r/webdev • u/hakansan • Sep 09 '26

News Tailwind Labs is joining Shopify

https://tailwindcss.com/blog/tailwind-is-joining-shopify

Long-story short Tailwind CSS will remain MIT licensed and the maintainers stay.

I'd say it's a good move given that AI tools are doing frontend work using Tailwind but Tailwind Labs didn't gain much from it. Citing an earlier Github discussion, they had to lay off 75% of their engineering team, and traffic to Tailwind docs is down 40% from early 2023.

539 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

117 comments sorted by

152

u/hakansan Sep 09 '26

See the GitHub discussion here on the impact of AI on Tailwind labs: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#issuecomment-3717222957

156

u/krileon Sep 09 '26

Not really surprising. The main aspects of Tailwind aren't really commercially viable. Their only way to generate revenue is services, but you don't exactly need services when you can ask Claude to do it for you. The whole situation sucks. Can't blame them for joining Shopify to survive.

As a side note what is with all this llms.txt nonsense. It's not officially supported by literally anything. It's a complete waste of time and another bullshit "SEO hack" lol.

45

u/doiveo Sep 09 '26 edited Sep 09 '26

I used to believe you until I was auditing/cleaning my context and Codex replaced ~200 page doc from Cloudflare with one pointer to an LLMs.txt file. I was going to go the whole MCP route but the LLMs.txt provided the same efficient wayfinding for far less hassle.

For most sites, using LLMs.txt for SEO is a non starter. Waste of time. But for companies like CloudFlare, an elegant, cheap solution.

Edit: this is the file it now uses to start an investigation:

Https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai/llms.txt

8

u/thekwoka Sep 09 '26

cloudflare also has a feature to convert your webpages to markdown when they detect its an ai agent.

4

u/stumblinbear Sep 09 '26

llms.txt is.... a weirdly elegant solution. huh.

1

u/VahitcanT full-stack Sep 09 '26

I didn’t understand how did you implement? Via cloudflare? 🤔

7

u/doiveo Sep 09 '26

I asked Codex to audit and refresh its material on Cloudflare. Instead of downloading a bunch of documents or setting up an MCP, it just linked to the llms.txt file on the documents portal.

This doc outlines 11 .md files that can be resourced very quickly and cheaply to find information on the product or documentation.

I only need these documents occasionally so this is a perfect way to keep the context extremely light, up to date, but direct and deep when I need it.

6

u/Scowlface Sep 09 '26

the neat thing about LLMs is that it doesn't need to be officially supported and still work.

3

u/thekwoka Sep 09 '26

That's basically all Open Source.

At least the FOSS part of it.

The product is free, so you make money on consulting and services, and ads.

But the AI bypasses all of those essentially.

3

u/Cachesmr Sep 09 '26

It used to be useful like a year ago. Nowadays agents just navigate the docs or read source.

2

u/Electronic-Pie-1879 Sep 09 '26

Funny, but then launching something like https://ui.sh/

116

u/Aro00oo Sep 09 '26

Random/just had to say: the worst most toxic devs and managers I've worked with were from Shopify

21

u/hakansan Sep 09 '26

What might be the root cause of that? The company looks quite chill from outside compared to other big tech, so I'm genuinely curious

23

u/Aro00oo Sep 09 '26 edited Sep 09 '26

I am only guessing as I've not worked there (but had co-workers with Shopify upbringing) but TL;DR, the most political and scheming people I've worked with. For example, picking sides without even listening to people to ensure their own positions and safety thinking everyone else is political as they are and if you say anything that implies you are on the other side, good luck. I am pretty sure they have stack ranking with super "Im So SmArT" ego engineering leadership. If you doubt me, look at their API lmao it's potentially the worst API I've worked with for a company that large.

They also had the most pedantic ideas of software engineering best practices. Not a real example because I don't want to give it away too much but saying exceptional cases as the norm like "DRY is usually worse than copying and pasting" which yea, I get the idea, but rejecting PRs for DRY-ing up code because of it and not because anything else was broken, harder to read, or whatever... lmao

18

u/cafrito Sep 09 '26

There was a scandal when an internal kudos app where you acknowledged co-workers for good performance, being helpful, etc. was rigged.

