5 ms·

The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely

• A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 9mo ago
  Agreed. I don't know how realistic it is without a major need that would force major player to abide by it, but yea..
• K0nserv 9mo ago
  Having worked on a design system previously I think most people, especially non-frontend developers, discount how hard something like that is to build. LLMs will build stuff that looks plausible but falls short in a bunch of ways (particularly accessibility). This is for the same reason that people generate div-soup, it looks correct on the surface. EDIT: I suppose what I'm saying is that "The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such thing." is wrong. My hunch is that AI has the appearance of eliminating the need for such things.
  • sosodev 9mo ago
    I think you're overestimating how much people care about quality.
    • K0nserv 9mo ago
      Oh no I'm very cynical about that.
      • sbarre 9mo ago
        I think perhaps the nuance in the middle here is that for most projects, the quality that professional components bring is less important. Internal tools and prototypes, both things that quality components can accelerate, have been strong use-cases for these component libraries, just as much as polished commercial customer-facing products. And I bet volume-wise there's way more of the former than the latter. So while I think most people who care about quality know you can't (yet) blindly use LLM output in your final product, it's completely ok for internal tools and prototyping.
    • sublinear 9mo ago
      It's not that people care about quality, but that people expect things to "just work". Regarding the point about accessibility, there are a ton of little details that must be explicitly written into the HTML that aren't necessarily the default behavior. Some common features of CSS and JS can break accessibility too. None of this code would obvious to an LLM, or even human devs, but it's still what's expected. Without precisely written and effectively read-only boilerplate your webpage is gonna be trash and the specifics are a moving target and hotly debated. This back and forth is a human problem, not a code problem. That's why it's "hard".
      • ctoth 9mo ago
        I use the web every day as a blind user with a screenreader. I would 100% of the time prefer to encounter the median website written by Opus 4.5 than the median website written by a human developer in terms of accessibility!
        • K0nserv 9mo ago
          That's really interesting. Are you speaking from experience with websites where you know who authored them or from seeing code written by humans and Opus 4.5 respectively?
  • beberlei 9mo ago
    While I believe you, its an argument that artists bring forward since the beginning of art, so even many hundred years before the internet on average humankind did not value this work.
  • lone-cloud 9mo ago
    It's not that hard to build a design system with decent accessibility. Just use shadcn ui components instead of rolling your own.
    • K0nserv 9mo ago
      It's not really a refutation of my point about how building a good component library is hard, to suggest using another component library. Of course, if you use one it's easier, that was my entire point.
      • lone-cloud 9mo ago
        shadcn ui is not a component library but the basis for a component library that has great accessibility built-in from the start, so yes, it is a refutation.
        • rhymnz 9mo ago
          You're thinking of Radix primitives which Shadcn is built on, but both are component libraries.
          • lone-cloud 9mo ago
            Maybe we're arguing semantics, but I think calling shadcn a "basis for a design system" is more accurate than a traditional component library. The difference to me is that shadcn lives inside your codebase and you can fully customize it as you please. You cannot customize a component library like MUI nearly to that extent.
  • xnx 9mo ago
    > design system ... discount how hard something like that is to build. This is probably a good thing. The web would be much better off with fewer design systems.
  • h14h 9mo ago
    The Tailwind Team's Refactoring UI book was a big eye opener for me. I had no idea how many subtle insights are required to create truly effective UX. I think people vastly underestimate just how much work goes into determining the correct set of primitives create a design system like Tailwind, let alone a full blown component library like TailwindUI.
• nemomarx 9mo ago
  Maybe we need patreon equivalents for open source development?
  • sosodev 9mo ago
    It already exists. Tailwind has had GitHub sponsorships enabled for years but only 5 people have ever given them money that way.
    • satvikpendem 9mo ago
      Meanwhile Evan You of Vue JS was making something like 200k just from Patreon before starting void(0) which is venture backed, it's all a marketing problem because I don't think anyone knew their GitHub sponsors even existed, people just don't seem to use it in general. I don't know why Tailwind needed anyone more than Adam, I understand that more people makes the work go faster such as for their Rust compiler but then you run into money problems like this.
