I love tailwind, but I think it’s disingenuous for Adam to claim that “AI” killed the tailwind UI kit business.

Ultimately it was Radix/Shadcn (which uses tailwind for styling of course) that killed the need to buy Tailwind’s UI kits by offering all these primitives with good default styling for free.

Also, the tailwind UI stuff feels pretty dated at this point in comparison to what’s offered in other free UI libraries these days.

Yea I agree that free UI kits like ShadCN basically blew everyone else away. I mean ShadCN has over 100k Stars on Github which is more than even Tailwind. So you can imagine the popularity. Having said that, I do think that AI is a factor as well because most of these components can now be coded by AI as well.

For example, I now routinely use AI to create UI components and my prompt usually includes "use ShadCN like component here" and even give them specific shadcn component names. The result is usually 90% good enough to start with.

Agreed. Also if they had really been trying to drive ARR, they would have made Tailwind UI a subscription/yearly licensing thing instead of a one-time purchase.

There's a reason companies like Adobe/Microsoft switched away from one-time purchase software, and that reason is that it is exhausting and eventually impossible to sustain a business where you have to hunt for brand new customers every single month just to keep the lights on.