Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

AI taking jobs by users avoiding ads. It makes me wonder how widespread this is and what other "not so obvious" job-taking effects it has.

We should have Telethons for all the companies on whose products we build our products but whose livelihood depends on the goodwill of others lest can't keep the lights on OR they get sold to some soulless corp and turned to crap.

How does something like Tailwind lead to a company big enough that you can layoff 75% of the engineering team?

I never appreciated tailwind until AI models revealed it as such a token-efficient way transport styles between models and other use-cases. AI aruably hurts demand for their premium offering the same way it hurts demand for junior devs.

If your business can easily be replaced or lose revenue because of AI, it doesn't sound like a good business model to begin with

Sincerely hope the Tailwind team can navigate this rough patch.

Frontend output from LLMs is (in my experience) subpar when compared to human-built components. However, I am not primarily a frontend dev. I would definitely pay for something that let me easily build frontends using vetted components, in ways they were designed to work together.

This seems like something that would sit solidly in the bailiwick of framework designers like Tailwind Labs. But it seems they primarily target frontend developers, so their focus is elsewhere.

I'm happy to see this, not because I wish Adam failure. I am a Tailwind user myself and use it in all of my projects. Generally am a fan of Adam and respect his business.

The happy (in a bad way) part is seeing very successful projects like Tailwind get financially fucked by AI. It means it's not just me.

I am a small tech course creator who was able to make a living for 10 years but over the last 3 years it has tanked to where I make practically zero. Almost all due to less traffic hitting my blog which was the source of paid course purchases. I literally had to shift my entire life around after 25 years of being a successful contractor because of this.

I hope the world understands how impactful (both good and bad ways) having an unchecked AI scrape the world's content and funnel everything directly through their monetized platform while content creators get nothing in return is.

I bought their Plus thing a while back and not I can't find myself a reason to use it.

If I was considering that purchase in today's landscape, I would surely not buy it. At $299 USD I can have a decent model do the job of writing custom tailored components for me and iterate extensively on them.

Hard sell with a "UI Kit" versus a "UI Brain".

If I were Adam I would drop to $29.99 and accept the status quo, but not make it lifetime access to try and not piss off existing owners, and I would pivot to building a Frontend AI Agent and a Tailwind Labs Model.

I love Tailwind, and I am really sorry Adam and co are going through this. They've built a great product, and it's brought joy back building again for me.

It's really hard to run a company, especially when your product is mostly OSS... Tailwind has helped thousands of companies save (or make) millions of dollars, and AI almost by default uses it to generate beautiful websites. This is such a hard position to be in... to watch your product take off, but your financials plummet. It really sucks how affected the team is after all the good work they've done.

It's important to remember this is just the commercial arm. The OSS side has as many maintainers as Adam allows and the community is quite active with PRs and volunteer work. Tailwind the project will be ok. Someone will fork it if stales thanks to its popularity. That being said, many more companies should sponsor considering its ubiquitous adoption.

Licensing hasn't caught up yet. It probably wouldn't be the worst idea to have a simple content copyright license protocol or standard that works for LLMs?

Something simple and obvious, like sticking a license file that has certain expected fields in /.well-known. I wouldn't be surprised if this is already being discussed because it would easily allow agents to check for special license requirements that only apply to them, directing them how to share content while remaining in compliance.

Never been a fan of tailwind, but this is kinda sad. Given it's popularity what a sad situation that they aren't getting able to get properly funded.

I think the solution is one of the big companies with lots of money to acquire tailwind. Specifically Vercel. They use it, their v0 thing uses tailwind allover, they have bought a bunch of open source companies in the past, and they should have deep enough pockets. Last year they acquired tremor blocks, which is a UI library, that uses tailwind!

Makes perfect sense, lets get it done.

If the business model had evolved together with artificial intelligence, we wouldn’t be talking about a 75% layoff today we might be talking about a 75% hiring spree instead.

As a avid user of Tailwind and one who purchased Tailwind CSS Plus, it's very sad to hear.

