior era, and hopefully this is a soft landing for them given their revenue stream dried up.
Tailwind at this point is a coding language and a brand with no direct product. It's a great acquisition when you want mind share and developer love, and are OK with there being no revenue involved. Shopify is a solid match for that.
As a lifetime access purchaser of Tailwind UI and a user of their recent oatmeal template, the news that they’re winding down tailwindui hurts a little.
Glad they got their exit, Adam deserves it, but I don’t know why they can’t see the value in preset UI templates. AI sucks at building UI, it sucks a little less when it’s got codebase references to build upon and reference.
I guess they aim to integrate tailwind into their shopify design code. AI understands most of tailwind css and it can generate good design using tailwind. this is a good step
The timing is interesting. Stylex (Metas CSS in JS library) is taking off right now because it seems a better fit for AI driven coding in the long run.
This is hardly surprising after the recent string of venture-backed developer tooling acquisitions: Bun -> Anthropic, VoidZero (vite) -> Cloudflare, Astral (uv, ruff) -> OpenAI
The only thing that remains to be seen is how these affect those tools going forward (and who's next)
I was a hardcore tailwind user and my projects still use it. That said, in the last 6 months, I haven't touched it. I just let my agents style things as they want. ... and they just use plain CSS.
I really appreciated tailwind, but it solved problems that fewer people face these days.
I think the bigger issue is that AI is attacking the business model, not necessarily the product.
Tailwind can still be massively popular, but if an AI agent can look at the docs/examples and generate 80% of what you'd otherwise pay for, that popularity doesn't translate into customers anymore.
Feels like we'll see this happen to a lot of "we already figured this out for you" developer products.
> Feels like we'll see this happen to a lot of "we already figured this out for you" developer products.
It has for me at least.
I had a solo business for 10 years selling tech video courses (learning Flask, Docker, etc.). It was enough to pay the bills, but for the last few years it has nose dived. For 2026 YTD it has generated $20 / month in revenue but it costs almost triple that to host the courses so I've been losing hundreds of dollars a year, for years. All while watching LLMs cannibalize ~600 free in-depth blog posts and YouTube videos only to re-sell that information to anyone willing to pay.
It completely flipped my life upside down to where for 20 years I was able to sustain myself doing contract work + courses to having to take full time work. All of this started when AI became popular.
It's all related to a massive loss of traffic to my site which was the entry point to both contract work and the courses. Both sides of the business have been crushed.
It's about time! Adam has been stressed about revenue and long term viability of a business to support a popular CSS /UI library framework like Tailwind. Shopify was an early customer too.
PS: I like how Adam dissing on the famous Claude Speak "load bearing" with a strike-through!. Subtle, but EVERY PUN intended, hah!
I thought Laravel would've been the one to scoop them up, but I'm glad they landed with Shopify. Adam's a solid dude and what him and his team have done to commoditize web design is to be lauded.
To think it started as a side project and grew to the scale it did. Very impressive work.
Worth noting, Tailwind was canadian, and Shopify is also canadian. I like that this was the outcome. The labs business was obviously no longer needed in this era of AI, and I'm glad Tailwind will continue to get proper backing from Shopify to evolve further.
I bought Tailwind UI when it first launched and then ended up using it for a product that had a lot of success several years later and would consult the included components anytime I was going to build something in my app but now with AI I haven't done that in the last couple years at all because the AI just handles it... It's crazy to think how much AI changed this sort of business model
As someone who built their entire platform on Tailwind and has been running gpt-6-astra for the last 5 days straight working on the migration away from it because it leaves an irrecoverable pile of slop when your project becomes large enough... Heed my warning.
It's not that Tailwind itself is bad. It's good. But agents are notorious for re-inventing the wheel without hard constraints that prevent them from doing it - and when I say hard constraints, I don't just mean an AGENTS.md file or a skill they can ignore. As such, I found that design consistency was near impossible and a constant firefight. It worked at first, but when my project got sufficiently large, it became worse and worse.
I initially tried combatting this with a spaghetti-soup of linter rules, but it wasn't very effective to maintain. So I'm biting the bullet and moving on to greener pastures.
I'm probably going to catch heat for this, because people (I did too, I won't lie) have a visceral reaction to the Javascript for styling, but... StyleX.
It came on my radar a few months ago when I first started noticing this rot problem. Then recently I saw that it was getting quite hyped and people have been singing its praise for solving this exact problem. So I'm giving it a shot.
Can't say for certain whether it will work out well or not yet, but based on the feedback I've been seeing from others, I'm hopeful.
For us we went with CSS modules, it just made more sense for us to stay closer to web fundamentals since our styles are used across different tech stacks. From my experience in the last year, AI is quite good at sticking to your css ground rules and gleaning css patterns from other files all while being underpinned by design tokens (can have linters raise raw values to question also). Gotta use whatever works best for the job!
I have ~4-5 completely non technical friends who've used LLMs to generate their personal websites, complete with appointment scheduling and payment links. We can't be more than a year out for full store generation with 1 click upload to hosting providers.
I don't think Shopify needs to exist anymore sadly.
When I was at Shopify we used Tailwind along with our internal component library to great effect. Tailwind is a great css framework, but their business model is doomed by AI. Tobi acquihiring them for making a great product is a good result.
You're talking about Polaris? I really don't see how they're compatible or how Tailwind is useful to those liquid templates. The only thing that makes sense to me is headless Shopify, maybe that's the direction Shopify is headed in? But they've been struggling to get any traction there it seems to me.
I'm a very happy tailwind plus customer, I paid for their expertise on crafting good templates and best practices. Bit sad that they aren't going to add more but it was inevitable with AI cutting their lunch.
Happy for Tailwind as this was possible the best outcomes possible for them at this stage. It is clear that most of the frameworks for software are going to struggle significantly because of AI. Especially CSS frameworks. No one cared about writing CSS code by hand before AI and now with AI, no one needs to care about frameworks as well. AI writes it for you so I don't care whether its tailwind or plain css.
I had to create special checker/linter to analyze my code base ( and asked AI to loop it through it as some kind of test ), so as to avoid AI (mis)using tailwind class here and there. that was 2025, AI and linter both improved quite a lot since.
Tailwind has always sucked, and I hope this is the beginning of the end for this stupid library. Web designers universally agreed that utility class names are a bad design choice, and then Adam W, who probably never bothered to understand CSS, made quite possibly the most over engineered CSS wrapper of all time. Bad. For. Everyone. Use. CSS. Modules.
Shopify should deal with their hijacked accounts first. A high percentage of sponsored Google search sponsored results lead to scams on hijacked sites.
Probably the most damaging idea ever exiated in frontend dev. I'm glad that AI now abstracts all that crappy tailwind code away so I can stop giving a shit.
reading that shopify supports users designing their own custom shopfronts really helped put the acquisition into context. makes a lot of sense to bet on tailwind for that.
If you look at the monitor, the Shopify logo fits between the thumb and index finger, I suppose that's the only small thing about Shopify, lol.
All joking aside, I don't think most of us consider Shopify as a small company. I personally hope that Tailwind stays around after this acquisition. I was there when Shopify bought Remix and that project is as good as dead in the water now.
> On the commercial side, we'll no longer be trying to grow the business around Tailwind. All existing customers will of course maintain their access to products like Tailwind Plus and ui.sh, but we're closing sign ups for new customers to focus on Tailwind CSS at Shopify.
> All existing customers will of course maintain their access to products like Tailwind Plus and ui.sh, but we're closing sign ups for new customers to focus on Tailwind CSS at Shopify.
You've got to wonder how long that model can continue if no new customers are allowed in.
They've even removed the Plus splash page so clicking Plus on the homepage or going to /plus takes you to a login page with no detail about what it was.
Ugh. I remember how much Tailwind Labs has struggled for funding and it sucks to see Shopify get them. It also sucks to see they're discontinuing their paid products permanently, effective immediately -- they're not making them free, they're taking them away. You simply can't get them now. I understand why this had to happen but it is sad to see.
Usually when stuff like this happens, it means that Tailwind's developers are moving to work on Shopify instead, which means Tailwind CSS itself goes into maintenance mode. That's what usually happens when a dependency is picked up by a company with a huge, "more interesting" product -- the dependency starts to depend on the more interesting product for attention, and stops receiving attention on its own merits. It grows only to support the more interesting product.
Furthermore, I already have specific experience with Tailwind Labs neglecting their other libraries that aren't Tailwind CSS itself, probably because they were only meant to support their paid products (which now will no longer exist! so maybe those other libraries will just stop getting updates altogether). Headless UI was something I wanted to rely on heavily, but it's not built to be flexible enough and basic issues from 2021 or earlier haven't been resolved or seemingly even reviewed.
Now that they have Shopify, I'll be surprised if Tailwind CSS continues to receive any more attention than Headless UI did all those years ago. This acquisition puts Tailwind CSS in exactly that position.
tailwindcss is an anti-pattern that breaks fundamental rule of software engeneering - separation of concerns. just learn how to use CSS - it will benefit you in the long run. i suspect they will be "paywalling" more and more features in the future.
HTML and CSS are not a separation of concerns in anything I've ever built. They're both representing the layout/design. I don't want them separate.
You end up having to keep them synchronized anyway, messing with your HTML is frequently gonna break your CSS. Tailwind is infinitely more pleasant to write than a separate CSS file that has to be kept in sync with the HTML.
It makes me happy to see they'll continue to exist in an organization that benefits from their success. I really enjoy Tailwind and I feel terrible for the people in the company who watched their revenue plummet like that with the advent of AI
Does tailwind even make sense in the age of agentic engineering?
Tailwind was created to mitigate HUMAN problems, and HUMAN risks. Are these same problems experienced by an agentic workflow? I'm not so sure. The calculus is different.
Does this mean tailwind plus is basically deprecated, and wont get any new stuff at all? That really sucks for anyone who bought the life time license.
Edit: To clarify, I mean being assimilated by Shopify is awful. I understand that the Tailwind devs were neutered by AI skynet slop taking over before - that is also awful. That's actually two awful news we get here in one news entry.
Expected move and good to hear. Gives Tailwind some extra maintenance years. But like with all these sugardaddy takeovers, the next expected move is “Tailwind is now independent again“.
People saying design is dead or good UX doesn't matter anymore.
1. Are sloplords.
2. AI companies that sell the idea that AI can replace your designer, are still paying 100k retainers to designers for their landing pages lol.
3. People will probably replace backend engineering before they ever replace design, because they will want to seem more human.
4.Handmade watches, and handmade luxury clothing is one of the biggest markets on earth, almost as large as tech itself. I really don't think that urge for the handmade, made by someone with wonderful tastes is ever going to disappear.
Also, no great designer used tailwindcss. This is made by and for slop lords. Which is most of HN, you people have no taste.
Why would anyone need any kind of framework for CSS?! It's the inherent human need to control something, to package water and sell it as magical water.
I've never understood the whole idea. Bootstrap: the hard-to-remember, horrible shitshow forced on frontend devs. And people thought there couldn't possibly be anything lower than that. Then Tailwind arrived. Apparently, frontend joes are so below average in brain capacity that they need their shiny thing covered in stickers saying "modern" and "state of the art", otherwise they feel dirty, like they haven't taken a shower in a week.
It's like building a framework to simplify the SQL dialect. In reality, there's zero need for it, because SQL is so simple and easy to understand that you'd have to be a moron to use some kind of framework for it. The same applies to CSS. Tailwind is an abomination, a horrible mess, just like all the other pointless CSS 'frameworks'.
These aren't frameworks. They're just some semi-psycho control freak's projection of control over something that doesn't need controlling.
Let's just say it out loud: Tailwind is being rewarded for turning tons of frontend joes into complete idiots by telling them the tale that their shiny thing is the new standard, when all it ever was was an experiment in the gullibility of inherently moronic people.
> It's like building a framework to simplify the SQL dialect. In reality, there's zero need for it
Years of people deploying web apps and using (My-)SQL without prepared statements provide a counterexample to this. One can argue about ORMs, but stating SQL would need no abstraction layer around it seems questionable to me :/
These are the same anti-Tailwind arguments that have been circulating forever.
If you want to build a case against Tailwind that's actually compelling, you should start by understanding what it is first. Only then can you compare it to other frameworks and methodologies.
I thought the narrative by Lütke et. al. was that the clankers could do everything by themselves!
Turns out that clankers generate beige static websites that use 100% CPU, so some assistance is needed.
We now have proof that the above is true, since Lütke adheres to the principle that any non-clanker usage has to be justified. Let us assume he justified the purchase.
Here's some context on the impact AI had on the Tailwind Labs business model from January: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
> 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. [...]
> 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.
I made this point at the time but Tailwind Labs' business model shouldn't exist. It irks people because they wanna blame AI for it but they were coasting and should be happy it lasted this long.
