12 ms·

AI is a business model stress test

341 points by amarsahinovic 9mo ago

techblueberry 9mo ago
This feels like the OpenSSL problem where we do probably need some kind of industry organization to maintain these things. There’s a chicken and the egg problem that these AI companies need someone to keep maintaining tailwind if they want it to keep working in their prompts. Maybe that limits the ability for the head of tailwind to run their own business and make more income, but something gotta give.
- bob1029 9mo ago
  > we do probably need some kind of industry organization to maintain these things. In the case of CSS, we already have that: https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Overview.en.html https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Overview.en.html
  - mrgoldenbrown 9mo ago
    Are you saying the www consortium should be paying to keep Tailwind development and maintenance going? The css standard is not the same as a usable library of components.
    - aurareturn 9mo ago
      Tailwind is open source. Anyone can contribute to it, including an LLM. If the founder of Tailwind quits on it, others who deem Tailwind valuable enough will continue to maintain it.
      - zephen 9mo ago
        > others who deem Tailwind valuable enough will continue to maintain it. We have seen several examples in the last couple of years where this is simply not true enough. There are multiple open source projects that do not receive enough TLC.
        deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
        aurareturn 9mo ago
        Then it isn't important enough to people. If my company relies on an open source project and it isn't being maintained, I can either ask my company to start maintaining it or find something else or accept the risk of a an unmaintained project.
      - HumanOstrich 9mo ago
        You're just parroting what you've heard. The reality of continuing an abandoned project is not that simple.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
  - terribleidea 9mo ago
    The problem here is that the w3c sucks a fat one, and they've failed to build software specs that don't require an ecosystem thousands of libraries to make using CSS, etc. simple or efficient.
big_toast 9mo ago
"The value got extracted, but compensation isn't flowing back. That bothers me, and it deserves a broader policy conversation. What I keep coming back to is this: AI commoditizes anything you can fully specify. [...] So where does value live now? In what requires showing up, not just specifying. Not what you can specify once, but what requires showing up again and again." This seems like a useful framing to be aware of, generally. The internet has always kinda run on the ambiguity of "does the value flow back". A quote liberated from this article itself; all the content that reporters produce that's laundered back out through twitter; 12ft.io; torrents; early youtube; late youtube; google news; apache/mit vs gnu licenses; et cetera..
drivebyhooting 9mo ago
In my opinion LLMs are intellectual property theft. Just as if I started distributing copies of books. This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP. All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license: if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published.
- johnpaulkiser 9mo ago
  > if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published. This feels like the simplest & best single regulation that can be applied in this industry.
  - Dilettante_ 9mo ago
    It'd substantially reduce the incentive for the training of new models.
    - blibble 9mo ago
      burglary as a business has an extremely high margin for the burglar
    - Forgeties79 9mo ago
      So what? Figure it out. They have billions in investor funding and we’re supposed to just let them keep behaving this way at our expense? Facebook was busted torrenting all sorts of things in violation of laws/regulations that would lead to my internet being cut off by my ISP. They did it at scale and faced no consequences. Scraping sites, taking down public libraries, torrenting, they just do whatever they want with impunity. You should be angry!
      - drivebyhooting 9mo ago
        Meanwhile look at what happened to Aaron Schwartz. There’s no justice until corporations are held accountable.
l5870uoo9y 9mo ago
Killed by AI or competitors offering Tailwind templates and UI kits at a much lower price or for free?
kachapopopow 9mo ago
I know for a fact that all SOTA models have linux source code in them, intentionally or not which means that they should follow the GPL license terms and open-source part of the models which have created derivative works out of it. yes, this is indirectly hinting that during training the GPL tainted code touches every single floating point value in a model making it derivative work - even the tokenizer isn't immune to this.
- ronsor 9mo ago
  > the tokenizer isn't immune to this A tokenizer's set of tokens isn't copyrightable in the first place, so it can't really be a derivative work of anything.
  - kachapopopow 9mo ago
    GPL however, does put restrictions on it, even the tokenizer. It was specifically crafted in a way where even if you do not have any GPL licensed sourcecode in your project, but it was built on top of it you are still binded by GPL limitations. the only reason usermode is not affected is because they have an exclusion for it and only via defined communication protocol, if you go around it or attempt to put a workaround in the kernel guess what: it still violates the license - point is: it is very restrictive.
    - ronsor 9mo ago
      > GPL however, does put restrictions on it, even the tokenizer. It was specifically crafted in a way where even if you do not have any GPL licensed sourcecode in your project, but it was built on top of it you are still binded by GPL limitations. This is not how copyright law works. The GPL is a copyright license, as stated by the FSF. Something which is not subject to copyright cannot be subject to a copyright license.
      - kachapopopow 9mo ago
        GPL is not only a copyright license, it also covers multiple types of intellectual property rights. Especially when you consider GPL-3 which has explicit IP protection while GPL-2 is implicit, so yah you're partially right for GPL-2 and wrong for GPL-3.
heliumtera 9mo ago
Tailwind Labs relied on a weird monetization scheme. Revenue was proportional to the pain of using the framework. The sudden improvement in getting desired UI without relying on pre-built templates killed Tailwind Labs. There are many initiatives in a similar spot, improving your experience at using Next.js would hurt Vercel. Making GitHub actions runners more reliable, stable and economical would hurt Microsoft. Improving accessibility to compute power would hurt Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Improving control and freedom over your device would hurt apple and Google. Why should we be sympathetic to the middleman again? If suddenly CSS became pleasant to use, Tailwind would be in a rough spot. See the irony? "Give everything away for free and this people will leave technology", geohot said something like this and I truly appreciate. Technology will heal finally
