Comment by srameshc
2 days ago
> But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business.
Adam is simply trying to navigate this new reality, and he's being honest, so there's no need to criticize him.
Tools like Tailwind are one of the few cases where I totally believe it when the CEO says "we are cutting jobs because of AI".
Sucks that anytime you ask AI to generate a site for you Tailwind will have an impact on that.
And this is why AI coding will eventually degrade into a mess. Enjoy it while it lasts.
AI eats up users caring about $company which makes library, library degrades because nobody is paying, $company goes insolvent, library goes unmaintained and eventually defunct, AI still tries to use it.
Vibe coding with libraries is a fad that is destined to die.
Vibe coding your own libraries will result in million line codebases nobody understands.
Nothing about either is sustainable, it’s all optics and optics will come crashing down eventually.
That's presuming libraries need companies backing them to continue to work. That's a bad state of things in the first place.
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That is one take and certainly possible and negative but I think people create libraries for different reasons.
There are people who will use AI (out of their own pocket for trivial costs) to build a library and maintain it simply out of the passion, ego, and perhaps some technical clout.
That's the same with OSS libraries in-general. Some are maintained at-cost, others are run like a business where the founders try to break even.
I don't see enough people talking about this side of things. Couldn't agree more.
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Yeah, this pattern happens all the time:
1. Plant new trees,
2. Eat fruit from trees, get used to delicious fruit,
3. Planting trees hard, easier to wring out more juice from existing fruit,
4. Forget how to maintain trees, trees die, go to 1.
We are entering stage 3.
It's just interesting because most of the talk is programmers talking about AI taking their job by replacing them not taking their job because it's taking away revenue from the business.
Reminds me of the problem with Google & their rich results which wiped out and continues to wipe out blogs who rely on people actually visiting their site vs. getting the information they seek without leaving Google.
I expect a lot of business disruption because of AI. Agree it's not the same as employee replacement, but it adds to the sort of fog of war around what effect AI is really having.
I suppose in the limit that’s likely to be the fate of all other businesses.
Anything open source will be turned against its authors and against ICs.
We thought it would give us freedom, but all of the advantage will accrue to the hyperscalers.
If we don't build open source infra that is owned by everyone, we'll be owned by industrial giants and left with a thin crust that is barely ours. (This seems like such a far-fetched "Kumbaya, My Lord" type of wishful thinking, that it's a joke that I'm even suggesting this is possible.)
Tech is about to cease being ours.
I really like AI models, but I hate monopolies. Especially ones that treat us like cattle and depopulate the last vestiges of ownership and public commons.
it's a real shame no one warned us this would happen when a bunch of corporatists and opportunists wrested the term "open source" from the advocates of true freedom in the late '90s.
https://www.fsf.org/
But there was money to be made and the friends you thought were friends were just mercenaries with a shiv in their hand.
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> owned by everyone
There's no such thing. Even if on paper "everyone" has an ownership share, in practice it's going to be a relatively small number of people who actually exercise all the functions of ownership. The idea that "everyone" can somehow collectively "own" anything is a pipe dream. Ownership in practice is control--whoever controls it owns it. "Everyone" can't control anything.
> I really like AI models, but I hate monopolies. Especially ones that treat us like cattle and depopulate the last vestiges of ownership and public commons.
I would dispute whether the tech giants are "monopolies", since there's still competition between them, but that's a minor point. I agree with you that they treat individual coders like cattle--but that's because they can: because, from their standpoint, individual coders are commodities. And if automated tools, including AI models, are cheaper commodities that, from their standpoint, can do the same job, that's what they'll use. And if the end result is that whatever they're selling as end products becomes cheaper for the same functionality, then economically speaking, that's an improvement--we as coders might not like it, but we as customers are better off because things we want are cheaper.
So I'm not sure it's a consistent position to "really like AI models" but also not want the tech giants to treat you like cattle. The two things go together.
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IMO, the only ethical and legal way to build LLMs on the entire output of all human creativity, that still respects rights and won't lead to feudalism, is conforming to the actual legal requirements of fair use that are being ignored.
According to fair use doctrine, research models would be okay. Models used in education would be okay. Models used for public betterment by the government would be okay, etc
Pie in the sky version would be that models, their output and the infrastructure they run on would be held in a public trust for everyone's benefit. They wouldn't exist without consuming all of the public's intellectual and creative labor and property, therefore they should belong to the public, for the public.
> Tech is about to cease being ours.