Tailwind's business model existed due to a massive inefficiency in the frontend industry not being able to come to terms with CSS or native components. They surfed the wave of JS frontends becoming ever more complicated. If it wasn't AI and just a human awakening to that fact, realizing that the complexity of modern frontends and Tailwind are not an absolute necessity, they'd have lost business just the same. There are dozens of different ways of writing frontends that have nothing to do with Tailwind.
Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be.
I don't agree with "nor should it be" - the market decided it was clearly needed. And this isn't unique to Tailwind. For decades, companies in many ecosystems (like .NET, JS, etc) have made lots of money selling component libraries that save developers and companies a lot of time. And I even bought UI.sh in April, and it really was great until the models just natively got much better.
I happily paid for Tailwind UI because it was worth it. I paid for ui.sh and got plenty of my $130 (or whatever) value. The market spoke in a good way initially, and now it's sending a different message.
They've just got to do the next thing, which is find an AI-resistant steward of the project now.
"nor should it be" is connected to "being worth millions". It's not that it isn't worth money, but it's more of a lifestyle business than the sort of thing that will drive a tech company with employees, marketing, and conference budgets.
I think if you said "couldn't be a venture backed startup", I'd 100% agree with you. Can't support employees or a marketing budget is a much lower bar, and I think that's perfectly achievable by something like Tailwind (or I guess was prior to AI)
I’m a die hard engineer, yet when I see Apple, Microsoft, and Google marketing: it makes me realize the importance of marketing.
There are several graphing libraries that have been businesses for years. Like Highcharts. A frontend framework used by millions and millions certainly has some value to loads of people.
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" applies to running a business as well as trading. There is no certainty when you're dealing with the individual whims of millions of people.
Indeed. I saw their job ad just months before this with full remote 300K salary.
What does it being remote have to do with anything?
It changes the cost of living context of the salary. So, a lot.
I’m not sure what their valuation was but single digits millions sounds totally reasonable for a company you’re describing. Just to hire 10 engineers you’ll need to be in low millions
I don't want to diminish the work that any developers do, but a headcount of 10 seems high to me. (Unless some of those are simply "support engineers" who do nothing but support paying customers, but that would go up and down with revenue)
To hire 10 engineers you only need millions in yearly revenue. And millions in revenue does not imply that the business is worth millions. It very well, quite easily, could be worthless.
Millions is a very modest business these days
Just for reference, in the .NET ecosystem there are multiple vendors selling UI component libraries for sums ranging from lower three digits to upper three digits per dev, per year. This was generally considered good value (might no longer be great value post-AI)
As an engineering leader back in the day (2000-2015) I considered it terrific value to license Telerik and others. In fact, it looks like Progress has acquired a large catalog of the most common .NET dev tools over the past ten years.
Problem was tailwind had a very weak component library. I'd have been happy to pay for a more expansive set of components.
I think that “lots of money” needs to be put in perspective when thinking about software that’s used by developers. When you compare the size of the market for these kinds of tools compared to a truly massive market for something like an office suite, it looks pretty puny.
Developers are also very fickle and the one constant is change. Sometimes it seems like change for changes sake alone.
I’m not saying that any businesses easy just that it seems to me after seeing a lot of companies come and go, but this is one of the more difficult markets to capitalize on.
It’s hard to name a more pathological market than office suites. You have Microsoft which is lackadaisical about the subject, like maybe they think Office is a place to stuff with thoroughly unwanted AI features. The rest of the market is German zealots who spend all day with bash and emacs who lobby legislatures to subject public servants to off-brand office suites and then the public sector unions go on strike to get Microsoft Office back.
Bundling is one reason who can’t have nice things. Like in my opinion Excel is a lot worse than the others but if customers are thinking about a “suite” they are still going to buy Office to get Word and PowerPoint and can’t save money by switching to a different CSV wrangler or financial analysis tool.
Funny, my opinion is the opposite. Excel is a much better spreadsheet than Word is a word processor or than PowerPoint is a presentation tool.
Of course it’s got quirks and unfortunate relics of its long history, but I reach for it willingly, and I can’t say that about the rest of the Office suite.
Hey do you have any opinion on the current utility of ui.sh? I wanted to buy it but I'm a bit wary of it just not being useful and they don't have a preview of a single skill.
Wait, you’re thinking about buying “skills” instead of actual components that you can just use? This seems insane to me.
> I happily paid for Tailwind UI because it was worth it.
The business was worth something. But, as the earlier comment questions, was it worth millions? Or was that the free money, tech hype talking? Maybe in a more normal market it would have only been a simple mom and pop.
"The market" for Tailwind only existed due to ignorance and obfuscation fueled by hype for web dev jobs.
Completely artificial market built on propaganda and low interest rate money printing. Same as the rest of SaaS. Nothing about the tech industry since the '08 crash has been organic investment. Was 100% collusion between government and private interests to manipulate public opinion.
> They've just got to do the next thing, which is find an AI-resistant steward of the project now.
Good luck with that:
https://www.openui.com/blog/oui-1
Aside; all the leaked emails, chats, and going back further in time, telegrams, letters, travel logs on display in court yet the myth the economy is an organic free market this whole time persists
Such belief is nought but a quirk of biology that allowed humans to latch onto the idea Benevolent but Punitive Sky Wizard watches out for them; total cope. In Wealth of Nations Adam Smith called it the "invisible hand" and later came to realize he was wrong. He reconsidered and concluded the avarice of man will not be stopped by philosophy of national unity.
No, I didn't mean ai-resistant as far as "don't need coding agents" - I use agents to do all my coding now. I'm saying, AI-resistant in the sense that a company like Shopify isn't going anywhere even in the AI world. If anything, they will thrive with more AI-assisted shops coming online.
That gives the Tailwind folks a more steady stream of income.
this. leftpad as a service bullshit SaaS companies somehow raising millions was a temporary insanity driven by ZIRP and incestuous VC money currents. we see the same thing happening now with companies whose products are paper-thin vibecoded wrappers over someone else's models.
The market didn’t decide it was needed, the users just downloaded a bunch of free files and free docs. There isn't any indication there was ever a real market.
Using something free and paying for a product are entirely different things.
> Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be.
But what if people were already selling them, and tailwind showed up, did it better, and people went directly to them to buy what they were offering?
Why shouldn't that exist?
The folks over at Tailwind offered curated, hand-built components that were readily adapted and tuned to your own needs. They did an excellent job making it so you could pick and choose what you wanted, then theme all of it from your tailwind settings with ease. It was excellent.
Sure, similar things existed for less or at no cost. I was content to pay for this, though. It made my work meaningfully simpler at times. It paid for itself.
> Tailwind's business model existed due to a massive inefficiency in the frontend industry not being able to come to terms with CSS or native components.
I don't agree. The pain it addressed on my team was more so that very few people I worked with understood CSS, but tailwind was easy enough for them to work with (particularly in a React context). It was a useful tool in a context where a lot of the people didn't fully understand the tool. They could just pick and choose components and they'd slot into the app well enough. It addressed real pain there.
They surfed a wave for sure, but I think it was mostly that a non-trivial number of people working on the frontend don't understand HTML and CSS very well. That's not their fault at all.
> The folks over at Tailwind offered curated, hand-built components that were readily adapted and tuned to your own needs. They did an excellent job making it so you could pick and choose what you wanted, then theme all of it from your tailwind settings with ease. It was excellent.
They also offered an Open Source CSS framework with the explicit goal of making it easier for you to style your own components. There was always some tension between "make abstraction layer whose adoption depends on users finding it easier to make your own components with than vanilla CSS, which is not unusually hard" and "sell pre-made components". Particularly when there's an abundance of alternative FOSS components/libraries out there[1] in vanilla CSS or even full blown CMS templates for people not wedded to the idea that Tailwind makes things easy for them. Much easier to sell templates or even "premium components" when your USP is integrating them with a backend them rather than merely providing the layer of syntactic sugar supposed to make component styling easy...
They also happened to have the misfortune of designing it in a way which is particularly easy for AI which doesn't have to tradeoff time spent making design decisions and figuring out how to achieve those from the docs vs dollars spent buying components to minimally tweak.
[1]tbf, I always thought the Tailwind creators' designs were more tasteful than the average CSS mixin library even though I didn't think the same about the syntax...
Vanilla CSS (rule engine based on files) is unusually hard for what it provides. It is quite bad abstraction.
Aim of many styling solutions is to completely remove brittle CSS files .
> There was always some tension between "make abstraction layer whose adoption depends on users finding it easier to make your own components with than vanilla CSS, which is not unusually hard" and "sell pre-made components"
Do you have an example?
Humanity evolves.
We wouldn't need doctors if we had a box you could walk into that cured all ailments.
We won't need software engineers once you can crudely specify requirements and have a machine turn them into rigid requirements with a solid data model, flexibility to extend, infrastructure to run, and monitoring and recovery to maintain reliability.
A lot of things change when technology evolves.
I doubt AI will ever become omniscient
Hydrated sugars certainly think they themselves did.
if you mean this in a reductionist way for humans, i dont think most of us think we’re omniscient
my point more broadly is that if you have an incomplete spec, any entity implementing it either needs to be omniscient or make assumptions about the intended behaviour of the system. if constraints or invariants aren't part of the spec it might be difficult or outright impossible to make the right assumptions.
so while LLMs might be writing all of the code in the future, someone will still need to create the spec + verify it. and often the spec is not really possible to know until implementation begins...
ive been using astra on a project that isn't even that complex in the grand scheme of things, and it still fails to make the right assumptions. of course i could just give it a full complete spec right?! except i didn't know what the right assumptions were either until implementation anyways. so to some extent they were unknowable to me, and thus unknowable to the llm no matter how powerful.
I do think in the future humans will probably write very little code themselves, but the work will be all about specification + verification and that means system design, which is the stuff I care about anyways. maybe I won't develop rsi when I get older :)
lol what a load of nonsense.
im not swe by trade, in fact I would love it if what you said was true because I could consolidate various kinds of businesses into one holistic infrastructure and demolish all the competitors.
Aint happening tho!
Tailwind’s business model was entirely legitimate, pre-AI. Humans can only hold so many ideas in their heads, and panes in their IDEs. Shorthand class names let them stay in their render hierarchy while drawing from a logical and consistent design library, without going to another file for styling… or (the hardest thing in CS) choosing good semantic class names!
Of course, enterprises eventually hit a wall in the covered functionality, need customizations and library management, and an official consulting team is there to help - no different than any open source model throughout history.
That they were more vulnerable than most to agentic coding doesn’t make it a bad idea.
It sounds like your criticism is about their product, not about their business model.
The business model of having a popular product with great documentation, which leads free users to additional paid services, seems like a very valid business model.
Even the criticism you have for their product is along the lines of "the product only worked because they identified a problem in the market; If someone else identified it, this product wouldn't even be needed!". Which is, well, true, but also true for almost any other successful product.
Most of my clients over the years have been very successful businesses in industries and niches that I never imagined could support a multi-million dollar enterprise. A lot of the time I was surprised that the entire business model was even a thing.
My point is that just because you find the success of Tailwind Labs surprising does not mean that it "shouldn't" be a multi-million dollar business. Neither you nor I get to decide that.
> Tailwind's business model existed due to a massive inefficiency
Yeah, that's why most businesses form.
This is such a poor comment. It starts talking about the business model, but it’s just a “Tailwind shouldn’t exist at all” argument. Clearly it’s a useful tool if it’s used by so many people and companies.
>Clearly it’s a useful tool if it’s used by so many people and companies.
Yeah but its not. Hence the huge layoffs. If they don’t want to find another software development job maybe they could work at a New Jersey gas station. New Jersey protects their gas station attendants.
Tailwind is free. The company’s paid offerings are clearly not useful enough in the world of AI. That’s the crux.
But Tailwind is still being used? It's just being used by AI now.
The paid product.
Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be.
Arguably many websites and apps desperately need a good component library because it's very clear the UI sucks without one. Lots of people spending a few thousand dollars on their UX is not unreasonable at all, so the best-in-class library (whether that's Tailwind is a separate point) should be able to make a lot of money.
You could easily level the same argument at any library: "This thing is simple so it shouldn't be worth millions." That's just the wrong way to look at how selling works. If you make something that solves a lot of people's pain point (Tailwind) you're going to make a lot of money until someone else sells something that makes it even easier (AI). That is a tale as old as time, and the fundamental basis of how startups disrupt incumbents in an industry.
The pain point tailwind supposedly solves is that people who are supposed to be front end web developers don’t understand CSS.
That’s like saying a carpenter doesn’t understand woodworking because they sometimes buy pre milled lumber. Or that landscaper a doesn’t understand mowing because they don’t trim each blade of grass individually.
I don't agree with the other commenter. The point you make is a fair one.
