I’ve had a love/hate/love relationship with Tailwind.
When Tailwind was first launched, it generated a number of buzz, and I naturally gave it a glance. It was an intriguing notion—to outline a mess of tiny CSS utility courses that you simply embed instantly in your HTML, supplying you with wonderful management over each tag. It was tremendous cool.
Nevertheless, I’m an enormous believer within the separation of issues. You shouldn’t combine your chocolate and your peanut butter, however it quickly turned obvious that Tailwind was asking me to do precisely that. One of many principal functions of CSS was to mean you can separate out the HTML and the code that types that HTML. Didn’t Tailwind do the other? You possibly can’t separate your issues and have your design components embedded in your HTML, are you able to? Effectively, no.
However the nature of net design has modified since CSS was first constructed. Most frameworks, whether or not or not it’s Angular, React, or Astro, have turn out to be component-based. However even these parts had been designed to separate CSS and HTML. As an illustration, in Angular, a part consists of three information: a TypeScript file, an HTML file, and a CSS file.
However these parts have gotten increasingly granular. On the similar time, the appear and feel of internet sites have turn out to be extra standardized. Button colours, for instance, have standardized in order that blue means “you may belief this button” and purple means “watch out when pushing this one.” So the necessity for personalized colours has been decreased.
Now right here is the place Tailwind shines. If you would like standardized colours, Tailwind can outline them. And in case your colours and shapes are standardized, then Tailwind’s small utility courses that outline these types are helpful. Lastly, if these parts are compact and self-contained, do you actually need to separate your HTML and your CSS?
Finally, Tailwind is highly effective and straightforward to make use of. Thus it has turn out to be very talked-about, if not a normal technique to model web sites.
And now Tailwind’s reputation is likely to be its downfall.
Tailwind CSS meets AI headwind
This previous week, the Tailwind staff laid off 75% of their builders. Why? Effectively, in line with Adam Wathan, the creator of Tailwind and the founding father of Tailwind Labs, the layoffs had been needed as a result of AI has triggered the corporate’s advertising and marketing pipeline to dry up. Tailwind has that fantastic characteristic—the MIT License—which makes it principally free to make use of. Tailwind Labs relied on visitors to their web site to drive “lifetime license” gross sales and sponsorships. However since AI now’s doing increasingly coding, builders don’t go to the Tailwind web site and thus don’t buy or help as a lot as they used to.
I sort of hate that.
Don’t get me flawed. I’ve written sufficient about agentic coding over the previous couple of months to strongly help my bona fides as a vibe coder, however it is a actual, dwell instance of what can—and can—occur. We’ve seen Stack Overflow questions dwindle to virtually nothing. Now AI is making it laborious for Tailwind Labs to generate income.
That’s the half I hate. Is AI merely going to make writing new code and frameworks not well worth the effort? In that case, then the place will new code and frameworks come from?
I suppose that the reply to that’s agentic AI itself. However solely time will inform if AI can take over the duty of making higher frameworks and libraries for our (its?) use, or if we might want to provide you with a more moderen, higher mannequin for making human-generated libraries worthwhile.
I really like Tailwind and I really like agentic AI, however I hate what is going on to the previous due to the latter. Who’s going to construct the longer term?