OSS without founders having it's own managed software company is always a difficult position. (e.g. database vendors open source but also have their own company providing managed service and support allowing sustainable development). Hope of getting strong support from companies is unsustainable.

Curious what should be the business model for a library something like tailwind?

They could add a premium features but entry users not allowed to use certain features is a bad experience

The issue seems to be that LLMs already consumed large parts of the templatized code somewhere. Not directly from TW but from some other project. Codex / Claude are also exceptionally good at whipping out a UI quickly even when given flimsy requirements. Its hard running this business and competing against a several billion dollar machine. Wonder how Material UI is doing as they have a similar business model.

Tailwind is nice and all be it’s crazy verbose, I still am a fan of bootstrap. In the days of AI and tokens. Tailwind classes and styling cure through tokens. lol

Sad to hear. I have a Tailwind Plus license (when it was previously Tailwind UI). They are fantastic components and to be honest they keep me writing React even though I would rather not. Catalyst UI is too good.

not the most important point here, but llms.txt won't have any impact on anything anyway.

I'm a Tailwind Plus customer in spite of not being the world's biggest Tailwind fan. Even though it really grinds my gears how unreadable markup can be when littered with Tailwind classes, I appreciate the quality and variety of the templates and components available in Tailwind Plus and the constant (free!) updates. So this is a bummer to hear. Many thanks to Adam and the team.

Refactoring UI is a great book that i've had a ton of value from. Tailwind plus also, and i've been so surprised/impressed to see that my one time purchase kept granting me new stuff. Thanks a lot to Adam and the Tailwind team.

Ever feel like creating and nurturing an opensource project? Some of those responses make me second guess doing anything with opensource.

I've seen that the team had 4 members. 3 being laid off.

I nearly always use Tailwind, had no idea there was even a Plus offering. Checking the site I see it now but it’s a subtle link. Also wonder if shad/cn had something to do with the reduced usage of plus.

This is the actual comment that it's mentioned: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...

However, the whole conversation is worth reading (but it's sort of heartbreaking).

Sounds like fairly decent folks, all around.

Tailwind UI could be the missing piece for AI generated frontend to have consistency, but it seems that shadcn took that place in the last 3-5 years.

Companies like Vercel, Lovable, and Stackblitz should pay salaries to each of these engineers. Their business succeeded only because Tailwind exists.

My takeaway from this: If LLM can eat your lunch, you should remove your cash cow from crawler avenues and gatekeep it to humans only

I bought Tailwind UI/Plus just for my side projects several years ago because it was so useful. I'm very sad to see this.

So, is it AI or a problematic business model that caused this?

I bought Tailwind UI, now Plus a couple of years ago. I've also dabbled with a Claude skill that scrapes a "UI block" source from the site and transforms it into a Rails view component. Maybe there's a way to make Plus and LLMs work together rather than compete?

Specific link to actual comment: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...

I think that the OP should update link to this comment

> And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around and make sure the people who are still here are getting their paychecks every month.

Man, you can really feel the anxiety and desperation in Adam's reply.

Part of me wants to say "look what evil VC money does to devs", but that's only a harsh critism of a bystander.

Monetization is a normal path that the successful OSS projects would take. Tailwind went big on the startup route, took a bunch of VC cash a couple of years back, but despite the massive impact on the dev world, they clearly didn't hit the revenue numbers investors expected. Now the valuation bubble popped, and they're forced into massive layoffs. Though to be fair, maintaining a CSS library probably doesn't require that many people anyway.

I really feel for Adam here. He didn't really do anything wrong. Eagering to build a startup after your project blows up is a totally natural ambition. But funding brings risks. Taking other people's money makes you go from being the owner to just another employee real quick. And once you hop on that VC train, you don't really call the shots anymore. Sometimes you can't stop raising or scaling as your own will.

If you find a solid business model, that's great. But if not, well, honestly, a 75% layoff is getting off lightly. At least they still have a chance to keep on.

