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  • Hacker News
  • Glad to hear the team found a successful exit. Adam bought the tailwindlabs.com domain from me when they started out and he seemed genuinely cool. Hope they keep building tools so many people enjoy using.
    by ngmc
  • As a lifetime access purchaser of Tailwind UI and a user of their recent oatmeal template, the news that they’re winding down tailwindui hurts a little.

    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.

    by radicalriddler
  • Really happy for Adam and the rest of the crew - they made a great product for a prior era, and hopefully this is a soft landing for them given their revenue stream dried up.

    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.

    by jjcm
  • (1) Shop Pay is one of the services that I’ve seen grow fastest in market share ever. Like in the last six months it seems like almost every independent online store sees my phone number and offers me a text to pay via shop.

    (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?

    by PaulHoule
  • I hope Adam (and other Tailwind team members) got handsomely paid as part of this acquisition.

    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.)

    by simonw
  • I instruct my agents to build UI exclusively with bootstrap 5, jQuery, and HTMX.

    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.

    by petcat
  • IMO it is literally not possible for a medium+ jQuery app to fit in a brain or be maintained easily (especially without TypeScript). That's why React et al were invented. It is smaller, faster, no build step for sure, but I would never reach for jQuery for any possibly ambitious app.

    If you are using mostly agents and don't actually need to have it in your brain, then I'd probably go with strict TypeScript at the very least for verifiability purposes

    by eudamoniac
  • Also a solid combination for LLM assisted apps. Claude Code will just get it. It's good with Tailwind also though.
    by sgt
  • Even better than that - just use bootstrap 3
    by kyleee
  • I do boostrap 5 and htmx. works great
    by mrits
  • I've been thinking the same about the future of frameworks. Many of the complexities in today's frameworks exist for "developer experience", given that's less and less relevant by the month, it will be interesting to see the tech stacks chosen going forward.
    by alexcroox
  • Curious what jQuery brings for you these days? My favorite jQuery features got implemented in the vanilla DOM APIs (document.querySelector and fetch being the big one for me). Now I'm curious if I'm missing out.
    by jjice
  • With how good LLMs are getting at coding, running a DevTools company with both an open source and commercial component is getting harder and harder to do. It's easier every day to just vibe code the commercial part if you have the open source part.

    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.

    by jedberg
  • People put things out there for free and the AI companies used that data to replace them. I do wonder if the end result of that is that people will stop putting things out there for free. Open-source development was already a pretty thankless job.
    by dabinat
  • Never preferred tailwind. Much simpler to write plain css. It’s easier to create reusable components than what ppl think. CSS hardly has a steep learning curve. Problem with tailwind and many newer css frameworks I see posted even on HN, is they don’t seem to work on older devices, which is a shame. I guess ppl simply test on their latest phones and call it a day. Older ios itself have roughly 7% market share [1], that’s millions of devices that can’t access the web properly.

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

    by potato-peeler
  • Why wouldn't Tailwind work on older devices? It's just a bunch of classes. If you're using a feature the browser doesn't support it's not going to work whether it's vanilla css or tailwindcss.

    That said, I prefer vanilla CSS. Modern CSS is great.

    by lemonberry
  • I was a huge fan of Steve Schoger's YouTube Series - Refactoring UI. Taught me so much about design. Congrats on the exit. Hope it was good.

    Bring back the series!

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

    by popupeyecare
  • Holy shit I had no idea there was a YouTube series, nor that he had a YT channel.

    And a recent video is about designing a dashboard with Ai, which is exactly what I been needing from him specifically.

    I remember reading the book 6 years ago and I loved how easy it was to understand.

    It's also where I first learned about dense UI and was amazed at a before/after example of one. You can clearly see that uncommon common sense he has about UI/UX.

    Thanks for mentioning this.

    by testycool
  • Agreed! I get inspired just by seeing him talk through his approach to design problems.
    by mijustin
  • They are buying the people and the brand. Even Adam admitted that AI impacted dramatically their business. Selling UI templates in the current era is likely a dead end, even with a brand as strong as Tailwind.

    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!

    by pil0u
  • > Even Adam admitted that AI impacted dramatically their business.

    Even the bossman admitted that AI fired his employees, not the boss.

    I guess that’s why people talk so much about leadership this leadership that. I’m learning that leadership is when you are the captain of the ship and the ship goes down you man the lifeboat and mourn your sailors over what the Sea did to them.

    by keybored
  • I'm not sure it's completely dead.

    We use Claude for design of document templates a lot, and whilst we've built a fantastic pipeline for doing that well, asking Claude to then design anything outside of our guardrails isn't effective.

    So I could imagine folks prioritising high quality design of all kinds choosing templates that would guide Claude.

    I look at a large number of startup websites and it's very clear which ones are using Claude the excessive CAPS headings alone give it away. They look OK but the Claude aesthetic does leave me wondering whether this is a real business or one person using Claude to build a LP.

    by davidpapermill
  • It’s far from dead. All of the AI models struggle with creativity and consistency. There’s always going to be a market for well designed UX.
    by dawnerd
  • Serious question: is there a need to reach for tailwind if you are building a new site? Won't using vanilla CSS while taking advantage of the latest features be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining CSS), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?
    by fg137
  • I started with a UI framework thinking I'd need it but over time I realized that I was using it exclusively for button theming and setting the default font. I was using vanilla CSS and vanilla JavaScript and after removing the framework my package sizes reflect that fact.
    by miiiiiike
  • Vanilla CSS can take advantage of features like that "cascading" part that Tailwind goes entirely against.

    If you are styling a site, there's no competition at all. But if you are styling a single interaction-heavy page, it's a lot less work to put all the formatting inline instead of thinking about a descriptive structure and write your CSS around it.

    Apparently a lot of people design entire sites one page at a time.

    by marcosdumay
  • What's "funny" is that newer/modern CSS is often very clunky to write in Tailwind, or unsupported entirely unless you build your own selectors, but AI doesn't understand those well or how broad their support is, so getting AI to write good/modern CSS outside of Tailwind is pretty difficult. I suppose someone could make a new library that is for AI tools that focuses on the latest and greatest in CSS, but there's no market for it any more because AI would just steal it and generate UIs with it.
    by threetonesun
  • I only do front-end dev occasionally, but these are my 3 goto articles that make me lean towards not using Tailwind:

    1: https://www.zolkos.com/2025/12/03/vanilla-css-is-all-you-nee...

    2: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/subgrid/

    3: https://railsdesigner.com/custom-elements/ (more Rails specific)

    by hakunin
  • LLMs seem to work well with tailwind which I assume is because there was a lot of tailwind in the training data. As a human I never found tailwind to be particularly easy to work with anyway (mostly because I can't be bothered to learn another CSS framework) so I was constantly checking the docs when manually writing code. But I do like the rigidity it forces, which is probably a good thing for AI coding as well.
    by invalidusernam3
  • IMO, Tailwind is just inline CSS with standardised defaults. I think it found its place because most React devs didn't want to bother with CSS
    by vazark