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.

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.

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 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.

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.

I've always loved Tailwind, but at this point I'm not exactly sure why Shopify acquired them.

StyleX, on the other hand, has an explicit LLM Resources endpoint: https://stylexjs.com/docs/llm-resources

> 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.

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)?

Yeah I remember the “I fired 75%” getting glossed as how could AI do this to my staff.

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.

Oof. It’s so sad when businesses with in-demand products suffer from a lack of successful economic mechanism design.

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.