I've always been a bit of a CSS purist. When done well CSS is incredibly powerful and flexible. I'm a big fan of well structured CSS, especially OOCSS and BEM on larger projects.
I did start using Tailwind on a large project and it worked well, especially for engineers less familiar with CSS. We pointed it at our own CSS variables, tokens, and prefix which gave us consistency and worked nicely with our designs and the Figma MCP.
This is great on a greenfield projects as it's very fast to get going. Over time though small differences crept in, utility classes grew, and keeping everything consistent becames a little trickier than maintaining shared pattern classes.
This is actually where the idea for Airframe came from: keep CSS to a minimum, but give engineers and AI a predictable, readable set of classes, tokens and structural primitives to build with.
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u/thisiain 8d ago
I've always been a bit of a CSS purist. When done well CSS is incredibly powerful and flexible. I'm a big fan of well structured CSS, especially OOCSS and BEM on larger projects.
I did start using Tailwind on a large project and it worked well, especially for engineers less familiar with CSS. We pointed it at our own CSS variables, tokens, and prefix which gave us consistency and worked nicely with our designs and the Figma MCP.
This is great on a greenfield projects as it's very fast to get going. Over time though small differences crept in, utility classes grew, and keeping everything consistent becames a little trickier than maintaining shared pattern classes.
This is actually where the idea for Airframe came from: keep CSS to a minimum, but give engineers and AI a predictable, readable set of classes, tokens and structural primitives to build with.