On the hardware side, it's bad, as well. Remote attestation is here, and the frog is just about boiled when it comes to the idea of a somewhat open and compatible PC as the platform for general computing.
It was kinda cool while it lasted, glad I got to see the early internet, but it wasn't worth it to basically sign away for my great grandchildren to be peasants or belong to some rich kid's harem.
They commoditized their complement to their hardware/infra, that being software. Good for them and the value of tech will shift to what is still scarce relatively.
Stop enabling corporations' theft and exploitation.
Don't FOSS by default, unionize, embrace solidarity, and form worker-owned co-ops that aren't run by craven/unrealistic/non-business founders if you want any sort of stability.
It does give us freedom. In fact, it arguably gives more people freedom, as non-programmers can create now simple tools to help themselves. I really don't see any way that it reduces our freedom.
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Some of the critics in the thread are… odious. I’ve written down some of the GH handles, because if I’m ever hiring again, I wanna make sure I’d never hire some of these folks.
I don’t understand how someone can display such contempt towards the maintainer of a thing they’ve used for free.
> I’ve written down some of the GH handles, because if I’m ever hiring again, I wanna make sure I’d never hire some of these folks.
You can block accounts on GitHub and add a note as to why. Might be simpler and more accessible later on than a random TXT (plus, it probably updates if they change their username).
Note that blocking also means they can’t contribute to your repos. Which you may not care about anyway.
Thank you, that’s indeed much cleverer. Unfortunately I’ve closed my account this year, trying to put my money where my mouth is and not furthering the goals of GitHub or Microsoft.
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"Sorry, we cannot give you the job because even though you're qualified and passed our interviews, you were such a meano to Adam! That is a no-go at this organization"
Who trusted you with hiring
Half the people in that thread have this mentality that just using tailwind is enough contribution, so therefore GiVe mY oPuS MoRe InFo
I thought we learned years ago that exposure doesn't keep the lights on. That mentality is nothing but entitlement
One comment stated that "it's not our fault the founder was unable to manage his finances to pay his people" well if open source worked the way people try to act like it does, he shouldn't have to pay anyone, right? But here we are
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That's part of a personality fit.
People get rejected from companies based on nothing but vibes of personality fit every day.
Not wanting to hire a dick who can't keep a cool head and give constructive feedback is perfectly reasonable.
Nice, nothing like a little personal bias to inject into an interview process. If you can't handle criticism and you're just looking for sycophants, you're probably not the type of employer or hiring manager most people want to work for anyway.
Oh, it’s not the criticism. It’s the hatred, the vile attacks on open-source maintainers. I wouldn’t want to work with people like that, would you?
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You can use a product and still be critical, especially when layoffs happen, truth is there are a lot of things we don't know about their finances – tailwind definitely is successful by any metrics, they have corporate sponsors that alone give them a healthy MRR (I count at least $100k/month from the sponsors page alone)
I sympathise that it sucks having to fire people, been there. But it sucks more to get fired.
insert "First time?" meme
I am one of those critics, but I never used Tailwind. A layoff of that magnitude is horrific, but if what they are describing as their business model is true, they really really need to rethink it. I wonder what the size of their marketing team is like, and if they were involved in the layoffs. Seems like they need some help there. I found the "downvote" spam in that thread, for reasonable posts, to be quite off-putting, and that led me to my remarks.
The 75% of the team is 3 out of 4 developers. There are no marketing.
Left are the three owners of tailwind, one engineer and one ops+customer service + partner sails person.
Tailwind, not Tailscale.
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> pejudice: an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge
(Or some such variation of “making an opinion before having information”)
It might be unfair but port11 made the opinion of not wanting to work with people after observing their behaviours so it is not prejudice.
unemployed (dot) com.
Specifically thanks to equity takeover. I’m human, so yes, I can be prejudiced. People who succumb to mob mentality to hate F/LOSS maintainers fall under such prejudice.
I don’t want to sound harsh and didn’t mean to offend you.
I wrote down your handle, so if you are ever hiring, I will be able to skip your toxic place.
If there's anything AI coding is good at, it's writing react components and tailwind css.
I am not 100% sure about that - I usually find AI written CSS to be slightly visually flawed and almost always logically flawed.
The way you write websites that actually work imo, is you understand how your chosen CSS layout engine works roughly, and try to avoid switching between layout modes - traditional to flexbox to grid to flexbox again down the tree can drive the most brillant devs utterly mad .
But seriously, after a certain complexity threshold, it becomes impossible to tell what's going on and why.
