alt Hacker NewsThere 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.
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Yes. Maybe their business model was never sustainable and now they are unfairly blaming IA as a scapegoat to justify layoffs.
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.
> 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.
> 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.