- eddythompson80 9mo ago
  > Tailwind Labs relied on a weird monetization scheme. Revenue was proportional to the pain of using the framework. Really? To me, Tailwind seemed like the pinnacle of how anyone here would say “open source software” should function. Provide a solid, truly open source, software and make money from consulting or helping others use it and selling custom built solutions around it. The main sin of Tailwind was assuming that type of business could scale to a “large business” structure as opposed to “a single dev”-type project. By a “single dev”-type I don’t mean literally one guy, but more a very lean and non-corporate or company-like structure. Vercel (and redislabs, mongo, etc) are different because they are in the “we can run it for you” business. Which is another “open source” model I have dabbled in for a while in my career. Thinking that the honest and ethical position is to provide open source software, then offer to host it for people who don’t want to selfhost and charge for that.
  - reb 9mo ago
    Wasn't the tailwind team just a few people? Might be misremembering but my impression was a team under 10 people, which is tiny
  - heliumtera 9mo ago
    From the developer perspective not much changes despite organization structure being completely different in this comparison (trillion dollar company vs 10 individual contributors). Tailwind Labs revenue stream was tied to documentation visit, that was the funnel. The author's argument was this revenue stream was destroyed by a slight quality of life improvement (having llms fill in css classes). Tailwind Labs benefits from: a) documentation visit b) inability to implement desired layout using the framework (and CSS being unpleasant). It seems there is a conflict of interest between the developer expecting the best possible experience and the main revenue stream. Given that a slight accidental improvement in quality of life and autonomy for users destroyed the initiative main revenue stream, it would be fair to say it doesn't just "seems like a conflict of interest". Definitely disagree with it being the "pinnacle" of how open source should function but I also won't provide any examples because it is besides the point. I will point out that fsf is fine for many decades now, and a foundation with completely different structure like zig foundation seems to be ok with a somewhat proportional revenue (orders of magnitude less influence, adoption and users, maybe 10-20x less funding)
mrgoldenbrown 9mo ago
Calling it a stress test seems a bit off. Would we say that invention of lightbulbs was a "stress test" for candle related business models? Or would we just say that business models had to change in response to current events.
- Twixes 9mo ago
  Drop the "test". Just "stress" – it's cleaner.
geoffbp 9mo ago
> Value is shifting to operations: deployment, testing, rollbacks, observability. You can't prompt 99.95% uptime on Black Friday. Neither can you prompt your way to keeping a site secure, updated, and running. I agree somewhat but eventually these can be automated with AI as well.
- bowmessage 9mo ago
  How? I am tired of these unfounded claims. Humans can’t even keep many sites secure.
- g947o 9mo ago
  Care to provide a prompt that leads to coding agent achieving 99.95% uptime on Black Friday as an example?
- Culonavirus 9mo ago
  If "99.95% uptime on Black Friday", and "keeping a site secure, updated, and running" can ever be automated (by which I mean not a toy site and not relying on sheer luck), not only 99.99% of people in IT are out of a job, but humans as intelligent beings are done. This is such a doomsday scenario that there's not even a point in discussing it.
- tetha 9mo ago
  Unless you replace the entire workforce, you'd be surprised how much organizational work and soft skills are involved in an infrastructure at scale. Like sure, there is a bunch of stuff like monitoring, alerting that is telling us that a database is filling up it's disk. This is already automated. It could also have automated remediation with tech from the 2000s with some simple rule-based systems (so you can understand why those misbehaved, instead of entirely opaque systems that just do whatever). The thing is though, very often the problem isn't the disk filling up or fixing that. The problem is rather figuring out what silly misbehavior the devs introduced, if a PM had a strange idea they did not validate, if this is backed by a business case and warrants more storage, if your upstream software has a bug, or whatever else. And then more stuff happens and you need to open support cases with your cloud provider because they just broke their API to resize disks, ... And don't even get me started on trying to organize access management with a minimally organized project consulting team. Some ADFS config resulting from that is the trivial part.
avidiax 9mo ago
To call it a stress "test" is dismissive. A stress test on a bank doesn't actually erase the revenue and financially jeopardize the bank. Implementing layoffs is not a stress test.
deleted 9mo ago
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tschellenbach 9mo ago
They could build something like Lovable but with better design/frontend defaults.
ronsor 9mo ago
I see "hackers" in these comments are now advocating to make "criminal contempt of business model" a serious thing, instead of a mere meme used to describe draconian copyright and patent laws.
- gnerd00 9mo ago
  also death penalty for touching oil rigs, via Bush I.. "stay in your lane" plus license plate readers
- jennyholzer4 9mo ago
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- bongodongobob 9mo ago
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- jeroenhd 9mo ago
  It's a reddit alternative hosted by a venture capitalist firm, the startup culture is much more prevalent here than the hacker culture that inspires the website's <title> tag.
antirez 9mo ago
> You can't prompt 99.95% uptime on Black Friday. Neither can you prompt your way to keeping a site secure, updated, and running. This is completely wrong. Agents will not just be able to write code, like they do now, but will also be able to handle operations, security, continuing to check, and improve the systems, tirelessly.
- deleted 9mo ago
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- somebehemoth 9mo ago
  And someday we will have truly autonomous driving cars, we will cure cancer, and humans will visit Mars. You can't prompt this today, are you suggesting this might come literally tomorrow? 10 years? 30? At that unknown time will your comment become relevant?
  - chazhaz 9mo ago
    the quoted comment is arguing that devops will never be promptable — putting aside the discussion about whether or not that's true today, the argument here is that it's not likely to _never_ be possible
