Comment by exceptione
2 days ago
Maybe we accidentally found a more meaningful chance for having a discussion about LLMs.
As CSS is limited in scope, ultra-well defined, testable and declarative, this should be a home run for LLMs.
2 days ago
Maybe we accidentally found a more meaningful chance for having a discussion about LLMs.
As CSS is limited in scope, ultra-well defined, testable and declarative, this should be a home run for LLMs.
It is. That’s why Tailwind had to lay off 75% of their staff.
But they're still struggling for money.
Yes, they’re struggling because a large part of their business was selling the pro product of pre-built themes, pages and components and whatever else.
Now, LLMs have all but killed that side of their business. The latest models are incredibly good at writing Tailwind, to the point where no one is buying the pre-builts.
[dead]
Nah, Tailwind is way more important for LLMs than vanilla CSS.
Models work in contexts. If my context is "my entire app's styling", then it's going to be really difficult to write styles in line unless it's already pretty perfect.
Tailwind doesn't have that problem. It's local. I can define a single theme and KNOW FOR A FACT how something will look before it even touches my code. That's the beauty of utility-like libraries.
I stopped working in marketing and advertising (which DID need custom styles), and went to strictly app dev where my needs completely changed.
> limited in scope, ultra-well defined, testable
Are we talking about the same CSS?
lol People don't realize that Tailwind democratized styling for a lot of people who didn't want to or didn't know how to write CSS. We're not going back to writing hand-crafted CSS with or without LLMs. LLMs, by their nature, work better with Tailwind since it needs a much smaller context to make the right decision.
A lot of us have never stopped writing hand-crafted CSS. Also, in my experience, Gemini 3 Pro is an absolute monster at writing layouts and styling in pure CSS with very basic descriptions of what I want (tested it while I was experimenting with vibe coding in some sleepless night LOL).
There are still a lot of developers who loathe using Tailwind and avoid touching it like the plague. Handwritten CSS still offers more opportunities for optimization and keeps your markup much cleaner than spamming utility classes everywhere (I understand the appeal of rapidly iterating with it, though).
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Agents are not yet very good at figuring out how things look on the screen.
Or at least in my experience this is where they need most human guidance. They can take screenshots and study those, but I’m not sure how well they can spot when things are a bit off.