    • ceejayoz 9mo ago
      They have off-GH sponsorship that's much more widely subscribed. https://tailwindcss.com/sponsor https://tailwindcss.com/sponsor
      • jonas21 9mo ago
        Yeah, it's apparently pulling in over $800K in annual revenue [1]. EDIT: Doing the math on the sponsor list, it's probably around $1M in ARR now. [1] https://petersuhm.com/posts/2025/ https://petersuhm.com/posts/2025/
        • eudamoniac 9mo ago
          I'm sorry but it simply does not cost a million dollars to maintain Tailwind, a CSS library that has no compelling reason to ever change at this point.
  • Nextgrid 9mo ago
• spzb 9mo ago
  AI's going to be a whole lot less useful when it doesn't have any open source component libraries to crib from.
  • kjkjadksj 9mo ago
    They already pay people to generate training data.
    • css_apologist 9mo ago
      this is news to me, how does this work? who is getting paid?
      • babelfish 9mo ago
        Mercor, Turing, Scale, etc facilitate the work. Labs pay them, they pay contractors.
      • simonw 9mo ago
        Some relevant job ads for Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs/5025624008 https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs/5025624008 - "Research Engineer – Cybersecurity RL" - "This role blends research and engineering, requiring you to both develop novel approaches and realize them in code. Your work will include designing and implementing RL environments, conducting experiments and evaluations, delivering your work into production training runs, and collaborating with other researchers, engineers, and cybersecurity specialists across and outside Anthropic." https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs/4924308008 https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs/4924308008 - "Research Engineer / Research Scientist, Biology & Life Sciences" - "As a founding member of our team, you'll work at the intersection of cutting-edge AI and the biological sciences, developing rigorous methods to measure and improve model performance on complex scientific tasks." The key trend in 2025 was a new emphasis on reinforcement learning - models are no longer just trained by dumping in a ton of scraped text, there's now a TON of work involved designing reinforcement learning loops that teach them how to do specific useful things - and designing those loops requires subject-matter expertise. That's why they got so much better at code over the past six months - code is the perfect target for RL because you can run generated code and see if it works or not.
• tschellenbach 9mo ago
  Well.. there are many fast growing companies that provide UI + APIs for certain components of your app. Sure you can build things easier in-house, but the opportunity cost of doing so also went up. Supabase, Stream, Clerk, Stainless all growing very well.
• jesse_dot_id 9mo ago
  I bought a Tailwind Plus trial a few years ago and I've been using AI tools since they came out. I typically find the block or template I want to use via the Tailwind Plus site and then feed it into Claude Code and ask the agent to modify them as required. This has been working well for me. I think the problem is that the Internet is absolutely full of people who expect free shit and never even consider paying for it to support the devs. I don't really know how you fix that. In a sane world, we'd be funding the most popular/useful projects using government grants, since our entire fucking economy sits atop a pile of OSS.
  • YaeGh8Vo 9mo ago
    Ironically, some of the same people that are ready to pay $200.-/month Claude subscriptions.
    • jesse_dot_id 9mo ago
      You're not wrong.
    • nyantaro1 9mo ago
      I don't know why I didn't think about this before, but you are right. This is just wrong.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  • jandy 9mo ago
    I think you can see this when you look at the downvotes on that GitHub issue on any comment which suggests gating AI access behind a paywall.
  • jesse_dot_id 9mo ago
    Bought a license, not a trial. Freudian slip.
• legitster 9mo ago
  Well, you can tell from the tone of his post that he isn't blaming anyone directly. They monetized convenience, and something more convenient came along. I think it's more shocking to everyone how quickly something like that happens.
  • suyash 9mo ago
    Exactly the business model wasn't strong enough, just upselling templates for hundreds of dollars which AI can churn in few tokens was easy to disrupt.
    • mmcnl 9mo ago
      The business model is strong. AI is stealing traffic/money from creators. That's not a problem with the business model, it's a problem with AI. AI hyperscalers shamelessly monetize other people's work without compensation. Truly an awful dystopia.