- deleted 9mo ago
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- Culonavirus 9mo ago
  To be able to do this requires perfect domain knowledge AND environment knowledge AND be able to think deeply about logical dominoes (event propagation through the system, you know, the small stuff that crashes cloudflare for the entire planet for example). Please wake me up when Shopify lets a bunch of agentic LLMs run their backends without human control and constant supervision.
  - handfuloflight 9mo ago
    The extreme here is thinking machines will do everything. The reality is likely far closer to less humans being needed.
jamesshelley 9mo ago
Framing it as a "conduit" disruption might make a lot of assumptions about the fundamental economic value of software in the future. In a world (whether near term or long term) where you can just ask the computer to make whatever software you want, what are the economics of retailing/licensing any software at all? Open source or otherwise?
dnw 9mo ago
I'd note a couple of things: Not to nitpick but if we are going to discuss the impact of AI, then I'd argue "AI commoditizes anything you can specify." is not broad enough. My intuition is "AI commoditizes anything you can _evaluate/assess_." For software automation we need reasonably accurate specifications as input and we can more or less predict the output. We spend a lot of time managing the ambiguity on the input. With AI that is flipped. In AI engineering you can move the ambiguity from input to the output. For problems where there is a clear and cheaper way of evaluating the output the trade-off of moving the ambiguity is worth it. Sometimes we have to reframe the problem as an optimization problem to make it work but same trade-off. On the business model front: [I am not talking specifically about Tailwind here.] AI is simply amplifying systemic problems most businesses just didn't acknowledge for a while. SEO died the day Google decided to show answer snippets a decade ago. Google as a reliable channel died the day Google started Local Services Advertisement. Businesses that relied on those channels were already bleeding slowly; AI just made it sudden. On efficiency front, most enterprises could have been so much more efficient if they could actually build internal products to manage their own organizational complexity. They just could not because money was cheap so ROI wasn't quite there and even if ROI was there most of them didn't know how to build a product for themselves. Just saying "AI first" is making ROI work, for now, so everyone is saying AI efficiency. My litmus test is fairly naive: if you are growing and you found AI efficiency then that's great (e.g. FB) but if you're not growing and only thing AI could do for you is "efficiency" then there is a fundamental problem no AI can fix.
- andrekandre 9mo ago
  > if you are growing and you found AI efficiency then that's great (e.g. FB) but if you're not growing and only thing AI could do for you is "efficiency" then there is a fundamental problem no AI can fix. exactly, "efficiency" nice to say in a vacuum but what you really need is quality (all-round) and understanding your customer/market
m4rtink 9mo ago
So AI is attempting to replace SAP as the traditional way of testing if you company is strong enough ?
lacoolj 9mo ago
Companies providing AI services should offer ads for the things the AI is using. And I don't mean "Tailwind could pay Google to advertise in Gemini", I mean "Google should be clearly and obviously linking back to Tailwind when it uses the library in its output" They already do this sort of thing inside outputs from Deep Research, and possibly without. But the output should be less muted, inline, recessed and more "I have used Tailwind! Check out how to make it better [HERE](link)" They should be working with the owners of these projects, especially ones with businesses, and directing traffic to them. Not everyone will go, and that's fine, but at least make the effort. The infrastructure is in place already. And yes, right now this would not be across-the-board for every single library, but maybe it could be one day? It's the same problem news sites have been facing for years because of Google News and Facebook. Their solution so far has been country-level bans on it (Canada).
- nitwit005 9mo ago
  But why would you click the tailwinds link if you're getting correct answers? You don't need documentation or consulting. Google and Facebook couldn't provide full news articles because of copyright law. They just showed headline and summary provided by the news websites (and still eventually got sued for showing the summaries).
- camdenreslink 9mo ago
  The number one rule of these apps is don’t link outside the app (because then the user will stop their session).
- AlienRobot 9mo ago
  I feel that the battle is already lost when we aren't arguing that the AI service must get a license from the copyright holder like everybody else, but instead just arguing how many crumbs is the AI service morally obliged to throw back.
- pico303 9mo ago
  I was thinking something similar, but not so much an ad as a citation. A good starting point might be a law stating that when an LLM produces an answer, it cite its sources, with a link back to the content. Ideally, though, the producer of that content should receive some amount of financial compensation as well, similar to how an author or an actor receives royalties. If the LLM is making money off of this, so should the person who provide the LLM the value.
browningstreet 9mo ago
Business & time are business model stress tests.
terribleidea 9mo ago
Maybe they just over-hired for their business model.
xg15 9mo ago
> So where does value live now? In what requires showing up, not just specifying. Not what you can specify once, but what requires showing up again and again. Sounds like even more incentive for "managing" problems and creating business models around them instead of solving them.
- rglover 9mo ago
  The flurry machine isn't permanently broken, it's just keeping someone employed.
wolpoli 9mo ago
Tailwind plus is available for one time payment that provides lifetime access to current and future components. With AI cutting off the flow for new buyers, revenue shrivels up much quicker than what it would've been if it was a recurring subscription.
deleted 9mo ago
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MangoCoffee 9mo ago
>Open Source was never the commercial product. It's the conduit to something else. this is correct. If you open source your software, then why are you mad when companies like AWS, OpenAI, etc. make tons of money? Open Source software is always a bridge that leads to something else to commercialize on. If you want to sell software, then pick Microsoft's model and sell your software as closed source. If you get mad and cry about making money to sustain your open source project, then pick the right license for your business.
