I’ve had a love/hate/love relationship with Tailwind.
When Tailwind was first launched, it generated lots 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 straight in your HTML, supplying you with positive 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, but it surely quickly grew to become obvious that Tailwind was asking me to do precisely that. One of many fundamental functions of CSS was to permit you to separate out the HTML and the code that kinds that HTML. Didn’t Tailwind do the other? You’ll be able to’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 it’s Angular, React, or Astro, have develop into component-based. However even these parts have been designed to separate CSS and HTML. As an illustration, 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 appear and feel of internet sites have develop into 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. 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?
In the end, Tailwind is highly effective and simple to make use of. Thus it has develop into very fashionable, if not an ordinary strategy to fashion web sites.
And now Tailwind’s recognition is perhaps its downfall.
Tailwind CSS meets AI headwind
This previous week, the Tailwind workforce laid off 75% of their builders. Why? Effectively, in accordance with Adam Wathan, the creator of Tailwind and the founding father of Tailwind Labs, the layoffs have been mandatory as a result of AI has triggered the corporate’s advertising and marketing pipeline to dry up. Tailwind has that great characteristic—the MIT License—which makes it mainly free to make use of. Tailwind Labs trusted 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 website and thus don’t buy or help as a lot as they used to.
I form of hate that.
Don’t get me improper. I’ve written sufficient about agentic coding over the previous couple of months to strongly help my bona fides as a vibe coder, however this can be a actual, reside instance of what can—and can—occur. We’ve seen Stack Overflow questions dwindle to virtually nothing. Now AI is making it onerous 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? 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 recent, 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 long run?