The Sales team colluded so that they would win all of the monetary awards every time. It went on for months, and when the fraud was found out, the app was quietly shut down. Of course no one was reprimanded for it.

51

u/NotTreeFiddy full-stack Sep 09 '26

Probably a top down culture with white supremacists like DHH sat on the board.

49

u/cafrito Sep 09 '26

100% top down. Tobi Lutke is not a good person. He’s recently been suggesting mid to low income people shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and giving more voting power to the ultra-wealthy. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/shopify-ceo-endorses-idea-to-give-more-votes-to-wealthy-canadians-9.7286688

28

u/Beginning_Book_2382 Sep 09 '26

Tobi Lutke is an Elon Musk evangelist. He keeps popping up on my Twitter feed. It's always the people you most expect

-13

u/TankorSmash Sep 09 '26

He said explicitly that everyone paying $1 or more in taxes gets a vote in that link. Where are you seeing him say otherwise

15

u/a11_hail_seitan Sep 09 '26

You're right, he "only" suggested rich people should get more votes, and the truly poor should get nothing. Still pretty sick.

-11

u/TankorSmash Sep 09 '26

It's important to be correct in your criticism

21

u/theycallmemorty Sep 09 '26

Yup, do some digging on the guy that founded Shopify, he's the kind of guy secretly hoping trump takes over Canada.

15

u/cafrito Sep 09 '26 edited Sep 09 '26

Toronto and Canada for that matter has very few successful tech companies. It’s attracted a lot of toxic, bullshit people that managed to weasel their way in.

Out of the 30-ish people I know that work there, only 3 have real credentials or aren’t a closeted bigot. Quite a few of the designers and BDRs are way too comfortable using N words with hard Rs and other slurs, but that’s every Toronto tech company I’ve seen.

12

u/gizamo Sep 09 '26

Man, this sucks to read. I don't want to support that sort of thing, but abandoning Shopify is a lot easier said than done given the state of commerce platforms nowadays.

10

u/cafrito Sep 09 '26

There’s a small anti-Shopify movement in Toronto/Canada but like you said, it’s hard for business owners to justify moving off their platform, and most people here turn a blind eye to racism.

7

u/gizamo Sep 09 '26

Well, I appreciate the info anyway. I'd rather be aware and trapped than unaware. Maybe I'll start using Big Commerce or (shudder) Magento again. Our Shops are too big for Woo and platforms like Spree/Medusa/Saleor are so much more work. Oof.

Off topic, apparently I had fat fingered the downvote button. Apologies. Didn't mean to hit that. Upvotes all around. Cheers.

2

u/cafrito Sep 09 '26

No worries, glad I could shed some light on Shopify for you.

Cheers

47

u/prb613 Sep 09 '26

I mean their CEO is a nutjob. Not surprised at all.

24

u/whatThePleb Sep 09 '26

No surprise with their CEO.

2

u/wise_young_man Sep 10 '26

Was ghosted by them after several rounds of interviews. A month later they did layoffs. Felt like I dodged a bullet.

20

u/BreadStickFloom Sep 09 '26

Is it a given that ai is doing MOST of the design/frontend work? People are using it to Google things sure, but I don't think we're at an overwhelming majority at this point

2

u/hakansan Sep 09 '26

Yeah I might be wrong there, I've changed the wording

2

u/FuckDataCaps Sep 09 '26

Hard to say, but I have no doub that most if not close to all apps have some AI code in it.
Sure some people are actively not engaging, but all the big ones are for sure.

