Comment by simonw
2 days ago
Key comment is this one: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
> [...] 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. And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around and make sure the people who are still here are getting their paychecks every month. [...]
> Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework.
>The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products
Wall that's the problem, and it's tractable problem. Seems like tailwind needs a sales strategy beyond hoping people read the docs. And that it gives rise to a perverse incentive--making a less intuitive product to drive the need for documentation--is bound to affect the product.
If LLMs are really the problem, and it seems possible that they are, then you might need to lean in. Maybe selling access to mcps and skills. I'd still bet on hiring someone to chase down some contracts is going to be the easiest way out of the hole though.
Tailwind can be made less intuitive?
Agreed. If Tailwind could give you a paid subscription to a service that plugs into your agent and will recommend component compositions, styles, etc. (basically how those web app generators companies work but targeted at experienced devs) they have a chance to survive the transition.
Presumably the MCP could also be aware of the commercial products, which ought to coax the agent to apply those patterns. That'd be more useful than actually have the library.
This isn't novel either. Expo offers an MCP with its paid subscription, for instance. It's helpful. In fact, I wish the tamagui crew would get on that...
I feel like if their docs are their only funnel into their commercial product, they need to fire their marketing staff and find people who are competent. There are so many other ways they could be reaching potential customers, even those only familiar with Tailwind's free product.
> There are so many other ways they could be reaching potential customers
Like what, exactly, now that most people interact with tailwind purely via AI agents?
I started work on a front end project React/Astro/Tailwind project for the first time in about a year, building out with CLI agents, and one things that's changed compared to a year ago is that I have the entire UI basically working and I haven't even looked at the tailwind classes. I just say yes that's fine but can you improve the width for the sidebar on mobile (obviously paraphrasing here, I write the requirements for the agent carefully) and within a couple of iterations it's working. I keep expecting to have to jump in to manually fix things but so far I haven't needed to.
I worked in FE for years and I know tailwind and CSS quite deeply. But the entire extent of what I've needed to know for this project so far can be summed up as "it's some kind of styling tool". I never had to look at the docs, I never went to their website, or or Twitter or anywhere else that might have worked for marketing.
I did make an informed decision in choosing this stack, but it's equally likely that the AI could have recommended it to me, and the AI entirely set up the project scaffolding and config for me.
So where in this could they possibly have marketed paid components to me? And even if they did, why would I have paid for them when Shadcn is free and was added automatically by the AI?
> I did make an informed decision in choosing this stack, but it's equally likely that the AI could have recommended it to me, and the AI entirely set up the project scaffolding and config for me.
I'm not a web dev, I've heard of Tailwind CSS but my actual knowledge is "I know what the CSS in that name means, therefore it's some kind of styling tool".
One of my experiments before Christmas with Claude Code, was to see what it does in pure vibe-coding mode, where I just say "yes" and then see what kind of mess (if any) it made.
It did not use Tailwind CSS. There was a lot of… if a human had done it I'd say "copy-paste" CSS, but I think it just regenerated it all fresh each time rather than actually using the pasteboard? And it was raw CSS, no dependencies that I noticed.
They maintained professional etiquette in their marketing and I don't blame them. If you annoy people, they will not recommend you.
I've watched open source projects get lambasted because their developers dared to make a buck. Being conservative with their marketing is what is expected of them even if it isn't fair.
What marketing staff?
> they need to fire their marketing staff
Sounds like they did just that. Ereyesterday.
Thanks for that - the GitHub app “helpfully” collapsed this comment (along with most of the others in the thread), so I was confused how the headline related to this issue.
That traffic is down can have at least two separate AI related causes:
1) Lower amount of impressions on the google search pages due to the AI answers
2) Lower amount of searches since people are using code generators
I wonder which one it is primarily.