- jeroenhd 9mo ago
  > then pick the right license for your business That's one of the issues with AI, though; strongly copylefted software suddenly finds itself unable to enforce its license because "AI" gets a free pass on copyright for some reason. Dual-licensing open source with business-unfriendly licensing used to be a pretty good way to sell software, but thanks to the absurd legal position AI models have managed to squeeze themselves into, that stopped in an instant.
  - zephen 9mo ago
    Open source software helped to dramatically reduce the cost of paid software, because there is a now a minimum bar of functionality you have to produce in order to sell software. And, in many cases, you had to produce that value yourself. GPL licensing lawsuits ensured this. AI extracting value from software in such a way that the creators no longer can take the small scraps they were willing to live on seems likely to change this dynamic. I expect no-source-available software (including shareware) to proliferate again, to the detriment of open source.
keeda 9mo ago
One of the biggest shortcomings of Open Source was that it implicitly defaulted to a volunteer model and so financing the work was always left as an exercise for the reader. Hence (as TFA points out) open source code from commercial entities was just a marketing channel and source of free labor... err, community contributions... to auxiliary offerings that actually made money. This basic economic drive is totally natural but creates dynamics that lead to suboptimal behaviors and controversy multiple times. For instance, a favorite business model is charging for support. Another one was charging for a convenient packaging or hosting of an “open core” project. In either case, the incentives just didn’t align towards making the software bug-free and easily usable, because that would actively hamper monetization. This led to instances of pathological behavior, like Red Hat futzing with its patches or pay-walling its source code to hamper other Linux vendors. Then there were cases where the "open source" branding was used to get market-share, but licenses restricted usage in lucrative applications, like Sun with Java. But worse, often a bigger fish swooped in to take the code, as they were legally allowed to, and repackage it in their own products undercutting the original owners. E.g. Google worked around Sun's licensing restrictions to use Java completely for free in Android. And then ironically Android itself was marketed as "open source" while its licensing came with its own extremely onerous restrictions to prevent true competition. Or all those cases when hyperscalers undercut the original owners’ offerings by providing open source projects as proprietary Software as a Service. All this in turn led to all sorts of controversies like lawsuits or companies rug-pulling its community with a license change. And aside from all that, the same pressures regularly led to the “enshittification” of software. Open Source is largely a socialist (or even communist) movement, but businesses exist in a fundamentally capitalistic society. The tensions between those philosophies were inevitable. Socialists gonna socialize, but capitalists gonna capitalize. With AI, current OSS business models may soon be dead. And personally I would think, to the extent they were based on misaligned incentives or unhealthy dynamics, good riddance! Open Source itself will not go away, but it will enter a new era. The cost of code has dropped so much, monetizing will be hard. But by the same token, it will encourage people, having invested so much fewer resources creating it, to release their code for free. A lot of it will be slop, but the quantity will be overwhelming. It’s not clear how this era will pan out, but interesting times ahead.
renjimen 9mo ago
> You can't prompt 99.95% uptime on Black Friday. Neither can you prompt your way to keeping a site secure, updated, and running. Uh, yeah you can. There’s a whole DevOps ecosystem of software and cloud services (accessible via infrastructure—as-code) that your agents can use to do this. I don’t think businesses who specialize in ops are safe from downsizing.
- porkloin 9mo ago
  Yep - exactly. Ops isn't immune to LLMs stealing your customers. Given that most of the "open source product with premium hosting" models are just reselling hyperscaler compute at a huge markup, the customers are going to realize pretty quickly that they can use an LLM to setup some basic devops and get the same uptime. Most of these companies are offering a middleman service that becomes a bad deal the moment the customer has access to expertise they previously lacked. I also think he's glossing over the fact that one of the reasons why companies choose to pay for "ops" to run their software for them is because it's built by amateurs or amateurs-playing-professional and runs like shit. I happen to know this first hand from years of working at a company selling hosting and ops for the exact same CMS that Dries' business hosts (Drupal, a PHP-based CMS) and the absolute garbage that some people are able to put together in frameworks like Wordpress and Drupal is truly astounding. I'm not even talking about the janky local businesses where their nephew who was handy with computers made them a Wordpress site - big multinational companies have sites in these frameworks that can barely handle 1x their normal traffic and more or less explode at 1.5x. The business of hosting these customers' poorly optimized garbage remains a big business. But we're entering into an era where the people who produce poorly optimized software have a different path to take rather than throwing it to a SaaS platform that can through sheer force of will make their lead-weight airplane fly. They can spend orders of magnitude less money to pay an LLM to make the software actually just not run like shit in the first place. Throwing scaling at the problem of 99.95% is a blunt instrument that only works if the person paying doesn't have the time, money, or knowledge to do it themselves. Companies like these (including the one I work for currently) are absolutely going to get squeezed from both directions. The ceiling is coming down as more realize they can do their own devops, and the floor is rising as customer code quality gets better. Eventually you have to try your best to be 3 ft tall instead of 6.
DrewADesign 9mo ago
> AI didn't kill Tailwind's business. It stress tested it. The earthquake didn’t destroy the building — it stress tested it.
- emilsayahi 9mo ago
  In software (and business in general!), innovation is expected. If you built a building in San Francisco that couldn't handle a relatively minor earthquake you could argue it would be a 'stress test'.
  - DrewADesign 9mo ago
    If you’re right that AI’s impact on business is akin to a ‘relatively minor earthquake in San Francisco,’ a lot of investors are going to be really fucking bummed out.
