Tailwind Labs加入Shopify

Domain: tailwindcss.com Points: 478 | Comments: 185 [Top Comments] - It is an age of consolidation. - Ugh. I remember how much Tailwind Labs has struggled for funding and it *sucks* to see Shopify get them. It also sucks to see they're discontinuing their paid products permanently, effective immediately -- they're not making them free, they're taking them away. You simply can't get them now. I understand why this had to happen but it is sad to see. - Why does it suck that shopify got them? They seem to be a good steward of open source, especially with rails. - For some definition of "struggling" that encompasses a situation where you get $3M/year for renaming CSS variables. - Struggled for funding because their business model collapsed overnight and isn't coming back, this is probably a best case scenario. - The most pertinent part for many: > On the commercial side, we'll no longer be trying to grow the business around Tailwind. All existing customers will of course maintain their access to products like Tailwind Plus and ui.sh, but we're closing sign ups for new customers to focus on Tailwind CSS at Shopify. - > All existing customers will of course maintain their access to products like Tailwind Plus and ui.sh, but we're closing sign ups for new customers to focus on Tailwind CSS at Shopify. You've got to wonder how long that model can continue if no new customers are allowed in. They've even removed the Plus splash page so clicking Plus on the homepage or going to /plus takes you to a login page with no detail about what it was. - Here's some context on the impact AI had on the Tailwind Labs business model from January: [https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...](https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#issuecomment-3717222957) > 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. [...] > 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 think maybe they should have kept building Tailwinds CSS, release new versions, then charge a subscription to teams for their agents to access latest changes in their documents. In other words, the documents for the latest versions are hidden behind a pay wall. - I used to gripe a lot about how Tailwind docs didn't play well with doc aggregators like devdocs.io, or even implement basic browser search engine integration when I was using it regularly. It now makes sense why they wanted to keep their docs scoped to their domain. - I remember that HN discussion, but it seemed to me from the outside that after that post they got Google as a sponsor and I just had assumed the community was rallying together for them a bit. But I guess not. Too bad, they seem like such good people. Not that they're dead or something but I don't think this was their ideal end state for Tailwind. - Expected move and good to hear. Gives Tailwind some extra maintenance years. But like with all these sugardaddy takeovers, the next expected move is “Tailwind is now independent again“. - Obligatory xkcd: - Luckily, Tailwind is, and likely always will be, a block at the very top. Not a critical piece of infrastructure. - I thought the narrative by Lütke et. al. was that the clankers could do everything by themselves! Turns out that clankers generate beige static websites that use 100% CPU, so some assistance is needed. We now have proof that the above is true, since Lütke adheres to the principle that any non-clanker usage has to be justified. Let us assume he justified the purchase. - 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! - 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. - Happy for Tailwind as this was possible the best outcomes possible for them at this stage. It is clear that most of the frameworks for software are going to struggle significantly because of AI. Especially CSS frameworks. No one cared about writing CSS code by hand before AI and now with AI, no one needs to care about frameworks as well. AI writes it for you so I don't care whether its tailwind or plain css. - I bought Tailwind UI when it first launched and then ended up using it for a product that had a lot of success several years later and would consult the included components anytime I was going to build something in my app but now with AI I haven't done that in the last couple years at all because the AI just handles it... It's crazy to think how much AI changed this sort of business model - Well I guess that's good? - I hope Tailwind gets its own space to expand. Shopify has done some great things for Ruby/Rails ecosystem. Hope that spirit continues - 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. - Also a solid combination for LLM assisted apps. Claude Code will just get it. It's good with Tailwind also though. - Even better than that - just use bootstrap 3 - 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. - Business model always struck me as a little odd when Tailwind, by it's very nature, makes it trivial to copy existing implementations - Not sure how to feel about this, I hope Shopify will leave the Tailwind team alone for the most part and let them continue what they've been doing. - AI and Tailwind-based template systems sort of stole Tailwind's lunch, so I'm glad there was light at the end of the tunnel for Adam and co. - As someone who built their entire platform on Tailwind and has been running gpt-6-astra for the last 5 days straight working on the migration away from it because it leaves an irrecoverable pile of slop when your project becomes large enough... Heed my warning. It's not that Tailwind itself is bad. It's good. But agents are notorious for re-inventing the wheel without hard constraints that prevent them from doing it - and when I say hard constraints, I don't just mean an AGENTS.md file or a skill they can ignore. As such, I found that design consistency was near impossible and a constant firefight. It worked at first, but when my project got sufficiently large, it became worse and worse. I initially tried combatting