But he obviously didn't foresee this coming. He’s getting torn between being an OSS maintainer and a CEO who have to be responsible for stackholders and employees. That internal conflict must be brutal. It’s pretty obvious he didn't reject the PR for technical reasons. It's just because the reality hit him hard, and he has to respond to it, even if it goes against his mind as a developer.

Really hope Tailwind pulls through this. Also, this is a lesson worth noting for the rest of us. As indie devs, if you ever get the chance to take VC money, you really gotta think hard about whether you're truly ready for the strings that come attached.

There is an industry wide biting the hand that feeds them going on. It would be nice for people to realise that's what's happening.

Just charge a bucks for every deployment or something. Most of will easily pay a dollar.

Tailwind should not be free, its good.

They have the UI Blocks, Templates and UI Kit in https://tailwindcss.com/plus. I think they are in a good position to build an AI website builder similar to lovable.dev if they wanted to.

This has been a long time coming I think. I remember listening to an interview with the creator maybe over a year ago now and him saying revenue is way down, presumably because of AI

I do wonder though if the llms.txt could actually be used for their benefit? Why not literally recommend the paid upgrades within it?

Nothing but love to Adam and the Tailwind team (including now-former team members) today. They’ve made huge contributions to web development and it just sucks, sucks, sucks that things have turned out this way. I know he’ll find a way forward, though.

I would also say that the tailwind ui library is facing stiff competition from free offerings like shadcn.

While I'm a shameless freeloader with mostly backend skills - Adam has my utmost respect for out of the box innovation.

I did buy some of this books. Not the Tailwind UI though.

Adam, you gotta pay bills too. I understand that. And I respect that.

The day a product of mine starts making money, I'll come knocking your door.

Thank you.

Why would a CSS library turn into a company? How do they even make money while there are hundreds of alternatives?

Bootstrap is more than enough for 99.99% of the projects, and it is free.

That's sad to hear, if true, and I'd have gladly paid for Tailwind if they'd had a "OK, so you use our CSS indirectly" program in place. I'm aware of "Tailwind Plus", but that seems to be React-only, and thus the opposite of where I want to be.

I never personally wanted Tailwind as a product, but really feel for them when I see comments like this one [1]:

> Here's a friendly tip for the Tailwind team that you should already know, but I will repeat anyways: If your goal is monetizing your software, then making your software as easy to use for people's workflows, is paramount.

I made the horrible life mistake of starting a company around developer tools, and I would never, ever repeat the experience because of “friendly” stuff like this. I don’t know why software developers are so entitled, but it’s a serious culture problem.

[1] https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...

Where's the 75% layoff number from ? This thread is about making docs llm friendly.

No way the author of the PR created a TikTok to moan and mentioned it in 2 separate comments and accused Tailwind devs of "throwing a tantrum" ahaha.

Oh my days, how cringeworthy.

> Going to lock this one as it's spiraling a bit.

Well that was an understatement. That issue devolved completely.

Can someone explain to me the advantage of writing class="bg-blue" instead of style="background-color: blue;" and why anyone ever thought they could make meaningful money from enabling the former?

Multiple tiktok self-promotions in github comments is nuts

I absolutely love Tailwind CSS, big fan of Adam, too, just watching his journey over the past several years. I'm a bootstrapped solopreneur, too, doing an open core business for my dotnet job orchestrator Didact. It's so difficult running a business, I feel for him and his engineers he had to let go. Maybe they can build some sort of app to go along with Tailwind. Heck, even if they made the base library itself paid one day, I'd probably pay for it. Using Tailwind is just that good for me.

Anyone selling software components is going to get cooked by LLMs. People have been talking about that since ChatGPT 3 landed. It's just sad to see it actually playing out.

Shoutout to Adam Wathan and team. I rarely shell out any money, but Tailwind was an exception. They actually made front end development fun for me and added tons of value with their UI kit etc. Even though I rarely use it, I bought the lifetime to support their mission. Hope they can continue supporting the framework. It was the best thing to happen to front end in a long time imo.