Comment by willio58
2 days ago
Wow. This is wild. I have a mix of empathy for the guy and also a feeling like he has no idea what he's doing running a business.
> 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.
So his idea is to make Tailwind less modern than competitors by throwing a wrench in this tool that makes it easier to write tailwind with AI, simply because he thinks the only way Tailwind can make money is if actual human beings come to read the docs site? If that's the case, your income is based on products that's are not high enough value to potential customers, or you're marketing it poorly, or both.
> 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.
I get priorization but this isn't really that. He's not saying "I'll get to this when I find some time. Busy with high-priority business-related things right now.". He's saying "AI is going to be the end of profits for tailwind and instead of coming up with an alternative income stream I'm going to just block anything making tailwind easier to use with tailwind. And also stop complaining about it."
It sucks to fire people, but that doesn't mean you have to spread the flames out to open source contributors trying to make tailwind better for everyone. Look for new income streams, ideally ones that can be sold to people that control the money in companies (that isn't often the devs that are in your docs).
> I get priorization but this isn't really that. He's not saying "I'll get to this when I find some time. Busy with high-priority business-related things right now."
I don't really understand how you can find a difference between your sentence with what he wrote:
> I totally see the value in the feature and I would like to find a way to add it.
> 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. 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.
Pretty sure those are the same picture
This is the most pragmatic, non-conformist and rational comment here.
Exactly, when the Renaissance was happening, the printing machine(s) were spreading across the Europe rapidly, priest(s) were trying to prevent the spread of machines because they were copying the books, by hand, which was their income stream.
So they were against it, in the end, they learned their lesson the hard way. It was inevitable, it's the same thing with the LLM(s).
> 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.
Yeah, that is a quite depressing situation, but saying "trying to do fun free things for the community..." is quite contradictory.
Isn't that how that community is created in the first place?
I also don't understand the logical thinking that made them think that, if we make it harder to gather information with LLM(s) or if we do not improve it, people will keep coming to our website, NO!
They would just simply grab something similar, or ask an LLM to use something else, there are hundreds of alternatives, no one, literally no one has moat in the today(s) world.
I believe that if they focused solely on open source, improving the developer experience, creating more libraries, abstraction(s) over the abstraction(s), open source component libraries like shadcn/ui, DaisyUI, Radix etc, their income today would have been much higher than from what they currently have I believe.
There are many, like so many action items that Adam could do, instead of throwing tantrums at people, easiest could have been the sponsor-first business model, which would have scaled out much better I mean, they don't have recurring revenue, OSS sponsorships are mostly recurring, unlike the current model.
Good analogy but it feels a bit different, in a sense that the LLMs index all your content and then you don't benefit from any of that outcome. You essentially had no saying to the process of indexing, whether it's MIT licensed or else.
I'd say that this is a very interesting situation, I would not blame it on the founder. Nobody saw this coming ...
I'd be sympathetic to this take if
1. The contribution actually made something useful
2. He actually said anything to the note of "I'm going to just block anything making tailwind easier to use with ai."
3. The contributor was not adding an external library that he authored without mentioning it in the comments
I defer 100% to maintainers of a project if an external contributor drops a pr that they are now in charge of maintaining with no evidence that it is useful, or that the author of the change will maintain.
> The contributor was not adding an external library that he authored without mentioning it in the comments
Good point, I made the mistake of skimming and missed that part.