But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. [...]

Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework.

[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1118859/mobile-apple-ios...

I hope Adam and the team are well and good with this decision. Tailwind is regularly debated here for various reasons, using it helped me have a better understanding of CSS, HTML and design, and made me a better software engineer. Thanks for building and sharing Tailwind!

Bring back the series!

https://www.youtube.com/@SteveSchoger

The ones that are successful provide other services that are still hard to do, like hosting at scale, or running the open source at scale.

Basically, running something at scale is what DevTools companies need to do to survive. Hosting the open source and the data is one type of running at scale, or helping companies run the open source in their own infrastructure is another way to help them run at scale.

Every app is fast, responsive, progressive, small, and most importantly: it fits in my brain and I can maintain it. No build step or really any tooling at all.

(2) Tailwind is part of the CSSSlop ecosystem that includes of course the original Bootstrap, SASS, Emotion and many similar things that never really worked from an ecosystem perspective because learning the specifics on one CSSSlop framework never means you don’t have to completely understand CSS. CSSSlop just forces you to learn more things and face more cognitive overload.

Now that CSS includes most of what CSSSlop did, you can just use CSS and that’s a good thing. And if AI can answer questions about CSS and save you from trying to find answers in splogs or learning to navigate 50+ spec documents to find definitive answers, isn’t that a good thing?

Working on an open source project for 9 years and then getting a sizable bonus in an acquisition that keeps the open source project alive seems like a decent scenario to me.

(I don't think there are any investors involved here.)

Tailwind at this point is a coding language and a brand with no direct product. It's a great acquisition when you want mind share and developer love, and are OK with there being no revenue involved. Shopify is a solid match for that.

So thanks Shopify for taking them under your wings.

X-mas wish: that the Servo project gets a proper patron (looking at you, Huawei and Samsung).

Glad they got their exit, Adam deserves it, but I don’t know why they can’t see the value in preset UI templates. AI sucks at building UI, it sucks a little less when it’s got codebase references to build upon and reference.

I really appreciated tailwind, but it solved problems that fewer people face these days.

Tailwind can still be massively popular, but if an AI agent can look at the docs/examples and generate 80% of what you'd otherwise pay for, that popularity doesn't translate into customers anymore.

Feels like we'll see this happen to a lot of "we already figured this out for you" developer products.

What’s the commercial argument for shopify buying a css library. What’s the synergy and business benefits.

Is it just the hire of the tailwind devs with some fanfare?

PS: I like how Adam dissing on the famous Claude Speak "load bearing" with a strike-through!. Subtle, but EVERY PUN intended, hah!

https://tailwindcss.com/blog/tailwind-is-joining-shopify#~te...

To think it started as a side project and grew to the scale it did. Very impressive work.

Mr Lutke is kinda weird lately in Canada. Wonder why the tailwind guys are getting involved with him

It's not that Tailwind itself is bad. It's good. But agents are notorious for re-inventing the wheel without hard constraints that prevent them from doing it - and when I say hard constraints, I don't just mean an AGENTS.md file or a skill they can ignore. As such, I found that design consistency was near impossible and a constant firefight. It worked at first, but when my project got sufficiently large, it became worse and worse.

I initially tried combatting this with a spaghetti-soup of linter rules, but it wasn't very effective to maintain. So I'm biting the bullet and moving on to greener pastures.

I don't think Shopify needs to exist anymore sadly.

Shopify gets to control a large portion of the CSS UI market that AI so eagerly generates. Good for them

Tailwind is a ~~load-bearing~~ very important part of the stack

This is beautiful. Art, even. And it speaks to my very soul.

At least some of them got an escape plan before going bankrupt

Sad to see ui.sh go away, however. Is there something else like it out there? Especially the brand kit skill.

In case it wasn’t clear

But I guess that the cycle of life: products gets purchased and slowly die.

On the commercial side, we'll no longer be trying to grow the business around Tailwind. All existing customers will of course maintain their access to products like Tailwind Plus and ui.sh, but we're closing sign ups for new customers to focus on Tailwind CSS at Shopify.

Sad to see this company bailed out by a racist tho

Tailwind was created to mitigate HUMAN problems, and HUMAN risks. Are these same problems experienced by an agentic workflow? I'm not so sure. The calculus is different.

This time is now. Your bickering about how to more efficienty bloat a page is... pitiful.

R.I.P. Tailwind.

Edit: To clarify, I mean being assimilated by Shopify is awful. I understand that the Tailwind devs were neutered by AI skynet slop taking over before - that is also awful. That's actually two awful news we get here in one news entry.

1. Are sloplords.

2. AI companies that sell the idea that AI can replace your designer, are still paying 100k retainers to designers for their landing pages lol.

3. People will probably replace backend engineering before they ever replace design, because they will want to seem more human.

4.Handmade watches, and handmade luxury clothing is one of the biggest markets on earth, almost as large as tech itself. I really don't think that urge for the handmade, made by someone with wonderful tastes is ever going to disappear.

Also, no great designer used tailwindcss. This is made by and for slop lords. Which is most of HN, you people have no taste.

Why would anyone need any kind of framework for CSS?! It's the inherent human need to control something, to package water and sell it as magical water.

I've never understood the whole idea. Bootstrap: the hard-to-remember, horrible shitshow forced on frontend devs. And people thought there couldn't possibly be anything lower than that. Then Tailwind arrived. Apparently, frontend joes are so below average in brain capacity that they need their shiny thing covered in stickers saying "modern" and "state of the art", otherwise they feel dirty, like they haven't taken a shower in a week.

It's like building a framework to simplify the SQL dialect. In reality, there's zero need for it, because SQL is so simple and easy to understand that you'd have to be a moron to use some kind of framework for it. The same applies to CSS. Tailwind is an abomination, a horrible mess, just like all the other pointless CSS 'frameworks'.

These aren't frameworks. They're just some semi-psycho control freak's projection of control over something that doesn't need controlling.

Let's just say it out loud: Tailwind is being rewarded for turning tons of frontend joes into complete idiots by telling them the tale that their shiny thing is the new standard, when all it ever was was an experiment in the gullibility of inherently moronic people.

Turns out that clankers generate beige static websites that use 100% CPU, so some assistance is needed.

We now have proof that the above is true, since Lütke adheres to the principle that any non-clanker usage has to be justified. Let us assume he justified the purchase.