Most likely, as Adam directly "credited" their revenue issues to AI (which makes sense, tailwind was making money by selling pre-made components, but now the AI can generate those for you).
In which case one has to wonder if we need tailwind at all anymore. To me, years ago, tailwind was a great sell as a tool to work faster by typing less. The tradeoff is that the "inline styles" look awful and become a mess real quickly when too many of them are placed together (so and so has precedence or whatever, a media query for each single property, constantly translating between CSS and tailwind equivalent, etc).
Now? Well, AI solves the entire issue of time taken typing. Classnames always looked cleaner too. Additionally CSS doesn't lag behind Browser features and comes with the full power of the language.
Why bother with Tailwind anymore whatsoever?
They were extremely lucky that AI picked up tailwind to keep it relevant, they should be keeping up with the times if they want to stay relevant. Instead their actions are those of someone that is cowering in fear, making sure that they can put the last of the revenue into the coffer. (reject PR because they don't want AI to do better with tailwind while firing engineers, not to mention the big tantrum).
Lets go back to actual CSS, it is easier to read anyway, it's now a modern tool with variables and all that, there's no longer a need to dumb it down.
Besides, if I wanted to pay for pre-made components, I would go with DaisyUI which is agnostic to the frontend framework, unlike the paid components from tailwindLabs, which strictly require you use one of the javascript frameworks.
It was a problem with their revenue stream, which was documentation website -> banner for lifetime payment.
All customers already had lifetime access and couldn't pay more. Plus noone was reading the docs on the webpage anymore.
Recurring subscriptions, ads in AI products (think Tailwind MCP server telling you about subscription features.) Those were just two things I pulled out of the hat in a minute.
When you say plagiarizes, do you mean they are publishing their own docs without ads? Or you mean when the AI is reading the docs instead of a person they ignore the ads?
Most likely, as Adam directly "credited" their revenue issues to AI (which makes sense, tailwind was making money by selling pre-made components, but now the AI can generate those for you).
In which case one has to wonder if we need tailwind at all anymore. To me, years ago, tailwind was a great sell as a tool to work faster by typing less. The tradeoff is that the "inline styles" look awful and become a mess real quickly when too many of them are placed together (so and so has precedence or whatever, a media query for each single property, constantly translating between CSS and tailwind equivalent, etc).
Now? Well, AI solves the entire issue of time taken typing. Classnames always looked cleaner too. Additionally CSS doesn't lag behind Browser features and comes with the full power of the language.
Why bother with Tailwind anymore whatsoever?
They were extremely lucky that AI picked up tailwind to keep it relevant, they should be keeping up with the times if they want to stay relevant. Instead their actions are those of someone that is cowering in fear, making sure that they can put the last of the revenue into the coffer. (reject PR because they don't want AI to do better with tailwind while firing engineers, not to mention the big tantrum).
Lets go back to actual CSS, it is easier to read anyway, it's now a modern tool with variables and all that, there's no longer a need to dumb it down.
Besides, if I wanted to pay for pre-made components, I would go with DaisyUI which is agnostic to the frontend framework, unlike the paid components from tailwindLabs, which strictly require you use one of the javascript frameworks.
The AI issue was that their docs advertise their paid offerings. When AI plagiarizes the docs it doesn't include the ads.
It was a problem with their revenue stream, which was documentation website -> banner for lifetime payment.
All customers already had lifetime access and couldn't pay more. Plus noone was reading the docs on the webpage anymore.
Recurring subscriptions, ads in AI products (think Tailwind MCP server telling you about subscription features.) Those were just two things I pulled out of the hat in a minute.
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And since AI knows every Tailwind page, you probably do not need the paid offer for a decent looking page.
Well you always could just read the docs instead of using the paid offer. Took longer. Not anymore.
When you say plagiarizes, do you mean they are publishing their own docs without ads? Or you mean when the AI is reading the docs instead of a person they ignore the ads?
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It’s both.