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 mess of tiny CSS utility lessons that you just embed instantly in your HTML, supplying you with wonderful management over each tag. It was tremendous cool.
Nonetheless, I’m an enormous believer within the separation of considerations. You shouldn’t combine your chocolate and your peanut butter, nevertheless it quickly grew to become obvious that Tailwind was asking me to do precisely that. One of many essential functions of CSS was to can help you 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 considerations 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 it’s Angular, React, or Astro, have develop into component-based. However even these elements had been designed to separate CSS and HTML. As an example, in Angular, a element consists of three information: a TypeScript file, an HTML file, and a CSS file.
However these elements have gotten increasingly granular. On the similar 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 crimson means “watch out when pushing this one.” So the necessity for custom-made colours has been diminished.
Now right here is the place Tailwind shines. If you need standardized colours, Tailwind can outline them. And in case your colours and shapes are standardized, then Tailwind’s small utility lessons that outline these kinds are helpful. Lastly, if these elements 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 develop into highly regarded, if not a normal strategy to type web sites.
And now Tailwind’s reputation may 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 had been needed as a result of AI has precipitated the corporate’s advertising and marketing pipeline to dry up. Tailwind has that fantastic function—the MIT License—which makes it mainly free to make use of. Tailwind Labs trusted site 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 web site and thus don’t buy or assist 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 assist my bona fides as a vibe coder, however this can be 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 exhausting for Tailwind Labs to become profitable.
That’s the half I hate. Is AI merely going to make writing new code and frameworks not well 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 give you a more moderen, 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?
