Comment by sosodev
3 days ago
The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such things.
While I understand that this has been difficult for him and his company... hasn't it been obvious that this would be a major issue for years?
I do worry about what this means for the future of open source software. We've long relied on value adds in the form of managed hosting, high-quality collections, and educational content. I think the unfortunate truth is that LLMs are making all of that far less valuable. I think the even more unfortunate truth is that value adds were never a good solution to begin with. The reality is that we need everyone to agree that open source software is valuable and worth supporting monetarily without any value beyond the continued maintenance of the code.
Having worked on a design system previously I think most people, especially non-frontend developers, discount how hard something like that is to build. LLMs will build stuff that looks plausible but falls short in a bunch of ways (particularly accessibility). This is for the same reason that people generate div-soup, it looks correct on the surface.
EDIT: I suppose what I'm saying is that "The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such thing." is wrong. My hunch is that AI has the appearance of eliminating the need for such things.
I think you're overestimating how much people care about quality.
If you can produce something that works 80% of the time for 5% of the cost? People take that all the time when they buy cheap shit off Temu or Amazon.
They almost completely just give money back if it fails/sucks, and they are still coming out ahead.
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It's not that people care about quality, but that people expect things to "just work".
Regarding the point about accessibility, there are a ton of little details that must be explicitly written into the HTML that aren't necessarily the default behavior. Some common features of CSS and JS can break accessibility too.
None of this code would obvious to an LLM, or even human devs, but it's still what's expected. Without precisely written and effectively read-only boilerplate your webpage is gonna be trash and the specifics are a moving target and hotly debated. This back and forth is a human problem, not a code problem. That's why it's "hard".
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Accessibility is an interesting space for quality because under the ADA you can be sued for it and be exposed to huge liability.
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Oh no I'm very cynical about that.
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LLMs are not that cheaper, a customizable accessible component is still worth hours of work.
The Tailwind Team's Refactoring UI book was a big eye opener for me. I had no idea how many subtle insights are required to create truly effective UX.
I think people vastly underestimate just how much work goes into determining the correct set of primitives create a design system like Tailwind, let alone a full blown component library like TailwindUI.
While I believe you, its an argument that artists bring forward since the beginning of art, so even many hundred years before the internet on average humankind did not value this work.
> design system ... discount how hard something like that is to build.
This is probably a good thing. The web would be much better off with fewer design systems.
It's not that hard to build a design system with decent accessibility. Just use shadcn ui components instead of rolling your own.
It's not really a refutation of my point about how building a good component library is hard, to suggest using another component library. Of course, if you use one it's easier, that was my entire point.
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> The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such things.
Or more cynically that it eliminates the need to pay for such things. Claude and friends were no doubt trained on the commercial Tailwind components, so the question becomes whether those models could have done the job of Tailwind UI without piggybacking on the unpaid labour of the Tailwind UI developers. If not then we clearly have a sustainability problem here - someone still has to do the hard work to push things forward, but with the knowledge that any attempt to profit from that work will be instantly undercut by the copyright laundering Borg.
I bought a Tailwind Plus trial a few years ago and I've been using AI tools since they came out. I typically find the block or template I want to use via the Tailwind Plus site and then feed it into Claude Code and ask the agent to modify them as required. This has been working well for me. I think the problem is that the Internet is absolutely full of people who expect free shit and never even consider paying for it to support the devs. I don't really know how you fix that. In a sane world, we'd be funding the most popular/useful projects using government grants, since our entire fucking economy sits atop a pile of OSS.
Ironically, some of the same people that are ready to pay $200.-/month Claude subscriptions.
You're not wrong.
I don't know why I didn't think about this before, but you are right. This is just wrong.
Bought a license, not a trial. Freudian slip.
I think you can see this when you look at the downvotes on that GitHub issue on any comment which suggests gating AI access behind a paywall.
AI's going to be a whole lot less useful when it doesn't have any open source component libraries to crib from.
I don’t think the scraping party cares about the license, if the JavaScript code is linked online they’ll just take it. Source: see the art industry
I think AI has come as the industry was somewhat maturing and most frameworks/software had previous incarnations that mostly did the same thing or could be done adhoc anyway. The need for libraries as the models get better probably declines as well.
Not all open source but a lot of it is fundamentally for humans to consume. If AI can, at its extreme (still remains to be seen), just magic up the software then the value of libraries and a lot of open source software will decline. In some ways its a fundamentally different paradigm of computing, and we don't yet understand what that looks like.
As AI gets better OSS contributes to it; but in its source code feeding the training data not as a direct framework dependency. If the LLM's continue to get better I can see the whole concept of frameworks being less and less necessary.
They already pay people to generate training data.
This can never match the scale of organic training data
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These people won’t have to be experts like the tailwind team? Quality will be spontaneous?
They pay people to generate open source libraries? I'd love to see it
this is news to me, how does this work? who is getting paid?
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The funny part is how they think this will give them the power to take control of what is the defacto standard and circumvent standards.
It will instead further distinguish what is AI slop because it doesn't work and be siloed off to people who don't care about the code so can't fix it.