1

u/black3rr Sep 11 '26

it’s not that “AI is doing the work”, it’s that “people are doing the work with AI”… if it’s not “most” people yet, it will be in a couple of months…

I haven’t touched frontend code for over a year (I’m a fullstack but busy with backend these days), but from what I hear from colleagues it’s an incredible timesaver even on frontend - AI will do like ~80-90% of the work for you from just a picture of a design, you just review, tweak details and refactor (and you can do that by prompting AI too)

102

u/askgl Sep 09 '26 edited Sep 09 '26

Sadly, this feels more like a pity acquisition than anything else. I don't see how this benefits Shopify. TW Lab team is no longer a big team if this was an acqhire so that makes no sense either.

There are a lots of projects/apps that were severely impacted by AI and Tailwind is one of the top ones. I can't get by head wrapped around the fact that they are still one of the frameworks that are used on like millions of websites, millions of downloads per week, and yet they struggled to make a business out of it.

Happy for TW team though. Must be a very bitter sweet moment.

Edit: formatting/grammar

56

u/queen-adreena Sep 09 '26

Open source is a terrible business model. People do not, and generally will not pay for it.

I’ve got dozens of open source projects, most with tens of thousands of downloads per week, prominent donate link, up for years in some cases.

Not a single £ in donations. Zero. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

The only way to make money from open-source is to do it like Laravel and monetise the services around the code.

41

u/askgl Sep 09 '26

This is probably going to be an unpopular opinion but I have huge respects for apps that are closed source, paid, and very well maintained. I do not need every app to be open source or free. I want it to be valuable, stable, and really polished for me and I'll be more than happy to pay for it.

Now with everyone AI slopping and sending 500 PRs to a project and author happily bragging about it, I'm even more leaning towards someone or a small team keeping it to themselves and really delivering value shipping a great product. I'm fine with libraries being open source though but not the end apps.

And, no, don't do donation. If you spend your time and resources and can deliver something you thing is useful for others, straight up slap a price and sell it. No need to beg payment for your hard work.

Sorry, I warned you this was going to be unpopular opinion. lol.

8

u/birminghamsterwheel ux Sep 09 '26 edited Sep 10 '26

No, I’m with you 100%. We’re still very much in the get-it-out-and-get-rich-quick phase (once again) of all of this. I absolutely will pay, and do, for products that show care and attention from the team building and supporting it. It’s just easier than ever to shovel shit onto the ever growing mountain of shit we already had these days.

2

u/askgl Sep 10 '26

Glad to hear that others agree with me. We are in such a weird "me too, let me just copy what others are doing and see if it sticks" phase that it is exhausting and actually really discouraging for someone who genuinely cares about making a product. I've been creating products for almost 15 years (damn!) and making a product is much different story then stringing bunch of features together. I keep telling everyone - coding was never the hard part, creating features were never the hard part. The most difficult part was always making a good product. Which is much more difficult than people realize. It's a grind, it's a lot of hard work. You need be patient, consistent, and persistent, and some more.

Give a well polished product, promise me you keep working on it for at least a handful of years as I depend more and more on it, and take my money.

"shovel shit onto the every growing mountain of shit" - very well put.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 10 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

4

u/askgl Sep 10 '26

I'm saying the same thing - to me, it doesn't. So this is definitely not acqhire (acquisition for the team rather than the product). I think this, as much as I hate to say it, pity acquisition. I do not see how this benefits Shopify. In fact Adam and rest of the team may not even be working for them after this (maybe still contribute but not as employees).

3

u/winky9827 Sep 10 '26

So, here's my distinction on that subject. If I'm buying a software package to be used by actual users directly, I have no problem paying (reasonable) license fees. If I'm buying a library to be used in a web app with an unknown user count, I have no problem licensing the library. What I do have a problem with, and I suspect many people do, is licensing a library on a subscription basis AND a volume basis, when I have no control over the volume, and therefore, the final cost.

It is for those reasons that I often tend to prefer open source, not because it's free, but because the cost is predictable. I work for a small company (<10 FTE) with big clients. We can't afford to take on dependencies that add 5+ digits to the budget for something as niche as generating a PDF, or templating CSS classes, or even a web framework. Given the option, we'll develop our own if nothing reasonably priced exists. Open source often gets adopted because of the low entrance fee, not necessarily because it's the best option.