      • kimixa 9mo ago
        The output of AIs that is "churned out" wouldn't exist without templates like this being used as an input to the training. But that isn't "Copyright Infringement", according to the AI companies.
        • mmcnl 9mo ago
          They have more and better lawyers. But I know what feels morally unjust.
          • mrguyorama 9mo ago
            You and I would not get away with this no matter how much lawyering we buy. This has nothing to do with the actual facts or arguments of the case. Our "Justice" system has openly and capriciously emphasized corporate rights over individual rights for at least 50 years now.
      • 9mo ago
• jsheard 9mo ago
  > The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such things. Or more cynically that it eliminates the need to pay for such things. Claude and friends were no doubt trained on the commercial Tailwind components, so the question becomes whether those models could have done the job of Tailwind UI without piggybacking on the unpaid labour of the Tailwind UI developers. If not then we clearly have a sustainability problem here - someone still has to do the hard work to push things forward, but with the knowledge that any attempt to profit from that work will be instantly undercut by the copyright laundering Borg.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
• spaceman_2020 9mo ago
  The only thing that can save open source software is open source LLMs Unfortunately only the Chinese are really being serious about that
• Vinnl 9mo ago
  Does it matter whether it's been obvious that it would be a major issue? It's not unlikely that he did realise this a long time ago, and if he did, it's also not unlikely that he still hasn't found a solution, because there might not be one.
• biztos 9mo ago
  Is AI making component libraries redundant? Or is it just making it really easy to use free component libraries? (Or is it really more about traffic to the documentation site and thus eyeballs on the sales pitch?) I'm making an app using ShadCN, which is pretty good and free -- maybe Tailwind Plus would be significantly better, I don't know, I had to consider the possibility that this project never makes any money so I wanted free for the first shot. And the LLMs turn out to know it pretty well. Once I get it built using ShadCN, it's hard to imagine when I'd have time to go redo all the component hackery with another library, even if it were way better. I guess my point is just that "paid UI components" is a really tough business when there are so many people willing to make components just for the fun/glory/practice. Same with a lot of UI stuff it seems -- I highly respect icon designers, but I'm probably just going to use Lucide.
  • presentation 9mo ago
    Fwiw I don’t even think shadcn is good, but our app is built on top of those components already, so we can’t change it without changing everything, so we’re stuck with it.
  • keithnz 9mo ago
    I think all kinds of libraries are becoming redundant. Unless the library solves significant technical problems its likely AI will generate whatever you need. Even tailwind itself is kind of unnecessary, I've used it a lot, but recently been just using AI to generate raw css on side projects, I feel it works pretty well. Tailwind is really a developer convivence, it made things pretty fast to style, but now I don't really think it has anywhere near the advantages it did. If you aren't writing tailwindcss but generating it, almost all the advantage is gone. Only thing it kind of provides is a set of defaults / standards
  • hiccuphippo 9mo ago
    I've known of the paid components for years and never thought of buying them. It's so easy to build things with Tailwind that it never crossed my mind.
• falloutx 9mo ago
  How does it eliminates the need for simple templates and components? Templates and components are always gonna be more cost effective, back in the day we used to buy simple jQuery components for like 5*$ and even LLMs cant beat that, you will quickly end up with a shittier component with 0 accessibility and end up paying more to the Claude Opus
• throw234234234 9mo ago
  In the face of LLM's it won't be rational for many people to open source their work. People don't want their work/effort being used against them.
  • noobermin 9mo ago
    I've considered no longer uploading work I do to GitHub.
• tomaskafka 9mo ago
  > I think the even more unfortunate truth is that value adds were never a good solution to begin with. This is the money quote for me - charging for a different thing than the one that brings the value is unsustainable, and AI is accelerating that realization. Unfortunately, without free distribution, Tailwind would never gain anywhere close to its current mindshare, so there just might not be an opening there (save for a "this year is a year of Linux on desktop" dream of bots and pnpm install paying with micropayments for each download).
• nananana9 9mo ago
  > The reality is that we need everyone to agree that open source software is valuable and worth supporting monetarily The reality is that you need to figure out is that if you want people to pay when they make a ton of money from your code, you should put that in the license.