| ▲ | AlecSchueler 20 hours ago |
| The question is still why you need multiple devs worth 150-250kpa to maintain a CSS library. |
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| ▲ | andruby 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| The question isn't "what is the lowest cost that a CSS library could be maintained for" The question is rather, how can the most popular UI system (especially for AI models) have a healthy business model? Think of the immense value that Tailwind is bringing to all the companies and developers using it. Surely there should be a way for the creators to capture a small slice of that in our economic system. |
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| ▲ | Maro 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > the most popular UI system (especially for AI models) Like others earlier in the thread I'm symphatetic to this company/project, but your code/project being referenced often in AI output in itself doesn't imply that the thing needs to be a business. bash, curl, awk, Python code with numpy imports, C++, all sorts of code is constantly being generated by AI, doesn't mean curl or numpy should be its own company, or that the AI Labs need to fund them. As other fave written, making $1M+ already feels like a lot, maybe this shouldn't be a company, just 1-2 people who have a great time supporting this thing. I wonder if curl or awk have that kind of funding even.. | | | |
| ▲ | apublicfrog 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > The question is rather, how can the most popular UI system (especially for AI models) have a healthy business model? My question is why does it need one? Most web libraries I've used for the last few decades have not had any corporate structure and certainly haven't made a profit. They're done because someone wanted to showcase their skills and others got involved to help, or for fun or because a company who does something else built them internally and decided to open source. We don't need to apply capitalism to everything. Not everything needs a profit and scale. | | |
| ▲ | rapatel0 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Profit is the life blood of a business. It’s what pays for, mistakes, new ideas, responding to changes in the market. It tells you your are doing good things and that you are doing them well It’s the engineering tolerance that allows a company to operate and remain reliable. It’s amazing to me that engineers don’t understand this concept. (Clarification, not talking about excess profits) |
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| ▲ | AlecSchueler 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | So the millions of dollars are going towards marketing and suchlike you mean? |
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| ▲ | sonofhans 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If you can find a way to do it better or cheaper you’re welcome to try. No one else has. Don’t think it’s a small problem. The number of user agents and platforms supported by Tailwind would melt plenty of larger organizations. |
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| ▲ | AlecSchueler 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This doesn't really answer my question and is quite a flippant response. I didn't claim I could do better, I'm asking why they need so many resources to do what they do. | |
| ▲ | exceptione 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Maybe we accidentally found a more meaningful chance for having a discussion about LLMs. As CSS is limited in scope, ultra-well defined, testable and declarative, this should be a home run for LLMs. | | |
| ▲ | reassess_blind 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It is. That’s why Tailwind had to lay off 75% of their staff. | | |
| ▲ | AlecSchueler 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | But they're still struggling for money. | | |
| ▲ | reassess_blind an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes, they’re struggling because a large part of their business was selling the pro product of pre-built themes, pages and components and whatever else. Now, LLMs have all but killed that side of their business. The latest models are incredibly good at writing Tailwind, to the point where no one is buying the pre-builts. | |
| ▲ | fatata123 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | IsTom 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > limited in scope, ultra-well defined, testable Are we talking about the same CSS? | | |
| ▲ | mexicocitinluez 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | lol People don't realize that Tailwind democratized styling for a lot of people who didn't want to or didn't know how to write CSS. We're not going back to writing hand-crafted CSS with or without LLMs. LLMs, by their nature, work better with Tailwind since it needs a much smaller context to make the right decision. | | |
| ▲ | doodlesdev 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | > We're not going back to writing hand-crafted CSS with or without LLMs.
A lot of us have never stopped writing hand-crafted CSS. Also, in my experience, Gemini 3 Pro is an absolute monster at writing layouts and styling in pure CSS with very basic descriptions of what I want (tested it while I was experimenting with vibe coding in some sleepless night LOL).There are still a lot of developers who loathe using Tailwind and avoid touching it like the plague. Handwritten CSS still offers more opportunities for optimization and keeps your markup much cleaner than spamming utility classes everywhere (I understand the appeal of rapidly iterating with it, though). | | |
| ▲ | mexicocitinluez 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | I apologize, I was being a bit hyperbolic. I spent a decent amount of time working in marketing and ad agencies, and there are absolutely still needs for custom CSS in that area, so I agree. I was more pushing back against the idea that Tailwind will be replaced by vanilla CSS because of LLMs. |
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| ▲ | jpalomaki 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Agents are not yet very good at figuring out how things look on the screen. Or at least in my experience this is where they need most human guidance. They can take screenshots and study those, but I’m not sure how well they can spot when things are a bit off. | |
| ▲ | mexicocitinluez 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Nah, Tailwind is way more important for LLMs than vanilla CSS. Models work in contexts. If my context is "my entire app's styling", then it's going to be really difficult to write styles in line unless it's already pretty perfect. Tailwind doesn't have that problem. It's local. I can define a single theme and KNOW FOR A FACT how something will look before it even touches my code. That's the beauty of utility-like libraries. I stopped working in marketing and advertising (which DID need custom styles), and went to strictly app dev where my needs completely changed. |
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| ▲ | tpmoney 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Well they clearly don't "need" that many devs just to maintain it, since they just laid off most of their devs. But "need" and "want / have the revenue/work to hire and sustain" are different questions. I've never worked a single development position where there wasn't always more work to do and not enough people or time to do it. It appears they previously did have the revenue, and presumably had the work. Now they don't have the revenue, and so they had to let people go, and some of that work will go undone or take longer. |
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| ▲ | toddmorey 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It was more than a library of prewritten css, though, they did quite a bit of engineering work on tooling (speeding up the code scans and dynamically creating custom classes, etc). I respect the team's productivity. This is more a question about the business model of open source, which has always had some challenges. I don't think you can support OSS with premium templates, training, and support once the knowledge is baked into LLMs. |
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| ▲ | plagiarist 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I am wondering why are there three owners for a commercial CSS library? |
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| ▲ | troupo 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| They don't only make TailwindCSS. They also make a large collection of components and templates at https://tailwindcss.com/plus |
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| ▲ | robertjpayne 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes but Tailwind Plus has a flawed business model, AI was not really the reason nobody bought it, it's that it's a lifetime purchase and that shadcn + LLMs has eaten their cake left right and central. If LLMs didn't exist but shadcn still did, do you think people would pay and use Tailwind+ or shadcn? | | |
| ▲ | omnimus 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Tailwind UI is tool companies buy to save dev time mostly on internal/back office tools. It's usually bought per project. The math is pretty easy - if it saves you few hours of devtime you buy TailwindUI. Shadcn and bazillion other similar things are certainly competition but TailwindUI is very broad and of high quality so why not pick the nicest version. The problem is that Tailwind is extremely portable (thats why it's so popular) and since LLMs have been fed all TailwindUI code... people using LLMs don't even have to know that TailwindUI exists they just get some Tailwind styled components. They would probably look pretty confused if you told them you used to buy these templates. | |
| ▲ | d1sxeyes 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What’s the problem with the lifetime purchase? | | |
| ▲ | hennell 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's the difference between one-off revenue and recurring revenue. If you're making new components, making new changes for the new version, adding new css and browser support it's hard to keep going with only income from new customers. | |
| ▲ | corobo 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It takes the recurring out of recurring revenue, 100% churn |
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