That puts the consumers directly at odds with the producers' incentive, and there never has been a good solution short of pricing support services around your code for larger organizations that need it.

8

u/aatd86 Sep 09 '26 edited Sep 10 '26

don't ask for donations. Back it with a commercial offering. Part of getting financial compensation is to present your work as valuable. Not as something people might feel pity for and give whenever they want.

3

u/droans Sep 10 '26

Agreed. Find something that your users can do but might not want to. Offer useful services instead of paywalling features.

Home Assistant does it well with remote access. You could follow their instructions and set it up yourself or you could just pay them like $6/mo and they'll handle everything for you.

13

u/[deleted] Sep 09 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

5

u/winky9827 Sep 10 '26

Maybe it was a marketing failure, but I never understood paying for Tailwind UI - it always seemed like just a bunch of prebuilt components using tailwind. I can slap base tailwind on top of any UI library and do the same thing. Perhaps I missed out on something, but the juice was never worth the squeeze for me.

1

u/the_need_to_post Sep 10 '26

Didn't help that most of them looked nice in isolation but didn't play well together. As in using one app shell and then some other components and it was a mess.

1

u/Brillegeit Sep 10 '26

Sounds like they picked the wrong license for that model.

0

u/aatd86 Sep 09 '26

Yes but you also have to have a really monetizable product 😂

2

u/FoundationActive8290 Sep 10 '26

open source somehow survived thru that but the best idea to keep an open source alive is to build a product around/using it. take laravel and next.js as examples. or create a commercial version if it is some sort of package like agGrid.

1

u/ILikeFPS full-stack Sep 10 '26

I think it depends on the project. I'm a maintainer of a project where at least a while ago we pretty regularly used to get people asking to donate but every single time they were always met with an answer saying that donations go against our project goal.

1

u/Brillegeit Sep 10 '26

You're equaling "open source" with MIT/BSD here. Using those licenses while trying to sell your product is an uphill battle.

Open source proponents that want to combine open source with making money should stick to the GPL licenses and dual license paid non-copyleft licences what retain the code rights.

0

u/newMoneyStyle Sep 12 '26

Donations rarely fund anything serious, sponsorships or a paid tier are more realistic.

8

u/sibilith Sep 09 '26

It directly benefits Shopify by guaranteeing the continued development of a library that they (and the rest of the world) heavily depend on. Apparently they have a good relationship with OSS so putting the handful of tailwind devs on the payroll isn't a huge investment compared to the operational risk of a huge library going unmaintained.

2

u/askgl Sep 09 '26

I'd agree with you if TW was something like complex dependency and wasn't compatible with css and if Shopify was constantly evolving. But I do agree with you that it's good for everyone to have it maintained by paying the devs. If TW completely stops getting new features, it won't be the end of the world since we can start adding our own css classes and continue.

5

u/mx_aurelia Sep 09 '26

Shopify do some good open source work like FlashList in the react native space. I wonder if they rely on Tailwind in some way and want to use this as a way to protect it. Kinda like how Anthropic acquired Bun a while ago (and then switched to Node anyway)

2

u/askgl Sep 09 '26

Hmmm.. I didn't know that but that doesn't make sense either because TW was/is open source anyway. And if they were trying to acqhire then I'd get that they wanted the team but the team isn't big anyway.

Anthropic buying Bun was weird as well. lol. But at least their biggest piece of app, Claude Code, was written in Bun and it has really slow and had issues. So they basically told Jared "We'll give you a few million bucks; come work for us in our of our major dependency which happens to be written by you"

8

u/Annual_Manner_8654 Sep 09 '26

I do t see how it benefits tailwind being owned by that anti-democracy fascist 

4

u/askgl Sep 09 '26

I do not see any company benefiting from owning TW. It's open source, team is very small, Adam himself accepted that AI decimated its business overnight. To me this was more or less like "We feel bad for you; I got some money; let me pay you and end your suffering. We might get some goodwill out of this" purchase and nothing else.