If people want good interoperable production ready code that can be deployed instantly and just works and meets all current standards and ongoing discussions, we've had it for many decades and it's called open source.
Well, you can tell from the tone of his post that he isn't blaming anyone directly. They monetized convenience, and something more convenient came along.
I think it's more shocking to everyone how quickly something like that happens.
Exactly the business model wasn't strong enough, just upselling templates for hundreds of dollars which AI can churn in few tokens was easy to disrupt.
The business model is strong. AI is stealing traffic/money from creators. That's not a problem with the business model, it's a problem with AI. AI hyperscalers shamelessly monetize other people's work without compensation. Truly an awful dystopia.
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It isn't just the product itself: he's saying traffic to the site has dropped substantially, so any product will be harder to sell now for them.
Some people who would buy the higher quality templates don't know that they exist now.
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Is AI making component libraries redundant? Or is it just making it really easy to use free component libraries?
(Or is it really more about traffic to the documentation site and thus eyeballs on the sales pitch?)
I'm making an app using ShadCN, which is pretty good and free -- maybe Tailwind Plus would be significantly better, I don't know, I had to consider the possibility that this project never makes any money so I wanted free for the first shot. And the LLMs turn out to know it pretty well.
Once I get it built using ShadCN, it's hard to imagine when I'd have time to go redo all the component hackery with another library, even if it were way better.
I guess my point is just that "paid UI components" is a really tough business when there are so many people willing to make components just for the fun/glory/practice. Same with a lot of UI stuff it seems -- I highly respect icon designers, but I'm probably just going to use Lucide.
I've known of the paid components for years and never thought of buying them. It's so easy to build things with Tailwind that it never crossed my mind.
I think all kinds of libraries are becoming redundant. Unless the library solves significant technical problems its likely AI will generate whatever you need. Even tailwind itself is kind of unnecessary, I've used it a lot, but recently been just using AI to generate raw css on side projects, I feel it works pretty well. Tailwind is really a developer convivence, it made things pretty fast to style, but now I don't really think it has anywhere near the advantages it did. If you aren't writing tailwindcss but generating it, almost all the advantage is gone. Only thing it kind of provides is a set of defaults / standards
Fwiw I don’t even think shadcn is good, but our app is built on top of those components already, so we can’t change it without changing everything, so we’re stuck with it.
Does it matter whether it's been obvious that it would be a major issue? It's not unlikely that he did realise this a long time ago, and if he did, it's also not unlikely that he still hasn't found a solution, because there might not be one.
> I think the even more unfortunate truth is that value adds were never a good solution to begin with.
This is the money quote for me - charging for a different thing than the one that brings the value is unsustainable, and AI is accelerating that realization.
Unfortunately, without free distribution, Tailwind would never gain anywhere close to its current mindshare, so there just might not be an opening there (save for a "this year is a year of Linux on desktop" dream of bots and pnpm install paying with micropayments for each download).
Well.. there are many fast growing companies that provide UI + APIs for certain components of your app. Sure you can build things easier in-house, but the opportunity cost of doing so also went up. Supabase, Stream, Clerk, Stainless all growing very well.
> The reality is that we need everyone to agree that open source software is valuable and worth supporting monetarily
The reality is that you need to figure out is that if you want people to pay when they make a ton of money from your code, you should put that in the license.
How does it eliminates the need for simple templates and components? Templates and components are always gonna be more cost effective, back in the day we used to buy simple jQuery components for like 5*$ and even LLMs cant beat that, you will quickly end up with a shittier component with 0 accessibility and end up paying more to the Claude Opus
The only thing that can save open source software is open source LLMs
Unfortunately only the Chinese are really being serious about that
In the face of LLM's it won't be rational for many people to open source their work. People don't want their work/effort being used against them.
I've considered no longer uploading work I do to GitHub.
Agreed. I don't know how realistic it is without a major need that would force major player to abide by it, but yea..
Maybe we need patreon equivalents for open source development?
I think we just need better platforms for enterprise procurement.
The issue is that currently you either publish as free & open-source and get tons of traction and usage but little funding, or you publish as paid and get no traction.
The blocker for paid software isn't actually the money itself (this is solvable by just pricing it reasonably), it's all the red tape that someone has to go through to get their company to purchase a license to begin with.
Maybe a marketplace that preemptively does audits, provides insurance, code escrow, licensing, etc ahead of time, that vendors can put their software on it proactively and companies can have accounts where their employees can just open an "app store" and just buy/license software directly? Similar to the AWS marketplace but for libraries.
Sounds like the kind of enterprise-class walled garden that IBM or Oracle maintains.
It already exists. Tailwind has had GitHub sponsorships enabled for years but only 5 people have ever given them money that way.
Meanwhile Evan You of Vue JS was making something like 200k just from Patreon before starting void(0) which is venture backed, it's all a marketing problem because I don't think anyone knew their GitHub sponsors even existed, people just don't seem to use it in general.
I don't know why Tailwind needed anyone more than Adam, I understand that more people makes the work go faster such as for their Rust compiler but then you run into money problems like this.
They have off-GH sponsorship that's much more widely subscribed.
https://tailwindcss.com/sponsor
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