However, I think the real information in your comment is that there are people making websites and web apps who aren't frontend developers. They're likely fullstack who are much more backend focused, and who do the frontend more out of necessesity than enjoyment. Tailwind enables those people who aren't experts in frontend to make things for the web without the necessary expertise to write CSS themselves.
That's why it's valuable - the point of Tailwind is that it solve the pain point (not knowing CSS) with money instead of time. But now people can solve it with AI instead.
This is a poor analogy, but maybe we should consider CSS as a lower level language than Tailwind, similar to JVM bytecode to Java. There are plenty of people who will tell you that a real Java developer understands the bytecode, but that doesn't stop people writing code in Java without knowing the lower level.
> Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be.
Depends what you mean. I think it’s totally reasonable for a small team with a great reputation to offer a well-made component library and make millions of dollars from it. But I would never expect that to be a reliable source of recurring income, and certainly not enough to support a team of well-paid engineers, designers, marketers, etc. indefinitely.
To be honest, I wonder if AI is even the right thing to blame here, or just a timing coincidence. Is it not the case that they simply sold their UI library to roughly everyone who was in the market for a high-cost component library?
I don’t agree. Building a date picker used to be next to impossible. Overnight it was trivial. That’s some serious disruption.
That was certainly not overnight. The biggest disruption they personally did was offering a better alternative to Bootstrap. More customization, JIT compilation that allowed for custom class interpretation without any added CSS, proper flex consideration, removing unused library classes in the production compilation step, etc.
Beyond this, you should really be thanking things like Shadcn for the “date picker disruption”. It is a component library which arguably could’ve existed without Tailwind ever existing.
why shadcn and not bootstrap? shadcn is like a cool weird approach to a ui kit but bootstrap got us a date picker iirc.
Nonsense. There have been perfectly good free date picker widgets available for every era of web development, going back to clunky server-rendered html templates.
Seriously. I always wonder who makes these comments, then I remember I'm old and there are people who don't remember every era of the web. Although, it's still incredibly weird to essentially claim that Tailwind solved date pickers.
You have to remember the biggest appeal of tailwind is that it throws away the entire cascade of css. The people that reach for it are choosing it because it offers less functionality, and is therefore simpler to reason about. I hesitate to say they don't understand css, I'm sure some of them do, but in my experience the devs that reach for it are the same who deride css and make statements such as "I have better things to do than learn css"
I think there's plenty of developers that are perfectly competent with CSS who still reach for Tailwind.
You're right that Tailwind throws away the cascade, or at least enables developers not to have to think about it (under the hood, Tailwind 4 uses pretty modern cascading features like layers), but people aren't reaching it because of a lack of understanding, they're reaching for it because as front-ends get increasingly componentized, the cascade becomes less and less of a benefit and more of an obstacle to be worked around, and something that gets that obstacle out of the way becomes more attractive.
I'm quite versed in CSS but tailwind has convenient abstractions on top. It's like "why you need C if you have assembler". I don't remember when I wrote raw CSS last time. Even global styles I tend to express via @apply.
A bunch of people have already said this but I also have known CSS very well (being using it since its release) and even enjoyed it. Butt the moment I saw someone using Tailwind I thought, "I want that!" The idea that Tailwind is for, or rather only for, people who don't know CSS is very misguided. That said, I'm back to using vanilla CSS.
Don't forget that, in my opinion very positive way, it also normalized the concept of "uniform measurements". Every instance of `rounded-md` is the same on a site.
True. I'm grateful for that but typically reach for them via openprops or home built variables for most of my projects these days
IE, it has a built-in design system!
Indeed, I don't know what to make of such a bizarrely nonsensical assertion. Age and lack of experience doesn't really explain it, because all the poster needed to have done was make the simplest sort of web search. It's so wrong, it's... not even wrong.
Your analysis is fundamentally flawed because you’re conflating the Tailwind’s business model, which is based on the actual realities of the market, and your ideal for how frontends should be developed.
There are millions of Single Page, and other “complex” web apps. You not liking it does not invalidate anything.
I think many of the purchases of Tailwind UI were basically donations with extra steps. Many, myself included, wanted to support their work. The prebuilt components were nice, but you can find open source components and/or commercial ones on places like ThemeForest for about $20.
>Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be.
Neither creating a VSCode wrapper and putting an LLM with tools and valued billion dollars (cursor). But thats the demand and supply.. As long as AI was not there Tailwind would have continued it success journey - until a new tiny(at least initially)/shiny/minimal framework comes along
> I made this point at the time but Tailwind Labs' business model shouldn't exist.
It doesn't anymore. There are tens of thousands of businesses that have only been able to exist for a short time due to gaps in the market and technology. Video rental, started with video tapes, died with DVDs and didn't really make it into the bluray era. Owning DVDs came down to $20, no reason to drive across town and rent one for $6. But then Redbox was able to slip into that gap, putting lots of discs in a vending machine, those are cheap and they went everywhere! It was a buck a night! But then streaming killed that DEAD. Had tapes been cheap from the get go Blockbuster never would have existed, but studios decided to ignore that revenue for ages.
According to this logic most businesses should not exists because things should work properly.
I don't see any reason the business model shouldn't exist, though yes their scale was a challenge IMO.
Selling off the shelf, tested components and themes isn't a bad business. I'd firmly put it in the lifestyle business category, I just wouldn't expect it to sustain multiple high paid engineers on fulltime salary and benefits.
A relatively popular WordPress theme on ThemeForest could bring in $30k on a good month in the market's prime. Nowadays the number is much more humble.
I agree. things like tailwind etc should come out as by-products of products making money.
react was not facebook's product. rails was not 37signal's product. Kubernetes was not google's product.
blaming AI is not facing the reality of how tech products / open source is financed in our industry.
It's not really a moral argument that there shouldn't be a business model but more an opinion that you might now consider verified as a correct one that the business model just wasn't there. I agree that there probably never was one.
Selling to developers just is very hard. The reality of course is that this competes in a space full of other people's OSS attempts at solving the same problem. That just puts an upper limit on what you can charge and who is going to even consider paying at all. And whatever that is, it was nowhere close to what they needed it to be.
AI made the whole proposition less valuable. I actually like tailwind as a solution. But it was always a short cut for people who didn't want to reinvent all the low level CSS hackery on every project they did. It's why I like and used it as well. But I stopped doing these things manually at this point. AI coding tools will happily spit out the raw CSS as well. And the irony of course is that because of tailwind's popularity, generating it was easy as well.
strongly agree except that "million-dollar business" is such a low bar these days that I might argue a larger number is needed for the point to stand.
People are reacting foolishly to the word shouldn't here. It's not a "moral" shouldn't; it doesn't meant anything like "shame on them for existing". It's a technical criticism: the only reason this business was ever viable is that the rest of the ecosystem is in such a sorry state that it became worth spending money on this thing that should have been trivial.
A similar claim would be: Jquery shouldn't have existed, because browsers could have done a not-terrible job in the first place to the point that its existence was necessary. They didn't, so it did exist, but it shouldn't have had to.
Telerik has been around awhile and makes $60 million a year and their business model is selling essentially UI components at the heart of it for Microsoft UI frameworks. There is also SyncFusion and DevExpress.
Its crazy, but there is clearly money to be had in this.
> Tailwind's business model existed due to a massive inefficiency in the frontend industry not being able to come to terms with CSS or native components.
No, it wasn't. It's a CSS utility library. I've been writing CSS for 15 years. I didn't choose Tailwind because I couldn't come to terms with CSS or native components.
I disagree.
Ready-made UI components and templates have been million-dollar businesses for a lot of companies for a long, long time.
Finding space in a development ecosystem to provide a set of purpose-built tools is a common and healthy software business pattern.
They made money by selling components. It was never a good business model. Im fine with saying AI killed it — its not a bad look for AI.
Maybe you're overthinking this?
Tailwind saved me time and the pain of writing CSS so I paid for it.
It shouldn't exist bc it addresses a massive inefficiency? What do you think markets are for
Nah.
Tailwind provides an actual simplifying layer for the (over-)complicated practice of front-end web development.
By being well-though-out, well-designed, and very well documented, it actually made web app styling easier/simpler (without hiding or otherwise making it hard to drop into CSS as needed). And it slotted right into the place most web apps have for a CSS/class mechanism.
The paid templates extend the approach to components. The business model is that the credibility they establish with the free high-quality CSS/class system makes people willing to pay for the templates, which then goes over well because the templates are good and useful, saving a lot of development time. BTW, their templates solves a different problem than native components -- I suspect you're dismissive of their business model due to not actually understanding it.
Of course, it's all moot now. AI can generate the components now at the same time it's doing everything else, so no reason to pay for their templates. (Plus, tailwindcss probably doesn't build the credibility as much anymore either because devs aren't using it (their AI might be, but without the direct contact it doesn't have a chance to build that open-the-wallet credibility.)
> AI can generate the components now at the same time it's doing everything else, so no reason to pay for their templates
So the AI can do a better job than the average front end web developer? Maybe you should take it a step further from “no reason to pay for templates”…
Tailwind templates give you a quick way to get good, functional, customizable components. LLMs give you a quicker way to get good-enough, functional customizable components. You have to pay for LLMs too, but you aren’t getting the LLM just for the components, and component generation is included.
Looking ahead, maybe LLM subscription prices will eventually have to go way up to justify the huge valuations AI companies have. So maybe this could change, but it won’t be until anyone making a living from template has had to move on, so we aren’t going back to when that was a thing.
It seems to me that this is the way the market is heading. Strange bleeding edge perf or sprawling complexity feels like the last niche of front end engineers. The rest will move further down the stack or be replaced.
I come to similar conclusions when scanning dev newsletters and I fail to skip over an ad link. Based on the value proposition presented in the one-liner I wonder they exist then wonder whether I really understand "tech industry" as it currently is ...
Finding a massive inefficiency and then finding a way to solve it and make money doing it is basically how the entire economy works.
> the frontend industry not being able to come to terms with CSS
What does this even mean?
There’s nothing wrong with a company taking something complex and making it simple, and they absolutely deserve to be paid for making millions of developers lives easier
Sort of a weak and dismissive take. Tailwind saw a problem in the market, addressed it, and made money for a while. Why shouldn't that business model exist? It exists across SO MANY other industries.
People pay for aspirin, not vitamins, and Tailwind is aspirin.
I agree that a CSS library is not really worth a big business. But nobody has woken up: AI makes writing tailwind classes more convenient than ever and that’s what people seem to do.
Wait till you find out AI writes even better css without the tailwind crap.
It really doesn't.
This sort of critique could be made about almost any industry or individual business. The whole premise of almost any industry is lubricating some friction between the idealized and the reality.
Having said that, sure they were utterly doomed. For that matter, Shopify is utterly doomed as well. Businesses like that will continue to exist, but in no universe is it a $230B space.
There is some slight irony in them continuing to make these statements for me. Mostly because Tailwind is still incredibly around (and worth investing in, hence Shopify acquiring them) and AI isn’t anything close to offering a drop in solution. That is to say, AI will implement tailwind when building as there isn’t a good alternative, and otherwise just references these docs for the user so that they don’t have to visit the website, so it’s not like it’s being used less.
If you think about it, the site docs garnering traffic (beyond potential tailwind labs conversions) is more of an indicator of a code or design smell than anything. That’s just my 2 cents as a guy who used to look up their docs constantly to confirm a pattern I was implementing, as tailwind classes were never really as self-evident as tailwind labs liked to believe they were IMO.
Like it just doesn’t make total sense to me to compare library documentation traffic hits to traffic hits that happen in other industries here, or with other products or companies. They aren’t even a traditional SaaS company, not that there really Is one either. Their service or income flow is defined by things like offering Enterprise support or a component library at a premium — things that aren’t simply dictated by or shown through documentation traffic trends; things that were encroached upon by plenty of other things besides AI.
> and worth investing in, hence Shopify acquiring them)
I have nothing against Tailwind, but I think a company with $5 billion in cash reserves and the general context of Shopify may buy a company like Tailwind for community goodwill, to stabilize the technology that they use for their own business model, to acqui-hire the principals, and various other reasons other than Tailwind's business model.
> On the commercial side, we'll no longer be trying to grow the business around Tailwind. All existing customers will of course maintain their access to products like Tailwind Plus and ui.sh, but we're closing sign ups for new customers to focus on Tailwind CSS at Shopify.
I imagine it has to be for their expertise in translating developer intent into practice and refining the shopify specific markup conventions. When I misread the headline as Spotify I couldn't think of why any org, even very front end heavy, would buy them. But continuing to support a language that will always be in it's own lucrative domain makes perfect sense.
Yes. Maybe their business model was never sustainable and now they are unfairly blaming IA as a scapegoat to justify layoffs.
