Tailwind Labs is joining Shopify

I made this point at the time but Tailwind Labs' business model shouldn't exist. It irks people because they wanna blame AI for it but they were coasting and should be happy it lasted this long.

Tailwind's business model existed due to a massive inefficiency in the frontend industry not being able to come to terms with CSS or native components. They surfed the wave of JS frontends becoming ever more complicated. If it wasn't AI and just a human awakening to that fact, realizing that the complexity of modern frontends and Tailwind are not an absolute necessity, they'd have lost business just the same. There are dozens of different ways of writing frontends that have nothing to do with Tailwind.

Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be.

There is some slight irony in them continuing to make these statements for me. Mostly because Tailwind is still incredibly around (and worth investing in, hence Shopify acquiring them) and AI isn’t anything close to offering a drop in solution. That is to say, AI will implement tailwind when building as there isn’t a good alternative, and otherwise just references these docs for the user so that they don’t have to visit the website, so it’s not like it’s being used less.

If you think about it, the site docs garnering traffic (beyond potential tailwind labs conversions) is more of an indicator of a code or design smell than anything. That’s just my 2 cents as a guy who used to look up their docs constantly to confirm a pattern I was implementing, as tailwind classes were never really as self-evident as tailwind labs liked to believe they were IMO.

Like it just doesn’t make total sense to me to compare library documentation traffic hits to traffic hits that happen in other industries here, or with other products or companies. They aren’t even a traditional SaaS company, not that there really Is one either. Their service or income flow is defined by things like offering Enterprise support or a component library at a premium — things that aren’t simply dictated by or shown through documentation traffic trends; things that were encroached upon by plenty of other things besides AI.

As a Tailwind Plus customer I found it very hard to use their templates. I'm not and was not a React developer, so maybe I wasn't the target customer, but as a solo builder the products were too opinionated and too specific to make want to reach for them. I felt like I had to "learn" the template.

They used different technologies for different templates and some even use a 3rd party CMS service that I had no interest in using. Their JavaScript components were non-native, so if I wanted to use any of the interactivity I had to write from scratch.

I think they had an opportunity to grow with AI and with the amount of code that is now being written.

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.

I don't really agree that ML killed their business. I paid for their product early on before it was even done but they never really developed their product. I held out hope to the end of a year and ended up never using my purchase.

Compare that to shadcn, which had visible growing pains and yet reached rocketship fame. Shadcn is evidence that developers were hungry for yet another library, and it's also evidence that users were willing to tolerate rough code on the ride to maturity.

I don't believe Tailwind's component libraries deserved to win.

The shape of business moats are changing. There's probably a lot of businesses that are suddenly non-viable as currently designed.

Being a bit silly with the analogy: it's like we've discovered gunpowder and now entire classes of fortification are deficient.

Noob question, I recall https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49491791 mentioned how the kernel source code and diffs were being crawled excessively. All else being equal, won't all the AI crawling agents mean traffic to docs should at least be stable(presuming changes happen all the time)?

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.

Oof. It’s so sad when businesses with in-demand products suffer from a lack of successful economic mechanism design.

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.

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.

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

This is a good discussion: do LLMs change the calculus for DRY?

A major point of components is having a single place where you can change design and behavior across your entire codebase. With LLMs you can with very good accuracy tell them to change the look of "all buttons that are confirmation buttons in modals but not in the login modal". Doesn't matter if there are 10 such buttons or 1000, it'll take a few seconds for them to accomplish it.

I'm slowly forming the opinion that nowadays having copy-and-pasted "components", with their whole HTML just repeated over and over, is now a much less worrying thing in a codebase. Even a bloated CSS can be quickly fixed by a LLM.

And like you said: you eliminate the build phase entirely and frontend development ergonomics goes back to how it was in the early 2000s.

I quite like Tailwind. I've had great experiences with it, especially on projects where the skill level of contributors was highly variable.

That said, Tailwind is not as powerful as plain old CSS. It's a bit like training wheels for CSS—you gain some guardrails and prevent newbies from messing things up too badly, but you also give up the power modern CSS affords you.

E.g. I invite you to look at some of Ahmed Shadeed's (https://ishadeed.com) layout tutorials, or whatever you find on the CSS-Tricks/Masters.dev homepage today. It's bonkers what you can do with modern CSS!

Tailwind gives you access some of what's possible with CSS today, and they keep adding support for new features, but it's impossible to express everything CSS is capable of using only utility classes. At some point, you need to write some actual real CSS code.

So personally, it's a tradeoff for me. If I really want the full power of CSS, I use plain old CSS. If I'm willing to trade power for the convenience of Tailwind's built-in design tokens and guardrails, then I pick Tailwind.

Both approaches are good and valid. The right choice is context dependent. With And with LLMs in the mix, it's not that hard to port a Tailwind codebase to plain CSS, or vice versa, so picking the wrong thing doesn't have as high a cost as it used to.

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.

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.

Don't do a lot of technical work nowadays, but tailwind is still my go-to. Vanilla CSS just doesn't have nice ergonomics.

With AI I guess you could skip it, but I like to understand the code.

Writing CSS in a way that will scale up with the size of your project and team is just as hard as it's ever been, you still have to come up with a convention for doing that, including taking into account what newer features bring to the table. Having to manually edit it was never the pain point.

Short answer: no, not necessary. Long answer: https://mastrojs.github.io/blog/2025-11-27-why-not-just-use-...

Tailwind is still considerably easier to work with than vanilla CSS. You just have to write less.

There’s been a lot of devs reaching for StyleX over Tailwind recently. Not sure if hype or there’s real advantages.

It still helps deduplicate.

As someone that hates Tailwind, I think there is actually a use case here. If you are fluent in CSS reaching for Tailwind is probably a mistake. But for better or for worse there are lots of developers who can write HTML and JavaScript (or more likely React) who will not, and do not want to, learn CSS, for them things like Tailwind is a godsent.

I do think Tailwind is overused, but it obviously has some legitimate use case.

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

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.

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'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.

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

How well is Laravel doing nowadays?

More like Shopify skinning the company to make a novelty hat.

What are you switching to?

Shopify is a publicly traded company, and they own a significant share of the whole e-commerce market, they aren’t going anywhere lol :)

How do you define small?

> 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.

Struggled for funding because their business model collapsed overnight and isn't coming back, this is probably a best case scenario.

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.

Luckily, Tailwind is, and likely always will be, a block at the very top. Not a critical piece of infrastructure.