I’ve had a love/hate/love relationship with Tailwind.
When Tailwind was first launched, it generated plenty of buzz, and I naturally gave it a glance. It was an intriguing notion—to outline a large number of tiny CSS utility courses that you simply embed instantly in your HTML, providing you with effective management over each tag. It was tremendous cool.
Nonetheless, I’m an enormous believer within the separation of issues. You shouldn’t combine your chocolate and your peanut butter, nevertheless it quickly turned obvious that Tailwind was asking me to do precisely that. One of many important functions of CSS was to let you separate out the HTML and the code that kinds that HTML. Didn’t Tailwind do the alternative? You possibly can’t separate your issues and have your design components embedded in your HTML, are you able to? Properly, no.
However the nature of internet design has modified since CSS was first constructed. Most frameworks, whether or not or not it’s Angular, React, or Astro, have grow to be component-based. However even these parts have been designed to separate CSS and HTML. As an example, in Angular, a part consists of three recordsdata: a TypeScript file, an HTML file, and a CSS file.
However these parts have gotten increasingly granular. On the identical time, the feel and appear of internet sites have grow to be extra standardized. Button colours, for instance, have standardized in order that blue means “you may belief this button” and crimson means “watch out when pushing this one.” So the necessity for custom-made colours has been decreased.
Now right here is the place Tailwind shines. In order for you standardized colours, Tailwind can outline them. And in case your colours and shapes are standardized, then Tailwind’s small utility courses that outline these kinds are helpful. Lastly, if these parts are compact and self-contained, do you really want to separate your HTML and your CSS?
Finally, Tailwind is highly effective and simple to make use of. Thus it has grow to be extremely popular, if not a regular method to fashion web sites.
And now Tailwind’s reputation could be its downfall.
Tailwind CSS meets AI headwind
This previous week, the Tailwind group laid off 75% of their builders. Why? Properly, in keeping with Adam Wathan, the creator of Tailwind and the founding father of Tailwind Labs, the layoffs have been essential as a result of AI has brought about the corporate’s advertising pipeline to dry up. Tailwind has that fantastic function—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 could be doing increasingly coding, builders don’t go to the Tailwind website and thus don’t buy or assist as a lot as they used to.
I type of hate that.
Don’t get me flawed. I’ve written sufficient about agentic coding over the previous few months to strongly assist my bona fides as a vibe coder, however it is a actual, stay instance of what can—and can—occur. We’ve seen Stack Overflow questions dwindle to virtually nothing. Now AI is making it exhausting for Tailwind Labs to make cash.
That’s the half I hate. Is AI merely going to make writing new code and frameworks not definitely worth the effort? If that’s the 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 recent, higher mannequin for making human-generated libraries worthwhile.
I like Tailwind and I like agentic AI, however I hate what is going on to the previous due to the latter. Who’s going to construct the long run?