I think their business model was sustainable, but depended on SEO. AI made it so people would either use the LLM generated tailwind syntax, or the "AI Overview" at the top of the Google search results and never land on the official tailwind documentation site. Less visits on the official docs meant less people would see the paid offerings, which means less people would buy.
It's possible they could have explored other marketing channels (youtube?), but it seems like the death of SEO for this sort of content lead to the main issues.
I'm not sure if everyone in this thread is familiar with what their business model was. It wasn't "selling tailwind premium" or selling "tailing enterprise support". They sold a library of react components that happened to use tailwind for styling. So their competitors are DIY, Mantine, React-Bootstrap, and similar.
I'm not sure they'd even be classed as competitors to be honest. They floundered massively with the ui kit, most sections of it were very dated and untouched for several years whilst they piddled about with a failed new ui kit that never took off, for which they blamed ai.
The reality was that a big chunk of their initial audience came from Laravel, and as other players emerged and made what was Tailwind UI irrelevant it all seemed to compound into them panicking and making some rather silly business decisions. At one point they had a sizeable team and shipped nothing for a good 8 months, and when they did it was a couple of beautiful but completely impractical landing pages. They just didn't convert it to a sustainable business.
Oh and to add to it, they alienated their paying customers by dropping support for basic js based components in favour of making the entire ui library reliant on heavy js libraries, killing off any interest from most of the Laravel customers who'd been their initial target audience.
Spot on.
If nothing else, it definitively proves AI produces real value.
I hear the contrary a lot but Im not convinced anyone actually believes it.
In the long term, no business model is sustainable.
What AI replaces isn't Tailwind (AI will reach for Tailwind pretty readily), but the paid ecosystem that was Tailwind's business model. The value of having a pre-built component goes down when building that component is a 10 minute job of an agent.
I think this is reasonable but incorrect. Tailwind didn't say "our conversion rates went down." They said the traffic to their docs site went down.
Their funnel depended on SEO, and LLMs took SEO out of the equation. What you said about the value of pre-built components might also be true but can't be determined from a situation where consumers suddenly all stopped learning that the pre-built components exist. Occam's Razor says it's the funnel.
> the site docs garnering traffic (beyond potential tailwind labs conversions) is more of an indicator of a code or design smell than anything
I've heard this before, but it's really no different than vanilla CSS. My guess is that people started pointing this out is that Tailwind got more non-frontend people digging into styling more where they were hit with how much shit there is in CSS.
> it's really no different than vanilla CSS
Is this supposed to be a plus? When you have indirections they're supposed to provide some abstraction and the abstraction might or might not provide the utilities you desire, but there is a point to it. A near 1:1 mapping is completely useless and just a different syntax for the sake of it.
For me I know CSS quite well, but I would always have to look up some utility names that had no intuitive mapping. line-height is leading, flex-direction has no direct mapping, text-wrap is text but also font size is text, so if trying to do font-size:custom you had to do some weird syntax unlike the other custom value syntax lest it confuse text-[1rem] with a text-wrap rule. There are a lot of these weird decisions.
I love tailwind and will continue to use it, but it isn't perfect in this regard...
All good points. To be clear, though, I wasn't trying to insinuate that Tailwind has NO design smells.
I also like Tailwind, though I don't really use it anymore.
As a Tailwind Plus customer I found it very hard to use their templates. I'm not and was not a React developer, so maybe I wasn't the target customer, but as a solo builder the products were too opinionated and too specific to make want to reach for them. I felt like I had to "learn" the template.
They used different technologies for different templates and some even use a 3rd party CMS service that I had no interest in using. Their JavaScript components were non-native, so if I wanted to use any of the interactivity I had to write from scratch.
I think they had an opportunity to grow with AI and with the amount of code that is now being written.
I don't really agree that ML killed their business. I paid for their product early on before it was even done but they never really developed their product. I held out hope to the end of a year and ended up never using my purchase.
Compare that to shadcn, which had visible growing pains and yet reached rocketship fame. Shadcn is evidence that developers were hungry for yet another library, and it's also evidence that users were willing to tolerate rough code on the ride to maturity.
I don't believe Tailwind's component libraries deserved to win.
I agree. I also paid, but the components themselves were hard to use and required quite a bit of work to integrate into our product. For example, most components had a new (slightly different) button and parts of the components didn't have clear boundaries from what I remember.
Besides that, quite quickly there were many other free, and arguably better, alternatives available (like flowbite, preline, daisyui, etc) that I ended up using instead.
I remember that HN discussion, but it seemed to me from the outside that after that post they got Google as a sponsor and I just had assumed the community was rallying together for them a bit.
But I guess not.
Too bad, they seem like such good people. Not that they're dead or something but I don't think this was their ideal end state for Tailwind.
They got like 10 new sponsors, you can see it on their page. They are one of the top OSS projects in terms of revenue.
I can't recall any other OSS project that makes so much money and has nothing to do with infra/cloud.
They were making around $1M a year back when they complained about the revenue. A lot of Linux distros can only dream about such an amount of money.
$1M a year isn't a lot of money if you are paying for full-time employees.
They achieved $2 million revenue in the first 5 months of the first Tailwind UI release.[1]
They had a very good run for such a project.
[1] - https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduc...
This was after they laid everyone off, so it was just Adam and Steve left. An they surpassed $2M a year in sponsorships a couple of months after that. They were not struggling for cash at all.
I'm not sure from "they could afford payroll because they laid everyone off" I would conclude that they weren't struggling for cash.
Right, and as a consequence lots of very important software (orders of magnitude more important than tailwind) does not have full-time employees. Good for them if they can manage it, but it's a gravy train.
Given how hard it is to build any form of financially sustainable model around an open source project I think we should actively celebrate anyone who manages to build a model that works, not dismiss it as a "gravy train".
I really just think they got lucky, I don't see anything to celebrate. It's like celebrating one of your friends winning the lottery - good for them, but it's not really an indication the system is working well at all.
The shape of business moats are changing. There's probably a lot of businesses that are suddenly non-viable as currently designed.
Being a bit silly with the analogy: it's like we've discovered gunpowder and now entire classes of fortification are deficient.
What you said re moats might be true but can't actually be concluded from the Tailwind story. Traffic to the funnel dropped by more than half. That easily explains their problems, and says nothing about moats.
Tailwind had a solid funnel and a good product. Now they only have a good product. That's enough to kill a business.
If (or more likely when) Google loses money because LLMs are replacing search, that's a story about moats.
I was imagining their moat was having a monopoly on where you go to get documentation for the free product, and that's how they sell the for-profit product. If that monopoly is lost (people get the answers they need without going to the store), the moat is gone.
StyleX, on the other hand, has an explicit LLM Resources endpoint: https://stylexjs.com/docs/llm-resources
Noob question, I recall https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49491791 mentioned how the kernel source code and diffs were being crawled excessively. All else being equal, won't all the AI crawling agents mean traffic to docs should at least be stable(presuming changes happen all the time)?
Tailwind is so pervasive it's 100% in pretraining _and_ RLHF.
I've done several Tailwind projects and rarely did models from various providers need to reference Tailwind documentation.
A crawler visiting your docs won't help a human decide to pay for your commercial service advertised on those docs.
And also the fact that agents are solving anubis level 5 challenges Tailwind would not be able to figure out how much traffic is from people vs bots. So that would mean the traffic should be up...
> The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework.
In lieu of everything else, I'd say that in circumstances like that it's time to adapt to the state of the world and be the jerks that advertise in CLI.
I've always loved Tailwind, but at this point I'm not exactly sure why Shopify acquired them.
Wow, citing we need to figure out how to pay out bills and rejecting PR based on that is such a douche move. The fact is Tailwind core is an MIT-licensed open source project.
I used to gripe a lot about how Tailwind docs didn't play well with doc aggregators like devdocs.io, or even implement basic browser search engine integration when I was using it regularly. It now makes sense why they wanted to keep their docs scoped to their domain.
Yeah I remember the “I fired 75%” getting glossed as how could AI do this to my staff.
Oof. It’s so sad when businesses with in-demand products suffer from a lack of successful economic mechanism design.
They had a very successful economic mechanism design for many years. It's one that thousands of businesses have relied on for decades. Create great free product, create rich tutorials and docs, people look them up and you can sell variety of services from there.
Then ai companies stole the data, put a $20 pricetag on it and wiped out all those businesses essentially overnight.
If those "variety of services" are worth anything they should remain popular. There are countless ways to advertise them to people. I'm guessing many devs who were regularly browsing their documentation had ad blockers anyway.
Typically here's how it worked:
Company creates a free core product, possibly open source, etc.
Company creates rich help docs and other useful resources.
Customers who use their core free product are frequently engaged with the company and it's helpful resources.
Said company offers additional services such as coursework, cloud services, analytics, etc.
Since customer knows and trusts the core free product, and knows the company is trustworthy, they may be inclined to purchase something.
Now, few coders use these learning resources (ai fetches it for them), they do not know anything about the company and they never engage with the company to see their additional offerings.
Therefore the company now has to advertise by spending heavily on Google/meta/etc. to a cold audience that doesn't even know who they are, because everyone using their system/sdk/library/etc. doesn't know anything about them because ai just steals all their resources and regurgitates it to the coder.
> Now, few coders use these learning resources (ai fetches it for them)
This isn’t the problem. The problem is that you don’t need to pay for (or care about) their services when an LLM can easily replicate them.
I think maybe they should have kept building Tailwinds CSS, release new versions, then charge a subscription to teams for their agents to access latest changes in their documents.
In other words, the documents for the latest versions are hidden behind a pay wall.
That's one way to ensure Tailwind v4 remains forever the only version anyone uses. Agents already are not very responsive to framework changes.
That's ok. Teams who pay can use the new versions.
And the AIs they use would have no inherent training on those new versions.
While everyone else migrates to something else because v4 eventually becomes legacy and the only way to get modern features is to use something open and available. Charging for access to new versions only gives you short-term runway at the expense of giving your entire user base a very good reason to leave.
If people can't get paid to pay their rent and eat to write and support code, how is it relevant what the consumers of the code freeriding get? If the AI machine requires ongoing fuel to improve, they can pay for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem
They don't get paid to write more of it, but maybe we had enough tailwind and invisible boot of market is giving those people a gentle kick to force them to do something else.
If you release new versions without documentation it's easy for agents to generate that missing documentation.
Never preferred tailwind. Much simpler to write plain css. It’s easier to create reusable components than what ppl think. CSS hardly has a steep learning curve. Problem with tailwind and many newer css frameworks I see posted even on HN, is they don’t seem to work on older devices, which is a shame. I guess ppl simply test on their latest phones and call it a day. Older ios itself have roughly 7% market share [1], that’s millions of devices that can’t access the web properly.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1118859/mobile-apple-ios...
Why wouldn't Tailwind work on older devices? It's just a bunch of classes. If you're using a feature the browser doesn't support it's not going to work whether it's vanilla css or tailwindcss.
That said, I prefer vanilla CSS. Modern CSS is great.
Serious question: is there a need to reach for tailwind if you are building a new site? Won't using vanilla CSS while taking advantage of the latest features be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining CSS), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?
In my experience, if you're going to aggressively componentize whatever you're building (i.e. a button isn't a css class on a simple `a` tag but a distinct component that exists in it's own file somewhere) there's huge advantages to having your styling be associated directly with your components, and Tailwind is a great option (among many) for that.
If you're building something where your unit of organization looks more like a "page" than super fine grained elements, Tailwind will just make things messy and a higher-level library or writing your own CSS would be a better approach.
I don't think this changes much with AI - right now most models are not terrific at maintaining a huge degree of context in larger projects, so I could absolutely see an agent implementing CSS that works well in isolation but breaks due to the cascade. Maybe that changes in the future, but right now if anything I think Tailwind is well suited to AI because it enforces a certain locality to the changes you're making (i.e. you can reasonably assume that a `text-red-500` class on an element isn't going to break things elsewhere and wll do what it says on the box).
Why are your buttons `a` tags?!?
Buttons should be `button` tags. Links should be `a` tags.
It's common to want things that look like buttons that functionally link to a page.
This isn't really straightforward with the HTML `button` tag so `a` tags that appear like buttons are common. I'm not really proposing something out of the ordinary here, nearly every high level component library that has a built in "button" will support applying them to `a` tags and most likely have that as their primary example of a button.
Reading charitably, when writing that part of the comment they probably were thinking of links that look like buttons, for example the "Get started" link in Tailwind's home page.
Regardless of how that specific one looks like, I wouldn't like if it were replaced by a <button>.
Yeah, Tailwind is great as long as you have some way to reuse markup, like React. You don't have to care about class names and whether CSS defined somewhere else affects styles of a current component at all. That last point makes sense for LLMs as well: all the styles that affect the current file are automatically in context since styling is local. Admittedly, there are other ways to achieve this but the ergonomics of Tailwind are just good. Having nice defaults and good training data is an added bonus.