- StephenBuckley 9mo ago
  It's like the author doesn't understand what failing a stress test does.
  - DrewADesign 9mo ago
    And perhaps can’t define test.
- deleted 9mo ago
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Schnitz 9mo ago
The root of the issue is that Tailwind was selling something that people can now recreate a bespoke version of in mere minutes using a coding agent. The other day I vibe coded a bespoke dependabot/renovate replacement in an hour. That was way easier than learning any of these tools and fighting their idiosyncrasies that don’t work for me. We no longer need Framer because you can prompt a corporate website faster than you can learn Framer. It is, fortunately or unfortunately, what it is and we all have to adapt. I want to be clear, it sucks for Tailwind for sure and the LLM providers essentially found a new loophole (training) where you can smash and grab public goods and capture the value without giving anything back. A lot of capitalists would say it’s a genius move.
jaynate 9mo ago
I wish I could upvote this more than once. The author gets it, you have to sell outcomes. Not features. Seems like every open source company that doesn’t market an outcome to buyers will face a similar threat. And this particular go to market strategy was “brittle” before AI.
deleted 9mo ago
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leosanchez 9mo ago
I wonder how much impact shadcn had on their business.
sora2video 9mo ago
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Roark66 9mo ago
>"Value is shifting to operations: deployment, testing, rollbacks, observability. You can't prompt 99.95% uptime on Black Friday. Neither can you prompt your way to keeping a site secure, updated, and running" I've been doing exactly that since AI came out :-D You absolutely can prompt your way to 3.5 nines of uptime (even more), but you need to know what you're doing and correct it. Even very well aligned models like Opus will make traps for your infrastructure. For example you tell it to write a fluxCD implementation of some application, in your k8 cluster, following your conventions and best practices described in some md files. And it does this, very nicely. But unless you tell it in advance every detail it will do something extremely stupid mid way through. For example, let's say you have a database and it needs to create a new instance (with gitops) for the app. It adds the new DB and it gets created, but instead of using a tool that already exists (or proposing one if it doesn't) to sync the DB access credentials from the DB na espace to the app namespace it will read the credential, encrypt it and store in the app namespace. What's the problem with that? Well, none unless you rotate these credentials. In which case your app will stop working, possibly after you tested it and decided it's good enough to use seriously, despite having a HA DB. There are a dozen things like this in each "ai project", but even with this. With the time needed to review everything it saves a lot of time.
- sanderjd 9mo ago
  The author meant that you can't just tell a model "do everything that is necessary to achieve 99.95% uptime". It can certainly help you brainstorm issues and solve them, but you can't "just" prompt it.
PeterStuer 9mo ago
Many FOSS business models did, explicitly or implicitly, rely, not on direct obfuscation or overcomplication, but on not making things easy. So you sell not the product, services around the product. This is not exclusive to FOSS. It is also the basic model of most non SaaS B2B, often for good reason referred to by the derogatory term 'consulting-ware'. AI eats into these services, as it commoditizes them. 80%+ of what used to take a specialist for that product can now be handled by a good generalist + AI. Leaving aside the business model impact for a second, getting rid of obfuscation incentives is intrinsically good thing for a user community. Dries' solution, offering operations as a SaaS or managed service, is meeting a need AI can't as easily match, but not exactly for the the stated reason. What the client is actually buying is making something someone else's problem. And CIOs will always love this more than anything if they can credibly justify it. Where AI does impact this is in that latter part. If AI does significantly commoditize operational expertise, then the cost of in-house operating is (sometimes dramatically) lowered, and thus the justification gap on the CIO side for spending outside widens. How much this will drive a decision will be highly variable between businesses and projects.
- svilen_dobrev 9mo ago
  i think whole business around software is to change (as i said in another thread few days ago). if u imagine the "business" stack as: customers on top, over business, over analysis, over software, over machines/infrastructure.. 25+ years ago i thought that DSLs and such very-high-level-mostly-formalised-descriptions will move the line between what-product-is-aka-business-analysis and software/coding towards software, reducing its part in the whole stack. Well, it did not happen, just the opposite - instead the developers become expected to know everything from infrastructure to software to analysis to business domain and higher. So, stack became something like customers over business over... software-dev. Requirements, analysis... mostly gone / done by devs. Now if that whole "software-dev" part collapses into zero-margin, i see two ways: either businesses very quickly resurrect the business-analysis (what the product is) and make that their margin/moat, or the customers start making their own software (as throwaway 100 wrongs is now possible) - and removing the business from the whole transaction...
rcarr 9mo ago
In my opinion, governments are going to have to tax the big tech companies hard and distribute the money to funding bodies like Arts Council. I can see a future "Tech Council" for open source software organisations to apply for funding. It'll get to the point where every OSS developer has their own Community Interest Company or join with a few other devs to create a CIO in order to acquire funding. Of course, now you're opening a whole other can of worms. In the UK, only 1 in 9 Arts Council funding applications is successful.
vedmakk 9mo ago
To everything in this article that states what AI cannot do... I would like to add a big fat "YET!" and remind everyone to buckle up... Right now its convenient to look at Tailwind and discuss what their doing wrong. But eventually most other business models will be stress tested in the same way - sooner or later.
ChicagoDave 9mo ago