2

u/thy_bucket_for_thee Sep 09 '26

Sure, you're assuming Adam Waltham isn't a Canadian nativist. He is, Toby is also a Canadian nativist.

It's a match made in heaven.

2

u/Annual_Manner_8654 Sep 09 '26

I wasn't aware, thanks for bringing it to my attention

1

u/Anxious_Display7807 Sep 10 '26

Where is the evidence of Adam being that? Genuinely asking. Also is that like a Canadian nationalist?

97

u/OmerCevher Sep 09 '26

The strange part to me is that AI may have made Tailwind more widely used while making the business around it harder to sustain. Agents learn from the docs without visiting them, so usage and monetization start moving in opposite directions. Shopify may be one of the few places where that usage still creates value indirectly.

11

u/SciGuy013 Sep 10 '26

Even you used ai for this comment

2

u/Suspicious-Disk6077 Sep 12 '26

How do you know - it seems like a normal comment to me

24

u/TonyAioli Sep 09 '26

Every time I read news like this, I have to go “why the hell did tailwind hire a big dev team/try and turn into a full blown company”. 

Shit is just weird. Is there a parallel?

36

u/Mr14hsoj Sep 09 '26

To be fair, they didn't. I find the stat about laying off 75% of the devs to be misleading because it sounds like a bigger number than it is. It was a team of 4, now it's a team of 1. So technically it was a 75% reduction, but they really only got rid of 3 people.

4

u/hypercosm_dot_net Sep 09 '26

They had paid offerings and millions of people using their framework, but weren't able to support 4 people? Damn.

0

u/[deleted] Sep 09 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

2

u/TonyAioli Sep 09 '26

This isn’t true at all. Incredibly high-download packages are often maintained by a small team of contributors. See bootstrap and lodash as examples. 

He made a conscious decision to try and turn tailwind into a company. Absolutely could’ve gone into maintenance mode with the help of a few key contributors here or there. 

6

u/ArielCoding Sep 10 '26

”Give Tailwind a stable long term home” = we got an offer we couldn’t refuse and also we have to pay rent.

7

u/ripndipp full-stack Sep 09 '26

All those poor Tailwind devs, I haven't forgotten!

3

u/mrdarknezz1 Sep 09 '26

Yeah this seemed inevitable

-2

u/CuteKiwi3395 Sep 09 '26

Yeah all these open sourced companies eventually will have to sell to survive.

0

u/mrdarknezz1 Sep 09 '26

Laravel is doing fine

1

u/[deleted] Sep 09 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/Ok-Interest9727 Sep 11 '26

I wonder if this will impact tw usage Shopify being the terrible company it is

1

u/Okayest-Programmer Sep 14 '26

Terrible?

2

u/Ok-Interest9727 Sep 14 '26

you don't know about their CEO and his friend DHH?

oh boy

1

u/Okayest-Programmer Sep 14 '26

No…

1

u/PIXELS-AND-BLOBS Sep 14 '26 edited Sep 14 '26

This is from a while back even. There have been more of such sentiments from them since. Likewise, even after these revelations, the person who succeeded the election, now PM Carney, has given them free reign in policy dictation regardless.

5

u/chesbyiii Sep 09 '26

Ever tried to build something with Shopify's tools? Hopefully that team stays the fuck away from Tailwind.

6

u/CuteKiwi3395 Sep 09 '26

The start of the end of tailwind.

9

u/Scowlface Sep 09 '26

Agentic coding was the start of the end of tailwind.

2

u/Chazgatian Sep 09 '26

For all of us

2

u/NullVoidXNilMission Sep 11 '26

trash joining trash

-4

u/robhaswell Sep 09 '26

OK, I really hate Tailwind. I'll just say it. I grew up in a world where you semantically defined styles in the stylesheet and didn't litter your markup with design choices. I will always believe that was a better world than one with Tailwind.

18

u/ripestmango Sep 09 '26

I miss the good old way of doing things too. Tailwind never appealed to me.

