Tailwind laid off 75% of their team because of AI:

I totally see the value in the feature and I would like to find a way to add it.

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. And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I’m not spending trying to turn the business around and make sure the people who are still here are getting their paychecks every month.

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. I really want to figure out a way to offer LLM-optimized docs that don’t make that situation even worse (again we literally had to lay off 75% of the team yesterday), but I can’t prioritize it right now unfortunately, and I’m nervous to offer them without solving that problem first.

@PaulRBerg I don’t see the AGENTS.md stuff we offer as part of the sponsorship program as anything similar to this at all — that’s just a short markdown file with a bunch of my own personal opinions and what I consider best practices to nudge LLMs into writing their Tailwind stuff in a specific way. It’s not the docs at all, and I resent the accusation that I am not disclosing my “true intentions” here or something.

This feature is so that people can build MORE things with Tailwind in a FASTER and more EFFICIENT capacity.

@mtsears4 Tailwind is growing faster than it ever has and is bigger than it ever has been, and our revenue is down close to 80%. Right now there’s just no correlation between making Tailwind easier to use and making development of the framework more sustainable. I need to fix that before making Tailwind easier to use benefits anyone, because if I can’t fix that this project is going to become unmaintained abandonware when there is no one left employed to work on it. I appreciate the sentiment and agree in spirit, it’s just more complicated than that in reality right now.

I asked ChatGPT what Tailwind is:

What is Tailwind (in plain English)?
Tailwind is a tool developers use to style websites—to decide how things look: spacing, fonts, colors, buttons, layouts, dark mode, mobile vs desktop, etc.

Think of it like a LEGO set for design. Instead of writing a separate “style sheet” from scratch, Tailwind gives you a big box of tiny pre-made building blocks.

Interesting comments from the Hacker News thread discussion on this topic:

What most don’t realize is that this will happen to most businesses in all categories as more people rely on ChatGPT and Claude for discovery.

No discovery - no business.

And same with ads.if OpenAI decides not to add ads - prepare for even faster business consolidation. Those businesses preferred by llms will exponentially grow, others will quickly go out of business

---

> No discovery - no business.

I do SEO as a side gig to my 9-5 as a developer. All four of my freelance companies I work with have seen their traffic drop up to 40% since LLM’s have effectively taken over and people are using search engines less and less.

We’ve had to pivot to short form social media advertising which seems to be closing the gap whereas before the majority of our leads were coming from organic search and being ranked high in their respective industries. It certainly takes more effort to craft a script, film it, edit it to add text overlays, animations and catchy effects, but its showing me its being effective in the leads we’re generating.

I’m not sure if this is a sort of generational thing back when my parents were so engrained to use the yellow pages and then that stopped once the internet got into the advertising business - but it feels like a similar transition is taking place again.

As many have already told me, “Ignore AI at your peril”