This goes way deeper than open source businesses. Imagine I’m a company just big enough to entertain adopting Salesforce for CRM. It’s a big chunk of money, but our sales can absorb the pain. With GenAI as an enterprise architect, one of the options I’m now recommending is to create a custom CRM for our business and skip the bloated enterprise SaaS platform. We can gather CRM requirements fast, build fast, and deliver integrations to our other systems incredibly fast using tools like Claude Code. Our sales people can make feature requests and we can dogfood them in a few days, maybe hours. GenAI development tools are rapidly changing how I think about enterprise software development. If your core business is software-based offerings, your moat has been wiped out. A handful of senior engineers can replicate any SaaS, save licensing costs, and build custom applications that were too risky in the past. The companies that recognize what is happening and adapt will win.
- yowlingcat 9mo ago
  It isn't that simple. One of the implicit tradeoffs you make buying SaaS is that the overall cost of evolution (development and ongoing maintenance) is subsidized across all of the investment resources and customer base of the vendor. With CRM in particular, ecosystem integration is one of the heaviest buildouts there is because each point solution integration can very significantly in complexity and is also where the combinatoric explosion of misbehavior sets in. When you decide to pull that in house, you are implicitly burdening yourself with the cost of the buildout as well as ongoing maintenance. True, you could probably knock together an okay v1 of CRM yourself inhouse. But are you really going to get it to and maintain production level quality over time at a lower total cost of ownership? I'm skeptical. The theoretical party you are describing would probably be better served by simply avoiding Salesforce in favor of a next gen CRM that is both more cost effective and easier to customize. In enterprise contexts, even HubSpot is effectively next gen, but there are also products like Attio et al that have a ton of adoption and strong integration ecosystems (albeit not at the Salesforce level). When you buy enterprise software from a vendor you are buying more than "just software" you are also hiring a company's services. And the inverse is correct as well, when you choose to build it in house, you are implicitly choosing to hire a team internally to resource all of the services you would've expected that vendor to provide. Certainly, this tradeoff can still make a lot of sense for some companies. The acid test for that, in my opinion, is whether said company could (and would) actually successfully sell the product they build internally on the open market. If the answer to that is "yes", the prospect of turning a cost center into a profit center can potentially bear significant long term ROI to the company.
dev1ycan 9mo ago
2-5 years from now after the AI bubble bursts, and they are trying to rent us $300 PCs since every component is 5x the price, we will look back at all the damage and copyright law that was completely bypassed and ignored when it was convenient, after all those years of claiming evil China "stole" from companies (only to then pass laws where they can virtually steal anything they want, even utilizing private repositories on Github that they acquired by buying the site, completely ignoring the licenses)... Or how Meta downloaded 70tb+ of books and then got law enforcement to nuke libgen and z-lib to create a "moat", and all our tools start dying/disappearing because the developers are laid off since an AI "search engine" just regurgitates it, THEN and only then will most people understand the mistake that this was. Let's not even begin with what Grok just recently did to women on X, completely unacceptable, I really, really wish for the EU to grow some and take a stand, it is clear that China is just as predatory as America and both are willing to burn it all in order to get a non existent lead in non existent "technology" that snake oil salesmen have convinced 80 year olds in government that is the next "revolution".
pradn 9mo ago
> The value got extracted, but compensation isn't flowing back. That bothers me, and it deserves a broader policy conversation. It bothers me, too. But, look at the history of the internet. There's no reason to expect we'll be able to fix this problem. 1. Search engines drove traffic to news/content sites, which monetized via ads. Humans barely tolerate these ad filled websites. And yet, local news went into steep decline, and the big national players got an ever-larger share of attention. The large, national sites were able to keep a subscriber-based paywall model. These were largely legacy media sites (ie: NYT). 2. News sites lost the local classifieds market, as the cost of advertising online went to zero (ie: Craigslist). This dynamic was a form of creative destruction - a better solution ate the business of an older solution. 3. Blog monetization was always tough, beyond ads. Unless you were a big blog, you couldn't make a living. What about getting a small amount of money per view from random visitors? The internet never developed a micro-payment or subscription model for the set of open sites - the blogosphere, etc. The best we got were closed platforms like Substack and Medium, which could control access via paywalls. All this led to the internet being largely funded through the "attention economy": ads mostly, paywalls & subscriptions some. The attention economy can't sustain itself when there are fewer eyeballs: 1. Tailwind docs have to be added just once to the training set for the AI to be proficient in that framework forever. So one HTTP request, more or less, to get the docs and docs are no longer required. 2. Tailwind does change, so an AI will want to access the docs for the version its working with. This will require access at inference time. This is more analogous to visiting a site.
beeboop0 9mo ago
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an-allen 9mo ago
I think its a Kobyashi Maru - there is absolutely no way we will wield a paradigm shifting technology like language models and be able to do it safely. Language models create at scale and scope much greater than what can be reviewed by human… this means we very quickly move into trust without checks with language models. At some point, AI will be executing knowledge work in an instance, leaving no space for the human centric economic system that came before it. It will destroy our economic systems heavily based in knowledge and services (most advanced economies) and show us how what we do is mostly computable. And when we are there, hungry, broken, unemployed and unimpressed with the prometheus who stole our purpose and replaced it with nothing…. it will make a colossal mistake that will destroy faith in it, as well as the institutions destroyed because of its oversite. The mistake will lead to bans, and regulatory bodies and auditing and certification processes… and will result in the final master stroke - it will make AI unusable by the non ordained, regulatory capture. Math will be a tool governments and institutions wield in secret against its citizenry… and it will be a tool of omnipotence that will lead to the enslavement, rebellion, and robot wars.