The lack of single-file components is one of several reasons I wouldn't reach for React prior to the LLM craze[0]. For personal projects, I love Svelte. You wouldn't need tailwind there for the reasons proposed given their support for it.
[0] Things have probably changed, but Svelte 5 was a litmus test for how recent the data cutoff was for an LLM model. Meanwhile React _especially_ has no reason to change how the framework is used by coders. Thus there's years of scraped tutorials and sites for how to throttle a function or what-have-you in React.
You wouldn't need tailwind for svelte, but I've been using tailwind with svelte at work for years now and really like it
IMO, Tailwind is just inline CSS with standardised defaults. I think it found its place because most React devs didn't want to bother with CSS
It found its place because working on CSS on any non-trivial scale with multiple engineers is painful. The best way to deal with CSS at scale is not to write CSS. And this comes from me who really likes CSS.
CSS was prob great for early web but now it's just a pig with lipstick on
CSS is one of my favourite things to do and still is. However, most engineers don't really understand it because most engineers don't really bother learning anything, and as a result you typically end up with a mess.
If someone knows what they are doing and is allowed to make a decent UI library, you can have very clean, efficient styling without libs.
It's the reverse, the 2026 CSS is one of the most advanced layout engine you can have.
Oh why can't this idea die, it has been continuously debunked for 6 years now. So much so, any TW discussion will reiterate it.
Why would it die? How would it die? The vast majority of Tailwind is literally just shorthand for individual CSS properties.
Because what makes it useful , like media queries, can't be put in style attributes. Frankly this whole discussion is just as silly as claiming flex has nothing over table layout.
flex is not a collection of aliases for <td>s and <tr>s
Then again one should aim to not even need media queries and make things responsive intrinsically, breakpoint-free, continuously. A design where things jump at hard coded viewport widths is not actually a great design.
So at least that part is not so amazing.
This is certainly one of the arguments of all time. Thank you, HN.
>inb4 my 1:1 naive mapping of DB to screen works for me
>inb4 the web should be reserved for text documents and hyperlinks and user styles rule and running anything close to applications on the web was a mistake
>inb4 TUI
Never stop posting, you are doing great.
bro your own website has hard coded viewport widths where things jump
If you were so kind to point out, where I used media queries to hardcode viewport width ... "bro".
Oh ya? Is that why the parent prefaced that obvious and indisputable fact with "IMO"?
> Oh why can't this idea die
People like to feel superior to others, so dunking on people using a popular technology tickles some pleasure centers. Considering another viewpoint gets in the way of that, so other viewpoints are ignored.
It's inline CSS, but with all the limitations of inline styles removed. There is a lot of stuff that can't be done with inline styles, like media queries.
It's inline styles, not online stylesheets. Though yes, inline styles are limited.
It is used because UI component frameworks make vanilla CSS an awkward an unnecessary tool (the Cascading part). CSS makes sense as designed for styling a document, but not so much for styling atomic components. If we were designing the web and CSS from scratch around the React model, CSS would not be made to cascade, because that is totally unnecessary and usually leads to more issues than it solves. Apart from theme variables, in a component system there's no reason to have global CSS anywhere; you'd just style each component in isolation. So when in the React model you typically want no cascades at all, the library that is made for that gets popular.
CSS modules are also a solution to the above, but, once you get rid of cascading, and you have one stylesheet per component, it is again unnecessary to have the one stylesheet in a different file from the one component. There's no benefit to splitting a component and its styles into two files; it just makes it more annoying to edit. So we move the styles essentially inline, with either Tailwind or CSS-in-JS.
Thanks for this great explanation of your viewpoint. As an occasional frontend dev who really got into Tailwind, it was always hard for me to explain why I'm so much more productive in Tailwind than in writing CSS. This makes a lot of sense.
It was/is inline styles, not inline CSS. It isn't a stylesheet at all, just a single style property.
That, plus it looks like Forth code
I think it is mostly backend dev who don't want to spend time in frontend stuff.
LLMs seem to work well with tailwind which I assume is because there was a lot of tailwind in the training data. As a human I never found tailwind to be particularly easy to work with anyway (mostly because I can't be bothered to learn another CSS framework) so I was constantly checking the docs when manually writing code. But I do like the rigidity it forces, which is probably a good thing for AI coding as well.
I feel it's better for LLMs. For each class name, the LLM doesn't have to go out and consume CSS files and read all the cascading rules and determine what other classes elsewhere might have an effect. It has everything it needs to determine the styling and layout right in its immediate context
I don't really get this argument. 90% of Tailwind is shorthand for existing CSS properties. There's really not much to learn if you already know CSS.
Except for all those specific shorthands?
I used it for months at s previous job and spent a lot of time googling “how do I write X CSS property in Tailwind”
I’m not sure what to tell you. With only a few exceptions, the shorthand follows a very predictable pattern if you already know the property names. IDE completions help too.
I only do front-end dev occasionally, but these are my 3 goto articles that make me lean towards not using Tailwind:
1: https://www.zolkos.com/2025/12/03/vanilla-css-is-all-you-nee...
2: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/subgrid/
3: https://railsdesigner.com/custom-elements/ (more Rails specific)
It's my primary role. I started using jsxstyle a dozen years ago alongside React and really liked the ability to style my components in situ without breaking browser architecture assumptions.
I recently had to help out on a vibe coded project that inherited Tailwind (I think from Figma). It was a short assignment so I didn't dig that deep, but I don't understand the value prop of Tailwind. There was no obvious improvement over what I've been used to; in fact, it seemed a lot messier.
A lot of the time the choice comes down to abundance of resources and community support. So if we're comparing tools (e.g. jsxstyle vs tailwind) maybe Tailwind could actually win on those parameters (no actual idea, just guessing based on the number of stars jsxstyle has on Github), but if we're comparing vanilla to [any tool] then vanilla usually takes the cake.
I often feel like I'm the only person using jsxstyle, which is wild since it was done by Pete Hunt, same guy who spun React out of Instagram.
If I was using React, I'd probably like this tool too. The best counter to "community supported" is "so conceptually simple and small that it doesn't need a community". But perhaps that's kind why I'm not big on React in general.
I’m a full time front end dev, and I’ve basically accepted at this point that some people are really into tailwind, and some people are not. I’m not, and for a while I strongly preferred working with other devs who were also not… but at this point, LLMs have completely erased that distinction.
What's "funny" is that newer/modern CSS is often very clunky to write in Tailwind, or unsupported entirely unless you build your own selectors, but AI doesn't understand those well or how broad their support is, so getting AI to write good/modern CSS outside of Tailwind is pretty difficult. I suppose someone could make a new library that is for AI tools that focuses on the latest and greatest in CSS, but there's no market for it any more because AI would just steal it and generate UIs with it.
Yeah this is my main beef with Tailwind. There are lots of modern CSS features that are really nice that you have to hack into Tailwind because they don’t really fit into a utility model.
(Any complex grid model for example. If you haven’t used grid template areas try them out! They are by far my favorite way to do complex responsive layouts)
Vanilla CSS can take advantage of features like that "cascading" part that Tailwind goes entirely against.
If you are styling a site, there's no competition at all. But if you are styling a single interaction-heavy page, it's a lot less work to put all the formatting inline instead of thinking about a descriptive structure and write your CSS around it.
Apparently a lot of people design entire sites one page at a time.
I started with a UI framework thinking I'd need it but over time I realized that I was using it exclusively for button theming and setting the default font. I was using vanilla CSS and vanilla JavaScript and after removing the framework my package sizes reflect that fact.
Real answer was always no.
Tailwind is just conceptually bunch of css inline styles repackaged as classes for performance boost. It was always just shifting complexity around, but offered an immediate perception of productivity gain, because you could just make a quick edit here and there.
I used to use tailwind a lot, but AI has made it redundant largely. There's zero reason to add any library into your stack unless it has significant advantages, tailwinds advantage was largely a developer convenience, and that's not really needed anymore. You can now maintain a design system in CSS really easily and ensure your UI conforms to it using AI tools in a way that seems way more powerful than before.
Not at all, I personally never used nor plan to.
I am a big advocate of classes, not inline styles spaghetti.
The only contact I had with it was due to FE teams jumping into it, however every couple of months is something else anyway.
Believe me, I try all the time. But HTML and CSS are not made for the modern web.
Styling radio buttons, working date inputs, forms that POST automatically, typeahead and server-side validation (eg username already taken.)
You spend all your time reinventing the wheel and then it's buggy and looks like a dog. To say nothing of the inevitable poly fills and Cross-Browser issues.
How does this relate to Tailwind though?
Tailwind does ultimately compile down to CSS. Anything you can do in Tailwind can be done in CSS.
I have not run into cross-browser differences in a long time. That is differences, that actually mattered and for which I would have had to build any workaround. I have built several websites recently, using vanilla HTML and CSS and solved everything using server-side rendering.
What problems specifically do you see with server-side rendering?
From a security perspective I greatly prefer a client-server approach: you have an unsafe frontend where you care about ergonomy and aesthetics, and a backend which provides an API which handles the security.
Two different worlds and often two different kinds of developpers
I think we actually don't disagree there, but we have a different understanding of the term "server-side". Anything related to security must happen on the server since safety measures in scripts running client-side can be defeated.
SSR (Server Side Rendering) provides the browser with a page that is created on the server (and possibly enhanced/hydrated on the client).
Having a separate backed and frontend allows for separation of duties: the client is responsible for the user-facing content and the backend deals exclusively with data flows. This allows to have several independent clients, machine to machine connections etc.
Whatever arrives to the server is untrusted, and the API (or other interfaces) only verify raw data (a JSON for instance) and there are excellent (backend) frameworks for that.
Mixing the visual content with the data is possible (Django does that for instance) but from a security perspective less efficient (again - separation of duties). It also requires to possible double the work to have an independent API.
In other words, if you separate the two you do not care about security on the front at all, and the one who builds the back can focus on their expertise.
How does tailwind solve this vs. vanilla CSS?
This is a good discussion: do LLMs change the calculus for DRY?
A major point of components is having a single place where you can change design and behavior across your entire codebase. With LLMs you can with very good accuracy tell them to change the look of "all buttons that are confirmation buttons in modals but not in the login modal". Doesn't matter if there are 10 such buttons or 1000, it'll take a few seconds for them to accomplish it.
I'm slowly forming the opinion that nowadays having copy-and-pasted "components", with their whole HTML just repeated over and over, is now a much less worrying thing in a codebase. Even a bloated CSS can be quickly fixed by a LLM.
And like you said: you eliminate the build phase entirely and frontend development ergonomics goes back to how it was in the early 2000s.
So you enjoy reviewing your entire code base and relying on an extremely detailed regression suite just to make simple changes? I don't think AI changes good engineering at all, it just changes who or what is doing it.
It definitely changes some aspects of good engineering.
I'm not a huge AI person but it's obvious a host of great tools we've built to deal with our challenges would not have been significant if we had LLMs.
A very crude example: to translate code into a different language someone would need to write a tokenizer, a parser, an AST and finally a translator. All significant engineering challenges, taking days to finish. Nowadays you can tell an LLM to do that in minutes.
Staying on topic: we could easily argue that CSS wouldn't have existed if LLMs existed and could create table layouts from pasted images in a chat window.
I disagree about your last statement. That only covers the initial creation/generation phase. It ignores the engineering aspect of maintaining that design through the entire lifecycle of the product. How do you evolve that table design?
Sure an LLM can update every table in your project every time you make a change, just as a human could. It also can make mistakes and burn significantly more tokens doing so. Or, it could update one component with a one line change and be done. Easy to verify, less change for mistakes.
Engineering is a discipline and does not change dramatically with the advent of outsourcing it to agents.
> to translate code into a different language someone would need to write a tokenizer, a parser, an AST and finally a translator. All significant engineering challenges, taking days to finish. Nowadays you can tell an LLM to do that in minutes.
Do people do that on a regular basis? The most recurring case of building the above is when someone wants to include a language into a project and they usually don't bother with a translator. The second case is when transpilling (ex. LESS to CSS) and that's more akin to macro and other preprocessing tricks than a full blown translation.
> we could easily argue that CSS wouldn't have existed if LLMs existed and could create table layouts from pasted images in a chat window.
All current UI and Document conceptual models include styles (either as direct properties or separate models) and some does include named styles. The novel aspect of CSS is the Cascading concept, not the styling part. And cascading is obvious when we consider that there was supposed to be user stylesheets for documents. I read epub and user stylesheets (created from UI) is crucial.
> Do people do that on a regular basis?
They can now.
https://www.checklyhq.com/blog/agentic-rewrite-nodejs-to-go/
Frontend development in the early days was nightmare. I don't know why people pretend there was some kind of golden age but there really was not.
You could still develop frontend in the old way. Most browsers are very good at supporting old websites. But on one wants that.
