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While tailwind usage is up, website visits are down in the age of LLMs and they've had to fire 75% of the eng team Tailwind is one of the most successful projects in the space, this is a bit sad

Really sucks that AI corrodes OSS even more than it was already

Is it the OSS part it erodes or the commercial services of Tailwind the company? Shows the fragility of OSS projects backed by a single company?

The biggest problem in any open source project is sustainability. AI is def eroding that, tailwind was a resounding success story of how to do it right 99% of oss is fragile like this

As more things get pushed to things just AI uses (and maybe not even devs) the propensity to fuel other income streams gets lower too - cant do classes cause nobody needs to learn - dont get donations because no one even knows you exist seems like SAAS or corporate sponsored may be the only way

but even saas is in danger since people can generate their own saas from open source libs

Yet maintenance and security guarantees is hard for AI, especially as an AI will never be able to be held accountable, so in a way it becomes even more important to nurture and care for the dependency tree that ones AI uses and curate it into a powerful well oiled machine

Also: it’s pretty disingenuous to say this is du e to AI. I am not saying there’s no merit to it, but the broader reality is that there is no shortage of free, high quality, customizable component libraries anymore (shadcn, radix, etc). That’s largely what they are competing against, not just “AI”.

If it was due to competition, it would show up in the usage stats, but that's not what the numbers say.

I am referring to the product that they are monetizing (Tailwind Plus, fka Tailwind UI), which is distinct from the open source Tailwind project. We don’t have stats on that, but clearly it’s not growing (which is a problem, since they have a one-time purchase lifetime access model)