341 points by amarsahinovic 9mo ago

This feels like the OpenSSL problem where we do probably need some kind of industry organization to maintain these things. There’s a chicken and the egg problem that these AI companies need someone to keep maintaining tailwind if they want it to keep working in their prompts. Maybe that limits the ability for the head of tailwind to run their own business and make more income, but something gotta give.

bob1029 9mo ago
> we do probably need some kind of industry organization to maintain these things. In the case of CSS, we already have that: https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Overview.en.html https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Overview.en.html
- mrgoldenbrown 9mo ago
  Are you saying the www consortium should be paying to keep Tailwind development and maintenance going? The css standard is not the same as a usable library of components.
  - aurareturn 9mo ago
    Tailwind is open source. Anyone can contribute to it, including an LLM. If the founder of Tailwind quits on it, others who deem Tailwind valuable enough will continue to maintain it.
    - zephen 9mo ago
      > others who deem Tailwind valuable enough will continue to maintain it. We have seen several examples in the last couple of years where this is simply not true enough. There are multiple open source projects that do not receive enough TLC.
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
      - aurareturn 9mo ago
        Then it isn't important enough to people. If my company relies on an open source project and it isn't being maintained, I can either ask my company to start maintaining it or find something else or accept the risk of a an unmaintained project.
    - HumanOstrich 9mo ago
      You're just parroting what you've heard. The reality of continuing an abandoned project is not that simple.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
- terribleidea 9mo ago
  The problem here is that the w3c sucks a fat one, and they've failed to build software specs that don't require an ecosystem thousands of libraries to make using CSS, etc. simple or efficient.

big_toast 9mo ago

"The value got extracted, but compensation isn't flowing back. That bothers me, and it deserves a broader policy conversation. What I keep coming back to is this: AI commoditizes anything you can fully specify. [...] So where does value live now? In what requires showing up, not just specifying. Not what you can specify once, but what requires showing up again and again." This seems like a useful framing to be aware of, generally. The internet has always kinda run on the ambiguity of "does the value flow back". A quote liberated from this article itself; all the content that reporters produce that's laundered back out through twitter; 12ft.io; torrents; early youtube; late youtube; google news; apache/mit vs gnu licenses; et cetera..

drivebyhooting 9mo ago

In my opinion LLMs are intellectual property theft. Just as if I started distributing copies of books. This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP. All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license: if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published.

johnpaulkiser 9mo ago
> if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published. This feels like the simplest & best single regulation that can be applied in this industry.
- Dilettante_ 9mo ago
  It'd substantially reduce the incentive for the training of new models.
  - blibble 9mo ago
    burglary as a business has an extremely high margin for the burglar
  - Forgeties79 9mo ago
    So what? Figure it out. They have billions in investor funding and we’re supposed to just let them keep behaving this way at our expense? Facebook was busted torrenting all sorts of things in violation of laws/regulations that would lead to my internet being cut off by my ISP. They did it at scale and faced no consequences. Scraping sites, taking down public libraries, torrenting, they just do whatever they want with impunity. You should be angry!
    - drivebyhooting 9mo ago
      Meanwhile look at what happened to Aaron Schwartz. There’s no justice until corporations are held accountable.

l5870uoo9y 9mo ago

Killed by AI or competitors offering Tailwind templates and UI kits at a much lower price or for free?

kachapopopow 9mo ago

I know for a fact that all SOTA models have linux source code in them, intentionally or not which means that they should follow the GPL license terms and open-source part of the models which have created derivative works out of it. yes, this is indirectly hinting that during training the GPL tainted code touches every single floating point value in a model making it derivative work - even the tokenizer isn't immune to this.

ronsor 9mo ago
> the tokenizer isn't immune to this A tokenizer's set of tokens isn't copyrightable in the first place, so it can't really be a derivative work of anything.
- kachapopopow 9mo ago
  GPL however, does put restrictions on it, even the tokenizer. It was specifically crafted in a way where even if you do not have any GPL licensed sourcecode in your project, but it was built on top of it you are still binded by GPL limitations. the only reason usermode is not affected is because they have an exclusion for it and only via defined communication protocol, if you go around it or attempt to put a workaround in the kernel guess what: it still violates the license - point is: it is very restrictive.
  - ronsor 9mo ago
    > GPL however, does put restrictions on it, even the tokenizer. It was specifically crafted in a way where even if you do not have any GPL licensed sourcecode in your project, but it was built on top of it you are still binded by GPL limitations. This is not how copyright law works. The GPL is a copyright license, as stated by the FSF. Something which is not subject to copyright cannot be subject to a copyright license.
    - kachapopopow 9mo ago
      GPL is not only a copyright license, it also covers multiple types of intellectual property rights. Especially when you consider GPL-3 which has explicit IP protection while GPL-2 is implicit, so yah you're partially right for GPL-2 and wrong for GPL-3.

heliumtera 9mo ago

Tailwind Labs relied on a weird monetization scheme. Revenue was proportional to the pain of using the framework. The sudden improvement in getting desired UI without relying on pre-built templates killed Tailwind Labs. There are many initiatives in a similar spot, improving your experience at using Next.js would hurt Vercel. Making GitHub actions runners more reliable, stable and economical would hurt Microsoft. Improving accessibility to compute power would hurt Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Improving control and freedom over your device would hurt apple and Google. Why should we be sympathetic to the middleman again? If suddenly CSS became pleasant to use, Tailwind would be in a rough spot. See the irony? "Give everything away for free and this people will leave technology", geohot said something like this and I truly appreciate. Technology will heal finally