Nowadays though, that old way is working very well, because of all the things that were added to HTML and CSS, making things, which used to be annoying or difficult mostly easy.
LLMs change the calculus on DRY in some cases. I would say it's still very much a no-no on the frontend side of things. Code repetition is directly correlated with bad loading performance. When you're optimising for people on slow mobile connections, your HTML/JS/CSS being 500KB instead of 1.5MB matters a lot.
That only matters in context: if this repetition allows you to forego React and a zillion JS libraries you’re better off in the end performance wise.
I have never seen a single website where performance downgrade was caused by HTML.
However I’m not advocating for it, just making the case that it’s very hard to do worse than we’re currently doing with front end development.
> do LLMs change the calculus for DRY?
Yes it makes it insanely easy to refactor duplicated logic into shared and tested modules. Why would you go the other way?
Components as in React, Vue, etc requires a complete overhaul in frontend rendering, many dependencies, changes in deployment and even have an impact in organizational structure.
If one wants to do server side rendering with HTML templates like the old days there is no real “components” way of doing it (although declarative Shadow DOM is coming along). Partials are not the same thing.
In that scenario some repetition can give you the benefit of keeping a clean stack with no client side rendering.
Have you tried Astro? It lets you do exactly that: server-side rendering with HTML templates in component form, with css scoped to the component. No shadow dom needed, no JS frameworks either.
Astro is still fundamentally different, it's not server-side rendered in the sense of dynamic pages. I can't, in a language agnostic way, use Astro to receive a request, get data from the database and render an HTML representation of this data. This won't work in a Go, Rust, or whatever server. Astro at a minimum requires its own compiler to build the static assets, a server to serve them, and a custom API to answer the calls so it can build the dynamic part of pages.
There's never been a need to reach for tailwind. It's really a matter of preference.
Writing CSS in a way that will scale up with the size of your project and team is just as hard as it's ever been, you still have to come up with a convention for doing that, including taking into account what newer features bring to the table. Having to manually edit it was never the pain point.
Yes. Good design and a developer with good taste can make your site so much better than something mechanically excellent, but tasteless or derivative.
Short answer: no, not necessary. Long answer: https://mastrojs.github.io/blog/2025-11-27-why-not-just-use-...
Personally I still find it really helpful to have a proven framework to rely on so that I can be confident I'll have a reasonably consistent looking UI across a range of browsers, browser versions, screen sizes, and OS even versions.
Bootstrap was/is popular for the same reason. One framework and your site looks decent on almost any device. The downside is a bit like LLM work in that it all ends up looking like a Bootstrap site unless you’re a good designer.
Imo no
CSS is really good these days. Scope rules and the new selectors available mean you actually have to work hard to mess things up like you did in previous eras
I like vanilla CSS, but agents in my experience seem to deliver more uniform results when using tailwind.
is there a need to reach for compiled languages if you are building a new program? Won't using vanilla assembly while taking advantage of the latest instructions be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining assembly), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?
(Abstractions are still very useful to LLMs)
I believe if react had made inline styling of components less verbose then tailwind wouldn't exist
Yeah I think if React had adopted Vue’s scoped model early on then CSS Tailwind would be much less popular
(I much prefer the scoped CSS model)
As someone that hates Tailwind, I think there is actually a use case here. If you are fluent in CSS reaching for Tailwind is probably a mistake. But for better or for worse there are lots of developers who can write HTML and JavaScript (or more likely React) who will not, and do not want to, learn CSS, for them things like Tailwind is a godsent.
I do think Tailwind is overused, but it obviously has some legitimate use case.
There’s been a lot of devs reaching for StyleX over Tailwind recently. Not sure if hype or there’s real advantages.
Tailwind is still considerably easier to work with than vanilla CSS. You just have to write less.
It still helps deduplicate.
Only if you are using a framework like React, where you create generic Button and other components.
Try using Tailwind with server-side rendered frameworks like Rails or vanilla HTML, and you will find yourself repeating the same stuff over and over again. Basically anytime you want e.g. a <button>, you have to repeat all the inline css for it. (There are plugins for Rails that adds "components", but I found it very clunky)
Not really. Every single button that gets rendered has thirty class names attached to it instead of one. It really bloats markup with duplicated classes.
Don't do a lot of technical work nowadays, but tailwind is still my go-to. Vanilla CSS just doesn't have nice ergonomics.
With AI I guess you could skip it, but I like to understand the code.
What do you mean by vanilla CSS?
I can't be the only one who has no idea what this means. Do you mean high-abstraction classes that are bound to the DOM arbitrarily, and are difficult to change later? We've had 25+ years to see how that doesn't scale.
Do you mean Tailwind-style functional CSS written by hand? What would be the point of that?
Without tailwind LLMs tend to use inline random colors, random sizes and radiuses. Project becomes an unmaintainable design soup really fast. Even with tailwind first priority is to define dark/light theme with semantic colors. After it's a smooth sail (sort of, routing, forms, state ownership and persistent url state are still an alien concept for clankers).
My clanker made my vanilla css with branding color variables. shrug.
Did your clanker reach 40k CLOC?
A few of my teams use tailwind. As someone who used css directly for years, this just means I have to waste time looking up the tailwind equivalent of things I know (if I’m not vibecoding). Strongly dislike it for that. But css management is really bad without it too. If I knew all the tailwindisms, it would probably be a clear winner.
If it's the case that there's almost never the need to reach for it, and I do find myself in that camp, then a harder question is begged, why is it so popular?
I think there's a lot of technologies that are in the category of categoric mistakes to use, but popular enough and inert enough that they don't get dropped. There might be lots of different explanations depending on the technology, a lot have a reason the moment they are released.
Many third party tech becomes de facto standard at some era, then those features get incorporated into more mainstream tooling like browser css, and at that point the third party tooling exists only because of inertia and adds little value, but increasing supply chain and complexity risk.
Another example on this category is Axios which was essentially a cleaner DX for XMLHTTPRequests in client side javascript before Fetch, and later a polyfill for it. Nowadays it's a blunder to include it, but it ended up in stackoverflow answers and training sets, so it's "safe" to include. Developers that are on the bleeding edge drop it, but those that are catching up and reading tutorials or classes from the previous era, or using llms, use the previous era cutting edge technique, because they aren't evaluating all the parameters of a choice, they are just going with whatever someone else is using, which causes a coalescing around certain central technologies like React, Kafka, Redis.
Regarding Redis, my understanding is that it was popular during one era where databases were used to store state because we didn't know any better and people were moving fast and breaking things, so it was developed as a sort of hack to move things from a database into memory. But nowadays people just use it wherever (because it really is the most blank microservice you can think of, you can slap it anywhere), and people implement it off the bat.
There's lots of more specific reasons why bad third party deps persist. In python there's a library called python-dotenv, which is a categorical mistake to include, but people do it because they come from Node where it is a standard practice. But there's the standard nuance that in Node, it is a built in, but in python it is a third party dependency from a random dev (no offense to the dep dev, only to the users of the dep). It literally is replaceable by calling Open(), write(), and close(), but there it is with a lot of downloads waiting for the day it is targetted and hacked to capture millions of .env files. Personally to me it would be strike 1 of 2 if someone imports it, but there you go.
Yes, there's no reason to import tailwind, it adds nothing, the idea of:
red-color { color: red}
big-text { font-size: 14px}
<p class="red-color big-text"></p>
Is as laughably low quality, the application of a technique in form but not substance, similar to Getters and setters in Java, effectively making every property of a class public, but formally implementing the private keyword and access through functions. 100% a categoric mistake to implement.
I've written elsewhere of a phenomenon where devs avoid lerning a base technology, and rather end up learning a tech on a higher abstraction that ends up being a 1-for-1 of the lower tech, but it gave them the hope that they could avoid doing that learning, and they only drop into that realization by piecemeal ala "we did it not because it was easy, but because we thought it would be easy", and the only cost is that they learned the non-portable version of that technology and now they are vendor-locked professionally into that technology so they will spread it to the next repo, company, job posting and so on.
There's analogues in biology of inert viruses or parasites that don't materially cause damages, but their lifecycle depends on the host. Although to some extent, by competing for resources they always cause SOME damage, but it is important to notice that not all viruses or damages are highly damaging, that's a rare situation of very extreme pathogens, it isn't very beneficial to kill or damage your host. In fact many may be commensal, but there is a tendency to harm.
In conclusion, I think tailwind and such pre-ai slop-deps are more popular because they are inert viral parasites rather than because they provide value.
I tend to agree. Software development history is a long saga of things that are bad and still popular. Think of how popular J2EE, XML, and SOAP were at some point, and they're just miserable to use or maintain.
there's never a need to reach for tailwind, it's just a pathology some people like because someone else did the design work for them
I think the second half of your statement disagrees with the first.
Much like saying, "there's never a need for Scratch, it's just a way for my kids to code fun things without worrying about semicolons."
That's true about Scratch so what's the problem? You don't need to use Scratch if you learn the syntax of whatever language you desire to use.
Tailwind is a design library for people who don't want to learn or write CSS. They don't technically need it.
Why insult the millions of users relying on Tailwind?
What's the insult? Tailwind is specifically for people who don't like writing CSS because it avoids various ways CSS works and comes with predefined styles.
"Pathology"
it's objectively a pathological use of CSS because it circumvents the C (cascade)
More discussion should be had if the cascade is even beneficial in the first place.
It's ironic because standard software development practices advocate isolation.
I think that's some of the drive behind cascade layers, so we can have more control of the cascade
I quite like Tailwind. I've had great experiences with it, especially on projects where the skill level of contributors was highly variable.
That said, Tailwind is not as powerful as plain old CSS. It's a bit like training wheels for CSS—you gain some guardrails and prevent newbies from messing things up too badly, but you also give up the power modern CSS affords you.
E.g. I invite you to look at some of Ahmed Shadeed's (https://ishadeed.com) layout tutorials, or whatever you find on the CSS-Tricks/Masters.dev homepage today. It's bonkers what you can do with modern CSS!
Tailwind gives you access some of what's possible with CSS today, and they keep adding support for new features, but it's impossible to express everything CSS is capable of using only utility classes. At some point, you need to write some actual real CSS code.
So personally, it's a tradeoff for me. If I really want the full power of CSS, I use plain old CSS. If I'm willing to trade power for the convenience of Tailwind's built-in design tokens and guardrails, then I pick Tailwind.
Both approaches are good and valid. The right choice is context dependent. With And with LLMs in the mix, it's not that hard to port a Tailwind codebase to plain CSS, or vice versa, so picking the wrong thing doesn't have as high a cost as it used to.
They are buying the people and the brand. Even Adam admitted that AI impacted dramatically their business. Selling UI templates in the current era is likely a dead end, even with a brand as strong as Tailwind.
I hope Adam and the team are well and good with this decision. Tailwind is regularly debated here for various reasons, using it helped me have a better understanding of CSS, HTML and design, and made me a better software engineer. Thanks for building and sharing Tailwind!
It’s far from dead. All of the AI models struggle with creativity and consistency. There’s always going to be a market for well designed UX.
> There’s always going to be a market for well designed UX
Given the past 3 years, I will never understand how people can be so confident making statements like this
Yeah. Where's the "well designed UI"?
The only thing left is my Roku box, and it seems to be starting on the road to crappification.
If you are implying that AI models can do 'well designed UX', I would really love to learn the way of doing it.
That's not how I'm reading it. More like, given the past 3 years development, why wouldn't AI be able to do that in the not-so-distant future?
Using AI for design will always be derivative. For many cases that is good enough but for good product design, a human element will most likely always be necessary. Until the machine gains the ability to do just that
The sentiment goes both ways?
The local knitting club and Stanford University use the same flavor of stock/decorative images for their promos and communications.
Can’t believe that the thing that got permanently stale after a month is being put into question. The heresy of it all.
What are you talking about, there's still a market for handmade watches from switzerland. Literally nobody values AI generated UX. Except people with terrible taste. I see it and I email you and tell you how ugly it is.
The billion dollar AI companies saying desgin is dead are still hiring 100k retainer designers to do their landing page.
You simply have terrible taste if you think otherwise.
yes, but it will be the size of the market for smiths, coopers, and arkwrights.
> There’s always going to be a market for well designed UX
A bold claim
I'm not sure it's completely dead.
We use Claude for design of document templates a lot, and whilst we've built a fantastic pipeline for doing that well, asking Claude to then design anything outside of our guardrails isn't effective.
So I could imagine folks prioritising high quality design of all kinds choosing templates that would guide Claude.
I look at a large number of startup websites and it's very clear which ones are using Claude the excessive CAPS headings alone give it away. They look OK but the Claude aesthetic does leave me wondering whether this is a real business or one person using Claude to build a LP.
> Even Adam admitted that AI impacted dramatically their business.