this with a spaghetti-soup of linter rules, but it wasn't very effective to maintain. So I'm biting the bullet and moving on to greener pastures. - What are you switching to? - Very glad they got their exit. Provided huge value for years - meh fuck shopify - Happy for Adam and his team. - 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? - 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. - there's never a need to reach for tailwind, it's just a pathology some people like because someone else did the design work for them - It still helps deduplicate. - 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.) - Excellent news for the team, and a sad news for the rest of us. But I guess that the cycle of life: products gets purchased and slowly die. - 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! - 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. - I thought Laravel would've been the one to scoop them up, but I'm glad they landed with Shopify. Adam's a solid dude and what him and his team have done to commoditize web design is to be lauded. To think it started as a side project and grew to the scale it did. Very impressive work. - How well is Laravel doing nowadays? - 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. - Tailwind Labs != Tailwind In case it wasn’t clear - Phew was worried it was tailscale - Glad they managed to get a way out after their financial difficulties. Hopefully they got a decent exit. - IIRC Tailwind was toast a few months ago (laying off the few engineers that kept it going), so is this Shopify rescuing the company? - More like Shopify skinning the company to make a novelty hat. - Another open source project being consumed by capitalist vultures. It's not enough to just fund them as charity is it? - 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. - I had to create special checker/linter to analyze my code base ( and asked AI to loop it through it as some kind of test ), so as to avoid AI (mis)using tailwind class here and there. that was 2025, AI and linter both improved quite a lot since. - I guess they wanted to prevent losing their voting rights if Lütke‘s idea becomes reality - Wondering when Shopify is gonna wind up next. Not a good time to be a (small) software company. - How do you define small? - Shopify is a publicly traded company, and they own a significant share of the whole e-commerce market, they aren’t going anywhere lol :) - Worth noting, Tailwind was canadian, and Shopify is also canadian. I like that this was the outcome. The labs business was obviously no longer needed in this era of AI, and I'm glad Tailwind will continue to get proper backing from Shopify to evolve further. - That's too bad, but you gotta do what you gotta do. - tailwindcss is an anti-pattern that breaks fundamental rule of software engeneering - separation of concerns. just learn how to use CSS - it will benefit you in the long run. i suspect they will be "paywalling" more and more features in the future. - HTML and CSS are not a separation of concerns in anything I've ever built. They're both representing the layout/design. I don't want them separate. You end up having to keep them synchronized anyway, messing with your HTML is frequently gonna break your CSS. Tailwind is infinitely more pleasant to write than a separate CSS file that has to be kept in sync with the HTML. - what happens to people who paid for Tailwind Plus? - Oh, bejesus. Shopify awards the Stupefiers. Why would anyone need any kind of framework for CSS?! It's the inherent human need to control something, to package water and sell it as magical water. I've never understood the whole idea. Bootstrap: the hard-to-remember, horrible shitshow forced on frontend devs. And people thought there couldn't possibly be anything lower than that. Then Tailwind arrived. Apparently, frontend joes are so below average in brain capacity that they need their shiny thing covered in stickers saying "modern" and "state of the art", otherwise they feel dirty, like they haven't taken a shower in a week. It's like building a framework to simplify the SQL dialect. In reality, there's zero need for it, because SQL is so simple and easy to understand that you'd have to be a moron to use some kind of framework for it. The same applies to CSS. Tailwind is an abomination, a horrible mess, just like all the other pointless CSS 'frameworks'. These aren't frameworks. They're just some semi-psycho control freak's projection of control over something that doesn't need controlling. Let's just say it out loud: Tailwind is being rewarded for turning tons of frontend joes into complete idiots by telling them the tale that their shiny thing is the new standard, when all it ever was was an experiment in the gullibility of inherently moronic people. - Joining the company with the CEO eho believes only the rich should get a vote? - When I was at Shopify we used Tailwind along with our internal component library to great effect. Tailwind is a great css framework, but their business model is doomed by AI. Tobi acquihiring them for making a great product is a good result. - I was a hardcore tailwind user and my projects still use it. That said, in the last 6 months, I haven't touched it. I just let my agents style things as they want. ... and they just use plain CSS. I really appreciated tailwind, but it solved problems that fewer people face these days. - The timing is interesting. Stylex (Metas CSS in JS library) is taking off right now because it seems a better fit for AI driven coding in the long run. - God I about had a heart attack when I misread this as Tailscale joining Shopify. - I knew this would happen. - I think the bigger issue is that AI is attacking the business model, not necessarily the product. Tailwind can still be massively popular, but if an AI agent can look at the docs/examples and generate 80% of what you'd otherwise pay for, that popularity doesn't translate into customers anymore. Feels like we'll see this happen to a lot of "we alrea