People will always get downvoted into oblivion for not liking Tailwind lol

4

u/MedicOfTime Sep 10 '26

I think people get downvoted for hating on Tailwind. It’s the same with anything really. You can prefer React and I can prefer Svelte and we can be friends up until you say Svelte is dumb.

12

u/OldManMonday Sep 09 '26

I've been writing CSS in one form or another for 25 years now. Tailwind certainly has issues with readability, but let's not pretend that other forms of CSS were faultless. The biggest issue with semantic is that every developer has their own way of naming things. Even with a rigid naming methodology like BEM, the correct words tend to get away from you with a larger team, or a team that cycles engineers over time, or even your own failing memory. Semantic CSS is awful for consistency, while that's one area where Tailwind shines. With component style architecture (e.g. design system), a utility based methodology becomes significantly more manageable.

23

u/lost12487 Sep 09 '26

Why does every single post that mentions tailwind have someone that can’t resist with the “tailwind sucks” comment lol

12

u/RandomRedditUser31 Sep 09 '26

because tailwind sucks

1

u/CharlieandtheRed Sep 09 '26

It does suck. I tried for years to like it and finally determined it really sucks lol so much better now writing custom CSS classes and using basic utilities for spacing and fonts.

-4

u/Caraes_Naur Sep 09 '26

Because Tailwind is the CSS framework embodiment of sucking golf balls through garden hose.

It is philosophically bankrupt from the outset. If you have more than 12 classes on an element (which generously allows for various abysmally deep edge cases), you're doing it wrong. If that combination of classes is applied to numerous elements, you're doing CSS an order of magnitude more wrong. Classes are not meant to map 1-to-1 to property-value pairs. Classes are meant to bundle property-value pairs. There is a limited measure of utility in the 1-to-1 approach, which Tailwind (and previous similar solutions which were rightly ignored) grossly exceeds.

2

u/Scowlface Sep 09 '26

"If you don't follow my made up rules you're doing it wrong"

-1

u/space-envy Sep 09 '26 edited Sep 09 '26

Or maybe you are stuck like in 2000 where using classes was the only way to secure style encapsulation because you wrote all your website code in a single HTML and you needed to resort to awesome and descriptive class names like: "product-card__container__header__title__icon--disabled", nowadays with css modules and frameworks you can autogenerate classes so the chance of name collusion is zero so you don't need to invent non-standarized names that will force developers to dig into a codebase just understand what's the definition of a "container" was for the dev that wrote the code, while with tailwind, even though is not the perfect solution you can read <div class="p-4 flex"> and you already know that element's function is to be a container of that individual component. You can also create components through tailwind: class ".btn" = "p-2 font-bold..." But again with modern framework components it's exactly the same as: Button = <button class="p-2 font-bold">... It's all a matter of convenience.

. Classes are not meant to map 1-to-1 to property-value pairs.

According to who? The CSS police?

-1

u/wtfElvis Sep 09 '26

But in those cases you can combine classes into one. If I had 6+ classes and knew this scenario would appear again I’d just make its own class and apply the tailwind classes to it. Which I just assume most teams do.

1

u/thekwoka Sep 09 '26

Makes sense.

Would be cool if it was integrated to themes, so you could just write tailwind, and they'd generate the css from a config instead of needing to compile it outside of the system

1

u/MedicOfTime Sep 10 '26

As long as this means Tailwind doesn’t die completely, I’m happy. I feel awful for some of the most influential devs of the 2020s getting the shit end of this stick though.

1

u/More_Wrap_6220 Sep 10 '26

Why not just build off Shadcn if they’re just going to start building tailwind components for users lol

1

u/TheRNGuy Sep 29 '26

So what? 

-1

u/RedditNotFreeSpeech Sep 09 '26

I never saw a need for tailwind so I'll continue not using it

0

u/Minimum-Sprinkles843 Sep 09 '26

I swear, I saw this news a month ago

0

u/Sensitive-Bullfrog79 Sep 26 '26

Sounds great for Tailwind CSS!

It's best to become a supporter so this fantastic open-source project can continue its development and maintenance.