Comment by diggan
15 hours ago
You seem to mostly be arguing for a "~fine, but at least it was fast to develop" outcome, which is certainly one choice. But doing this sort of upfront work is for when you're not just looking for ~fine but something more. That's why sometimes you have to "waste work" to find better ways, even if it takes longer time. R&D basically, but for design.
But there is a time and place for it for sure, not every project is about coming up/producing something "perfect no matter the time/energy". Similarly, not every project is about "getting something OK out there as long as you get there fast".
R&D is supposed to produce something of value. If you agree that iterating rapidly using something like Tailwind can get you ~80% of the way towards some ideal design, do you think that last 20% is worth the upfront cost? I think there are very, very few cases where this will be true, and even for those cases, you can get first to market using the rapid iterated design and then refine it more towards the "ideal" before the upfront design approach even gets out the door.
Nue's approach to styling sounds nice in theory, but it seems like it's only a good fit for a domain you already know well, where the structure of the solution is already well understood and so the upfront design cost is actually minimal. For instance, the example project is a blog, a thing that's been around for like 20 years and whose structure, components and features are already well understood. I just don't think that's very common, but if I'm wrong I would certainly like to someone tackle a project that they don't understand using this approach.