Even the bossman admitted that AI fired his employees, not the boss.
I guess that’s why people talk so much about leadership this leadership that. I’m learning that leadership is when you are the captain of the ship and the ship goes down you man the lifeboat and mourn your sailors over what the Sea did to them.
In this specific case (Tailwind Labs) I don't understand this sentiment at all. It was a completely bootstrapped company! Its entire existence is due to the many years of difficult work by its founders.
What exact outcome would correctly align with "good leadership" in your view? It sounds like you think the CEO/cofounder should have "gone down with the ship" here -- how does that help anyone if it means the entire company would have failed?
It is common in our industry isn't it? There was another startup that fired all their employees then one month later got acquired by CloudFlare. Hard to not see this as fraud in the loose sense of the word.
I was a huge fan of Steve Schoger's YouTube Series - Refactoring UI. Taught me so much about design. Congrats on the exit. Hope it was good.
Bring back the series!
https://www.youtube.com/@SteveSchoger
Agreed! I get inspired just by seeing him talk through his approach to design problems.
Holy shit I had no idea there was a YouTube series, nor that he had a YT channel.
And a recent video is about designing a dashboard with Ai, which is exactly what I been needing from him specifically.
I remember reading the book 6 years ago and I loved how easy it was to understand.
It's also where I first learned about dense UI and was amazed at a before/after example of one. You can clearly see that uncommon common sense he has about UI/UX.
Thanks for mentioning this.
With how good LLMs are getting at coding, running a DevTools company with both an open source and commercial component is getting harder and harder to do. It's easier every day to just vibe code the commercial part if you have the open source part.
The ones that are successful provide other services that are still hard to do, like hosting at scale, or running the open source at scale.
Basically, running something at scale is what DevTools companies need to do to survive. Hosting the open source and the data is one type of running at scale, or helping companies run the open source in their own infrastructure is another way to help them run at scale.
People put things out there for free and the AI companies used that data to replace them. I do wonder if the end result of that is that people will stop putting things out there for free. Open-source development was already a pretty thankless job.
What will Shopify gain from this deal? Why everyone is buying dev tools. Earlier Anthropic bought BunJs. Can anyone explain the business model here?
Controlling critical technology your software runs on.
I think it's to ensure they're in-house projects using the tech keep going smoothly? They also get the talent along with the tech, right?
I instruct my agents to build UI exclusively with bootstrap 5, jQuery, and HTMX.
Every app is fast, responsive, progressive, small, and most importantly: it fits in my brain and I can maintain it. No build step or really any tooling at all.
Curious what jQuery brings for you these days? My favorite jQuery features got implemented in the vanilla DOM APIs (document.querySelector and fetch being the big one for me). Now I'm curious if I'm missing out.
I prefer the terseness of jQuery's API and things like chaining dom operations with the fluent API. I don't like the native DOM API. Too verbose
(I still read and review code)
I still think the only reason to use jQuery is if you need IE11 support.
Otherwise, it's really simple to do all the things you mentioned without the complexity/heaviness of jQuery. Something like this:
``` const $ = s => { const r = {}; const els = [...document.querySelectorAll(s)]; r.text = t => (els.forEach(e => e.textContent = t), r); r.on = (ev, fn) => (els.forEach(e => e.addEventListener(ev, fn)), r); // ... return r; }; ```
Right, I can cobble together my own worse version of jQuery if I wanted to.
Or I can just use jQuery.
jQuery is 30kB, there's not a lot of heaviness. In a world of React, Vue, htmx and what have you, 30kB is nothing.
If you like the syntax and functionality of jQuery, or if you're just use to it now, there's very little reason to no use it, and speed and size certainly isn't a reason. 15 years ago, maybe, but not in 2026.
Does anyone actually need IE11 support in 2026? It was released 13 years ago.
Makes sense to me. Their motto was "Write less, do more", i.e. its conciseness was a major selling point, but that seems to have been forgotten now that its other selling points have been rendered obsolete.
I recall scripts ending up as little as one-third the size of vanilla JS, when rewritten using jQuery (where the website was otherwise using jQuery anyway).
I've been thinking the same about the future of frameworks. Many of the complexities in today's frameworks exist for "developer experience", given that's less and less relevant by the month, it will be interesting to see the tech stacks chosen going forward.
I do boostrap 5 and htmx. works great
Also a solid combination for LLM assisted apps. Claude Code will just get it. It's good with Tailwind also though.
Even better than that - just use bootstrap 3
IMO it is literally not possible for a medium+ jQuery app to fit in a brain or be maintained easily (especially without TypeScript). That's why React et al were invented. It is smaller, faster, no build step for sure, but I would never reach for jQuery for any possibly ambitious app.
If you are using mostly agents and don't actually need to have it in your brain, then I'd probably go with strict TypeScript at the very least for verifiability purposes
(1) Shop Pay is one of the services that I’ve seen grow fastest in market share ever. Like in the last six months it seems like almost every independent online store sees my phone number and offers me a text to pay via shop.
(2) Tailwind is part of the CSSSlop ecosystem that includes of course the original Bootstrap, SASS, Emotion and many similar things that never really worked from an ecosystem perspective because learning the specifics on one CSSSlop framework never means you don’t have to completely understand CSS. CSSSlop just forces you to learn more things and face more cognitive overload.
Now that CSS includes most of what CSSSlop did, you can just use CSS and that’s a good thing. And if AI can answer questions about CSS and save you from trying to find answers in splogs or learning to navigate 50+ spec documents to find definitive answers, isn’t that a good thing?
Glad they have a patron now. I use it in my project (because scoped-css is not yet available in browsers and I do not want to deal much with CSS). LLMs write Tailwind easily, so that's good. And I do not have yet another place where cruft builds up (the CSS files) while they changes to them can silently mess up some UI I did not check.
So thanks Shopify for taking them under your wings.
X-mas wish: that the Servo project gets a proper patron (looking at you, Huawei and Samsung).
Glad to hear the team found a successful exit. Adam bought the tailwindlabs.com domain from me when they started out and he seemed genuinely cool. Hope they keep building tools so many people enjoy using.
I hope Adam (and other Tailwind team members) got handsomely paid as part of this acquisition.
Working on an open source project for 9 years and then getting a sizable bonus in an acquisition that keeps the open source project alive seems like a decent scenario to me.
(I don't think there are any investors involved here.)
Really happy for Adam and the rest of the crew - they made a great product for a prior era, and hopefully this is a soft landing for them given their revenue stream dried up.
Tailwind at this point is a coding language and a brand with no direct product. It's a great acquisition when you want mind share and developer love, and are OK with there being no revenue involved. Shopify is a solid match for that.
As a lifetime access purchaser of Tailwind UI and a user of their recent oatmeal template, the news that they’re winding down tailwindui hurts a little.
Glad they got their exit, Adam deserves it, but I don’t know why they can’t see the value in preset UI templates. AI sucks at building UI, it sucks a little less when it’s got codebase references to build upon and reference.
I guess they aim to integrate tailwind into their shopify design code. AI understands most of tailwind css and it can generate good design using tailwind. this is a good step
But why?
What’s the commercial argument for shopify buying a css library. What’s the synergy and business benefits.
Is it just the hire of the tailwind devs with some fanfare?
Business model always struck me as a little odd when Tailwind, by it's very nature, makes it trivial to copy existing implementations
The timing is interesting. Stylex (Metas CSS in JS library) is taking off right now because it seems a better fit for AI driven coding in the long run.
Apparently they did a long experiment with Stylex at Shopify and found that it was "a wash in every metric":
https://xcancel.com/argyleink/status/2095253698431844607
Linear adopted stylex as well and published a comprehensive write up https://linear.app/now/styling-linear-for-the-future-stylex
And it has an explicit LLM Resources endpoint: https://stylexjs.com/docs/llm-resources
Weird acq but okay
Mr Lutke is kinda weird lately in Canada. Wonder why the tailwind guys are getting involved with him
This is hardly surprising after the recent string of venture-backed developer tooling acquisitions: Bun -> Anthropic, VoidZero (vite) -> Cloudflare, Astral (uv, ruff) -> OpenAI
The only thing that remains to be seen is how these affect those tools going forward (and who's next)
I was a hardcore tailwind user and my projects still use it. That said, in the last 6 months, I haven't touched it. I just let my agents style things as they want. ... and they just use plain CSS.
I really appreciated tailwind, but it solved problems that fewer people face these days.
I think the bigger issue is that AI is attacking the business model, not necessarily the product.
Tailwind can still be massively popular, but if an AI agent can look at the docs/examples and generate 80% of what you'd otherwise pay for, that popularity doesn't translate into customers anymore.
Feels like we'll see this happen to a lot of "we already figured this out for you" developer products.
> Feels like we'll see this happen to a lot of "we already figured this out for you" developer products.
It has for me at least.
I had a solo business for 10 years selling tech video courses (learning Flask, Docker, etc.). It was enough to pay the bills, but for the last few years it has nose dived. For 2026 YTD it has generated $20 / month in revenue but it costs almost triple that to host the courses so I've been losing hundreds of dollars a year, for years. All while watching LLMs cannibalize ~600 free in-depth blog posts and YouTube videos only to re-sell that information to anyone willing to pay.
It completely flipped my life upside down to where for 20 years I was able to sustain myself doing contract work + courses to having to take full time work. All of this started when AI became popular.
It's all related to a massive loss of traffic to my site which was the entry point to both contract work and the courses. Both sides of the business have been crushed.
It's about time! Adam has been stressed about revenue and long term viability of a business to support a popular CSS /UI library framework like Tailwind. Shopify was an early customer too.
PS: I like how Adam dissing on the famous Claude Speak "load bearing" with a strike-through!. Subtle, but EVERY PUN intended, hah!
https://tailwindcss.com/blog/tailwind-is-joining-shopify#~te...
I thought Laravel would've been the one to scoop them up, but I'm glad they landed with Shopify. Adam's a solid dude and what him and his team have done to commoditize web design is to be lauded.
To think it started as a side project and grew to the scale it did. Very impressive work.
How well is Laravel doing nowadays?
Pretty well https://x.com/taylorotwell/status/2093329899083759634?s=46
Disclaimer: aarondf is an employee of Laravel. https://x.com/aarondfrancis
Yeah! So is Taylor otwell, the primary source to whom I linked.
Worth noting, Tailwind was canadian, and Shopify is also canadian. I like that this was the outcome. The labs business was obviously no longer needed in this era of AI, and I'm glad Tailwind will continue to get proper backing from Shopify to evolve further.
Off topic, I read this as "Shopify acquires Thailand". Many strange things have happened in recent years but at least that still remains absurd.
I read “Spotify acquires Tailwind” and was slightly terrified for a split second
This was definitely an acqui-hire. I'm glad Adam could find an exit like this.
Joining the company with the CEO eho believes only the rich should get a vote?
I bought Tailwind UI when it first launched and then ended up using it for a product that had a lot of success several years later and would consult the included components anytime I was going to build something in my app but now with AI I haven't done that in the last couple years at all because the AI just handles it... It's crazy to think how much AI changed this sort of business model
As someone who built their entire platform on Tailwind and has been running gpt-6-astra for the last 5 days straight working on the migration away from it because it leaves an irrecoverable pile of slop when your project becomes large enough... Heed my warning.
It's not that Tailwind itself is bad. It's good. But agents are notorious for re-inventing the wheel without hard constraints that prevent them from doing it - and when I say hard constraints, I don't just mean an AGENTS.md file or a skill they can ignore. As such, I found that design consistency was near impossible and a constant firefight. It worked at first, but when my project got sufficiently large, it became worse and worse.
I initially tried combatting this with a spaghetti-soup of linter rules, but it wasn't very effective to maintain. So I'm biting the bullet and moving on to greener pastures.
What are you switching to?
I'm probably going to catch heat for this, because people (I did too, I won't lie) have a visceral reaction to the Javascript for styling, but... StyleX.
It came on my radar a few months ago when I first started noticing this rot problem. Then recently I saw that it was getting quite hyped and people have been singing its praise for solving this exact problem. So I'm giving it a shot.
Can't say for certain whether it will work out well or not yet, but based on the feedback I've been seeing from others, I'm hopeful.
i.e. https://dev.to/adioof/stylex-won-css-in-js-because-ai-agents... (not my blog).
For us we went with CSS modules, it just made more sense for us to stay closer to web fundamentals since our styles are used across different tech stacks. From my experience in the last year, AI is quite good at sticking to your css ground rules and gleaning css patterns from other files all while being underpinned by design tokens (can have linters raise raw values to question also). Gotta use whatever works best for the job!
That blog is obvious AI slop.
I have ~4-5 completely non technical friends who've used LLMs to generate their personal websites, complete with appointment scheduling and payment links. We can't be more than a year out for full store generation with 1 click upload to hosting providers.
