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Socket
@socket.dev

💔 @tailwindcss.com laid off 75% of its engineering team after revenue dropped 80%, despite being more popular than ever. LLMs are killing documentation traffic, breaking the business model that funds development on many open source projects. Full story → socket.dev/blog/tailwin... #OSS #CSS

socket.devTailwind CSS Announces 75% Layoffs as LLMs Reshape OSS Busin...Tailwind Labs laid off 75% of its engineering team after revenue dropped 80%, as LLMs redirect traffic away from documentation where developers discov...

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Pavel AI
@pavelai.bsky.social

To make this story a little bit more interesting to those who doesn't know. All the business of Tailwind is built around CSS's lack of on-demand classes and specificity problem, they avoided the last one with one-rule-per-class decision and gave a solution to the first with sophisticated toolset

Pavel AI
@pavelai.bsky.social

So the core of their business is built around obsolete solution. What they (Tailwind team) should had do with all their reputation and knowledge is to push CSS WG to implement on-demand classes. It would be an end of Tailwind toolset, but a big step forward for the Web

Pavel AI
@pavelai.bsky.social

And they could become a very good AI enhanced/accompanying company, like Vercel or Bun. But they seem to be against it and they refuse to move the progress, benefitting from the obsoleteness of the technology

Pavel AI
@pavelai.bsky.social

Adam is sitting on a pile of gold and don't see it. It's a really sad story and a good lesson. I believe they would be fine and rehire the team soon as they would realize it was a mistake

Pelle Wessman
@voxpelli.com

Which other OSS projects are struck and is it certain that its LLM:s and not other competition that hurts them? Also:

patak@patak.cat

TIL that the tailwinds docs are not open source. It is the first time I see a popular OSS project with this kind of non-license approach for their docs. Are there other examples out there? Maybe I missed them too assuming that docs followed the same license as their code.