And if you don't think about it in advance, it's very easy to reach that threshold, especially if you don't get to write the whole page from scratch, but have to build on the work of others.
AI (and many frontend devs) do write-only CSS - they add classes until the code they write looks right.
But code like that tends to fall apart under multiple resolutions, browsers, screen sizes, devices etc.
I am not a frontend dev, and came pretty late to the frontend party. That said I felt that anything that obscures the raw CSS makes it much harder to deliver UI that works right, as it peppers hidden side effects across your code.
That's why I wasn't too keen on CSS frameworks like Tailwind - I found that when writing frontend code the writing part takes up the minority of the time, it's producing a well thought out layout flow is what is actually the biggest sink of time and effort.
That said, I'm not a frontend dev, and I'm to too good at CSS - but not horrible either - so I defer to the judgement of others who are pros at this, its just my opinion and experience.
> I usually find AI written CSS to be slightly visually flawed and almost always logically flawed.
Funny, this also qualifies most of the _human_ written CSS I've seen. !important all the things!
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If you want a bunch of tailwind class slop, then yes. Otherwise, A lot of context engineering is needed if you want it to write modular tailwind components properly for large projects where consistency is important.
> Otherwise, A lot of context engineering is needed if you want
I am not seeing that. I have a few AI-assisted projects using tailwind and scrolling through it now 99% of it looks... completely modern and professional. I had previously asked it to "completely refactor, a rewrite if needed, all the tailwind/css/app styles. ensure visual and code consistency across pages".
Modern coding tools add tons of their own content, but none of the above was "a lot of context engineering".
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Absolutely, but the AI era seems to have lowered the bar for what's considered passable code. Slop works for most projects.
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Agreed. Also I could not imagine being in his shoes, it must be heartbreaking seeing all his work burn like this.
It is "progress" when tech bros displace traditional workers, but it is "heartbreaking" when a tech bro gets displaced by other tech bros.
Whats the 2026 version of "you should learn to code"?
There’s many people who dislike both of those things. Please think before you write
"You should learn how to vibecode and ship whatever works enough, as fast as possible, to get bought for a wildly disconnected from fundamentals valuation." This may sound flippant, or low quality, but it I assure that it is not intended to be. It is derived from observations of the current tech macro. Quality does not appear to matter, ethics do not appear to matter, sustainability and engineering rigor do not appear to matter; it appears that all that matters is "Start up. Cash in. Sell out. Bro down."
I would love to be proven wrong, truly, because this is a path to the death of craftsmanship, deep knowledge, and to some extent, curiosity, in the domain.
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You should learn to vote for UBI?
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>Whats the 2026 version of "you should learn to code"?
Elderly care.
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When you talk in meaningless terms like "traditional workers" and "tech bros", all it tells me is that you have divided the world into people you like and people you dislike and mourn / celebrate accordingly.
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unfortunately, it doesn't seems like tech bro gets displaced by other tech bros at all and more like corporates running costly ephemeral branding as tech bro by abusing other tech bros works.
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Well, I never read the artcicle because paywall, but there is a WSJ headline today about a $160k mechanic job at Ford that can't be fulfilled because no labor
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I think it's fairly sad that somebody feels this needs to be said.
I don't buy it. They failed to build a sustainable business model and are now suffering the consequences. Everybody is leaning into AI because it works (in the sense that it pays the bills). Saying the layoffs were because of AI offloads the blame.
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He fired a shitload of people, of course we can criticise him
Three. He fired three people.
Just posting the "75%" without context is a bit of an odd choice. He explains why in the podcast, but it still feels like he should have specified immediately to avoid assumptions about scale.
He himself said "75%", nowhere in that thread does he say 3 people. That's why the headline is like that.
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I'm also criticizing you for not hiring the laid-off people at their former salary.
>and he's being honest
oh, come the fuck on. it's "AI made us do it" drivel that companies began to justify layoffs with in 2023 (!!!).
Tailwind is just another FOTM frontend thing. I saw dozens of them come, gain some popularity, then abruptly disappear once the marketing budget ran out.
He mentions that tailwind is more popular than ever before but their revenue is down 80% so unless he’s lying about that it makes sense rather than tailwind going out of style.
However, why is that even surprising? Tailwind is essentially a frontend css stylesheet. What business could there possibly be around that?
I understand, they have UI kits, books, etc. but just fundamentally, it was never going to be easy to monetize around that long term, with or without AI.
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I suppose Tailwind might be more popular because it fits AI development better?