I don't think Shopify needs to exist anymore sadly.
It is an age of consolidation.
I'm happy to hear that because their business model of selling ready available components is pretty much dead due to AI.
Shopify gets to control a large portion of the CSS UI market that AI so eagerly generates. Good for them
And based on Tailwind’s previous statements about AI impact on them and their business, it’s possible Shopify got a good deal.
When I was at Shopify we used Tailwind along with our internal component library to great effect. Tailwind is a great css framework, but their business model is doomed by AI. Tobi acquihiring them for making a great product is a good result.
You're talking about Polaris? I really don't see how they're compatible or how Tailwind is useful to those liquid templates. The only thing that makes sense to me is headless Shopify, maybe that's the direction Shopify is headed in? But they've been struggling to get any traction there it seems to me.
I'm a very happy tailwind plus customer, I paid for their expertise on crafting good templates and best practices. Bit sad that they aren't going to add more but it was inevitable with AI cutting their lunch.
I am interested to see what comes out of this. We are living through some interesting times to say the least.
Happy for Tailwind as this was possible the best outcomes possible for them at this stage. It is clear that most of the frameworks for software are going to struggle significantly because of AI. Especially CSS frameworks. No one cared about writing CSS code by hand before AI and now with AI, no one needs to care about frameworks as well. AI writes it for you so I don't care whether its tailwind or plain css.
Even though people aren't huge fans of Tailwind or Shopify, Tailwind honestly saved my life a few years ago.
AI and Tailwind-based template systems sort of stole Tailwind's lunch, so I'm glad there was light at the end of the tunnel for Adam and co.
> Tailwind is a ~~load-bearing~~ very important part of the stack
This is beautiful. Art, even. And it speaks to my very soul.
I hope Tailwind gets its own space to expand. Shopify has done some great things for Ruby/Rails ecosystem. Hope that spirit continues
IIRC Tailwind was toast a few months ago (laying off the few engineers that kept it going), so is this Shopify rescuing the company?
More like Shopify skinning the company to make a novelty hat.
I love tailwind's work, but AI stole their customer base worse than a natural disaster would destroy a factory or other kind of business,
At least some of them got an escape plan before going bankrupt
Glad they found a home, but the press release doesn’t make it sound like a victory (or I’m pessimistic!).
Sad to see ui.sh go away, however. Is there something else like it out there? Especially the brand kit skill.
I had to create special checker/linter to analyze my code base ( and asked AI to loop it through it as some kind of test ), so as to avoid AI (mis)using tailwind class here and there. that was 2025, AI and linter both improved quite a lot since.
God I about had a heart attack when I misread this as Tailscale joining Shopify.
If they get acquired it’d probably be cloudflare.
I also read it as Tailscale at first and couldn't figure out why Shopify would want to buy them.
Tailwind Labs != Tailwind
In case it wasn’t clear
I see "acquire" followed by "Tail" and I get concerned. This is fine though.
is "scale" the ending you are thinking of? Or is there something I don't know about
Tailwind has always sucked, and I hope this is the beginning of the end for this stupid library. Web designers universally agreed that utility class names are a bad design choice, and then Adam W, who probably never bothered to understand CSS, made quite possibly the most over engineered CSS wrapper of all time. Bad. For. Everyone. Use. CSS. Modules.
Shopify should deal with their hijacked accounts first. A high percentage of sponsored Google search sponsored results lead to scams on hijacked sites.
"load-bearing" - lol, nice easter egg. no one likes the AI-isms in writing!
I alwasy thought they would be aquired by Vercel or maybe Anthropic but didn't see this one coming
Probably the most damaging idea ever exiated in frontend dev. I'm glad that AI now abstracts all that crappy tailwind code away so I can stop giving a shit.
Not sure how to feel about this, I hope Shopify will leave the Tailwind team alone for the most part and let them continue what they've been doing.
reading that shopify supports users designing their own custom shopfronts really helped put the acquisition into context. makes a lot of sense to bet on tailwind for that.
Excellent news for the team, and a sad news for the rest of us.
But I guess that the cycle of life: products gets purchased and slowly die.
Glad they managed to get a way out after their financial difficulties. Hopefully they got a decent exit.
Actually a good price for it i think, i prefer the design to the tipped ones tbh.
Wondering when Shopify is gonna wind up next. Not a good time to be a (small) software company.
Shopify is a publicly traded company, and they own a significant share of the whole e-commerce market, they aren’t going anywhere lol :)
How do you define small?
If you look at the monitor, the Shopify logo fits between the thumb and index finger, I suppose that's the only small thing about Shopify, lol.
All joking aside, I don't think most of us consider Shopify as a small company. I personally hope that Tailwind stays around after this acquisition. I was there when Shopify bought Remix and that project is as good as dead in the water now.
I liked remix so much, very sad it ended up in a graveyard
When your moat is just code.
Well then Shopify isn't small!
The most pertinent part for many:
> On the commercial side, we'll no longer be trying to grow the business around Tailwind. All existing customers will of course maintain their access to products like Tailwind Plus and ui.sh, but we're closing sign ups for new customers to focus on Tailwind CSS at Shopify.
> All existing customers will of course maintain their access to products like Tailwind Plus and ui.sh, but we're closing sign ups for new customers to focus on Tailwind CSS at Shopify.
You've got to wonder how long that model can continue if no new customers are allowed in.
They've even removed the Plus splash page so clicking Plus on the homepage or going to /plus takes you to a login page with no detail about what it was.
Very glad they got their exit. Provided huge value for years
That's too bad, but you gotta do what you gotta do.
Where we are going, we won't need css.
Well I guess that's good?
I knew this would happen.
I guess they wanted to prevent losing their voting rights if Lütke‘s idea becomes reality
Ugh. I remember how much Tailwind Labs has struggled for funding and it sucks to see Shopify get them. It also sucks to see they're discontinuing their paid products permanently, effective immediately -- they're not making them free, they're taking them away. You simply can't get them now. I understand why this had to happen but it is sad to see.
Struggled for funding because their business model collapsed overnight and isn't coming back, this is probably a best case scenario.
Why does it suck that shopify got them? They seem to be a good steward of open source, especially with rails.
Usually when stuff like this happens, it means that Tailwind's developers are moving to work on Shopify instead, which means Tailwind CSS itself goes into maintenance mode. That's what usually happens when a dependency is picked up by a company with a huge, "more interesting" product -- the dependency starts to depend on the more interesting product for attention, and stops receiving attention on its own merits. It grows only to support the more interesting product.
Furthermore, I already have specific experience with Tailwind Labs neglecting their other libraries that aren't Tailwind CSS itself, probably because they were only meant to support their paid products (which now will no longer exist! so maybe those other libraries will just stop getting updates altogether). Headless UI was something I wanted to rely on heavily, but it's not built to be flexible enough and basic issues from 2021 or earlier haven't been resolved or seemingly even reviewed.
Now that they have Shopify, I'll be surprised if Tailwind CSS continues to receive any more attention than Headless UI did all those years ago. This acquisition puts Tailwind CSS in exactly that position.
(Edited to fix "Spotify" typos...)
Tailwind is more relevant than ever in web development, it's practically the native language for UIs in the LLM world.
I don't see why they'd put Tailwind into maintenance mode when they just purchased a pretty major building block in the modern web stack.
> which means Tailwind CSS itself goes into maintenance mode.
You are making quite an assumption here.
Bootstrap was a twitter os library that is still in development today.
For some definition of "struggling" that encompasses a situation where you get $3M/year for renaming CSS variables.
well at least the founders got a bailout.
Sad to see this company bailed out by a racist tho
tailwindcss is an anti-pattern that breaks fundamental rule of software engeneering - separation of concerns. just learn how to use CSS - it will benefit you in the long run. i suspect they will be "paywalling" more and more features in the future.
HTML and CSS are not a separation of concerns in anything I've ever built. They're both representing the layout/design. I don't want them separate.
You end up having to keep them synchronized anyway, messing with your HTML is frequently gonna break your CSS. Tailwind is infinitely more pleasant to write than a separate CSS file that has to be kept in sync with the HTML.
dude, have you heard about single file components where you have HTML & CSS in one place? XD
> separation of concerns
> everything in one place
You're destroying your own argument.
what happens to people who paid for Tailwind Plus?
Will this mean they yet again throw away their component library for Shopify apps and make everyone migrate AGAIN?
It makes me happy to see they'll continue to exist in an organization that benefits from their success. I really enjoy Tailwind and I feel terrible for the people in the company who watched their revenue plummet like that with the advent of AI
Does tailwind even make sense in the age of agentic engineering?
Tailwind was created to mitigate HUMAN problems, and HUMAN risks. Are these same problems experienced by an agentic workflow? I'm not so sure. The calculus is different.
I remember the time when I did not need any fancy frameworks, webfonts, tons of JS and effin cdns to present my thoughts to the world.
This time is now. Your bickering about how to more efficienty bloat a page is... pitiful.
Off topic but. I never liked how tailwind looks but that font. Inter Variable. That is a new level of garbage.
Does this mean tailwind plus is basically deprecated, and wont get any new stuff at all? That really sucks for anyone who bought the life time license.
This is awful.
R.I.P. Tailwind.
Edit: To clarify, I mean being assimilated by Shopify is awful. I understand that the Tailwind devs were neutered by AI skynet slop taking over before - that is also awful. That's actually two awful news we get here in one news entry.
Phew was worried it was tailscale
Happy for Adam and his team.
Expected move and good to hear. Gives Tailwind some extra maintenance years. But like with all these sugardaddy takeovers, the next expected move is “Tailwind is now independent again“.
Y tho
meh fuck shopify
People saying design is dead or good UX doesn't matter anymore.
1. Are sloplords.
2. AI companies that sell the idea that AI can replace your designer, are still paying 100k retainers to designers for their landing pages lol.
3. People will probably replace backend engineering before they ever replace design, because they will want to seem more human.
4.Handmade watches, and handmade luxury clothing is one of the biggest markets on earth, almost as large as tech itself. I really don't think that urge for the handmade, made by someone with wonderful tastes is ever going to disappear.
Also, no great designer used tailwindcss. This is made by and for slop lords. Which is most of HN, you people have no taste.
Another open source project being consumed by capitalist vultures. It's not enough to just fund them as charity is it?
They are a for profit? why do you think they need to be a charity?
And even if they were a charity, the sponsors... well I don't think you would like them either.
They were 'captured' before Shopify bought them.
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347/
Luckily, Tailwind is, and likely always will be, a block at the very top. Not a critical piece of infrastructure.
And even then, how would Tailwind "die"?
Oh, bejesus. Shopify awards the Stupefiers.
Why would anyone need any kind of framework for CSS?! It's the inherent human need to control something, to package water and sell it as magical water.
I've never understood the whole idea. Bootstrap: the hard-to-remember, horrible shitshow forced on frontend devs. And people thought there couldn't possibly be anything lower than that. Then Tailwind arrived. Apparently, frontend joes are so below average in brain capacity that they need their shiny thing covered in stickers saying "modern" and "state of the art", otherwise they feel dirty, like they haven't taken a shower in a week.
It's like building a framework to simplify the SQL dialect. In reality, there's zero need for it, because SQL is so simple and easy to understand that you'd have to be a moron to use some kind of framework for it. The same applies to CSS. Tailwind is an abomination, a horrible mess, just like all the other pointless CSS 'frameworks'.
These aren't frameworks. They're just some semi-psycho control freak's projection of control over something that doesn't need controlling.
Let's just say it out loud: Tailwind is being rewarded for turning tons of frontend joes into complete idiots by telling them the tale that their shiny thing is the new standard, when all it ever was was an experiment in the gullibility of inherently moronic people.
> It's like building a framework to simplify the SQL dialect. In reality, there's zero need for it
Years of people deploying web apps and using (My-)SQL without prepared statements provide a counterexample to this. One can argue about ORMs, but stating SQL would need no abstraction layer around it seems questionable to me :/
These are the same anti-Tailwind arguments that have been circulating forever.
If you want to build a case against Tailwind that's actually compelling, you should start by understanding what it is first. Only then can you compare it to other frameworks and methodologies.
I've made arguments like this in the past, and my position hasn't changed much
https://pdx.su/blog/2023-07-26-tailwind-and-the-death-of-cra...
Precisely this.
Do you have an argument, or are you coasting on the "trust me bro" vibes of the parent?
dont like "Cascading", inline css better https://vuejs.org/guide/scaling-up/sfc#what-about-separation...
I thought the narrative by Lütke et. al. was that the clankers could do everything by themselves!
Turns out that clankers generate beige static websites that use 100% CPU, so some assistance is needed.
We now have proof that the above is true, since Lütke adheres to the principle that any non-clanker usage has to be justified. Let us assume he justified the purchase.
I read this as "Shopify acquires Taiwan"