eddythompson80 9mo ago
> Tailwind Labs relied on a weird monetization scheme. Revenue was proportional to the pain of using the framework. Really? To me, Tailwind seemed like the pinnacle of how anyone here would say “open source software” should function. Provide a solid, truly open source, software and make money from consulting or helping others use it and selling custom built solutions around it. The main sin of Tailwind was assuming that type of business could scale to a “large business” structure as opposed to “a single dev”-type project. By a “single dev”-type I don’t mean literally one guy, but more a very lean and non-corporate or company-like structure. Vercel (and redislabs, mongo, etc) are different because they are in the “we can run it for you” business. Which is another “open source” model I have dabbled in for a while in my career. Thinking that the honest and ethical position is to provide open source software, then offer to host it for people who don’t want to selfhost and charge for that.
- reb 9mo ago
  Wasn't the tailwind team just a few people? Might be misremembering but my impression was a team under 10 people, which is tiny
- heliumtera 9mo ago
  From the developer perspective not much changes despite organization structure being completely different in this comparison (trillion dollar company vs 10 individual contributors). Tailwind Labs revenue stream was tied to documentation visit, that was the funnel. The author's argument was this revenue stream was destroyed by a slight quality of life improvement (having llms fill in css classes). Tailwind Labs benefits from: a) documentation visit b) inability to implement desired layout using the framework (and CSS being unpleasant). It seems there is a conflict of interest between the developer expecting the best possible experience and the main revenue stream. Given that a slight accidental improvement in quality of life and autonomy for users destroyed the initiative main revenue stream, it would be fair to say it doesn't just "seems like a conflict of interest". Definitely disagree with it being the "pinnacle" of how open source should function but I also won't provide any examples because it is besides the point. I will point out that fsf is fine for many decades now, and a foundation with completely different structure like zig foundation seems to be ok with a somewhat proportional revenue (orders of magnitude less influence, adoption and users, maybe 10-20x less funding)

mrgoldenbrown 9mo ago

Calling it a stress test seems a bit off. Would we say that invention of lightbulbs was a "stress test" for candle related business models? Or would we just say that business models had to change in response to current events.

Twixes 9mo ago
Drop the "test". Just "stress" – it's cleaner.

geoffbp 9mo ago

> Value is shifting to operations: deployment, testing, rollbacks, observability. You can't prompt 99.95% uptime on Black Friday. Neither can you prompt your way to keeping a site secure, updated, and running. I agree somewhat but eventually these can be automated with AI as well.

bowmessage 9mo ago
How? I am tired of these unfounded claims. Humans can’t even keep many sites secure.
g947o 9mo ago
Care to provide a prompt that leads to coding agent achieving 99.95% uptime on Black Friday as an example?
Culonavirus 9mo ago
If "99.95% uptime on Black Friday", and "keeping a site secure, updated, and running" can ever be automated (by which I mean not a toy site and not relying on sheer luck), not only 99.99% of people in IT are out of a job, but humans as intelligent beings are done. This is such a doomsday scenario that there's not even a point in discussing it.
tetha 9mo ago
Unless you replace the entire workforce, you'd be surprised how much organizational work and soft skills are involved in an infrastructure at scale. Like sure, there is a bunch of stuff like monitoring, alerting that is telling us that a database is filling up it's disk. This is already automated. It could also have automated remediation with tech from the 2000s with some simple rule-based systems (so you can understand why those misbehaved, instead of entirely opaque systems that just do whatever). The thing is though, very often the problem isn't the disk filling up or fixing that. The problem is rather figuring out what silly misbehavior the devs introduced, if a PM had a strange idea they did not validate, if this is backed by a business case and warrants more storage, if your upstream software has a bug, or whatever else. And then more stuff happens and you need to open support cases with your cloud provider because they just broke their API to resize disks, ... And don't even get me started on trying to organize access management with a minimally organized project consulting team. Some ADFS config resulting from that is the trivial part.

avidiax 9mo ago

To call it a stress "test" is dismissive. A stress test on a bank doesn't actually erase the revenue and financially jeopardize the bank. Implementing layoffs is not a stress test.

deleted 9mo ago

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tschellenbach 9mo ago

They could build something like Lovable but with better design/frontend defaults.

ronsor 9mo ago

I see "hackers" in these comments are now advocating to make "criminal contempt of business model" a serious thing, instead of a mere meme used to describe draconian copyright and patent laws.

gnerd00 9mo ago
also death penalty for touching oil rigs, via Bush I.. "stay in your lane" plus license plate readers
jennyholzer4 9mo ago
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bongodongobob 9mo ago
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jeroenhd 9mo ago
It's a reddit alternative hosted by a venture capitalist firm, the startup culture is much more prevalent here than the hacker culture that inspires the website's <title> tag.

antirez 9mo ago

> You can't prompt 99.95% uptime on Black Friday. Neither can you prompt your way to keeping a site secure, updated, and running. This is completely wrong. Agents will not just be able to write code, like they do now, but will also be able to handle operations, security, continuing to check, and improve the systems, tirelessly.

deleted 9mo ago
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somebehemoth 9mo ago
And someday we will have truly autonomous driving cars, we will cure cancer, and humans will visit Mars. You can't prompt this today, are you suggesting this might come literally tomorrow? 10 years? 30? At that unknown time will your comment become relevant?
- chazhaz 9mo ago
  the quoted comment is arguing that devops will never be promptable — putting aside the discussion about whether or not that's true today, the argument here is that it's not likely to _never_ be possible
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
Culonavirus 9mo ago
To be able to do this requires perfect domain knowledge AND environment knowledge AND be able to think deeply about logical dominoes (event propagation through the system, you know, the small stuff that crashes cloudflare for the entire planet for example). Please wake me up when Shopify lets a bunch of agentic LLMs run their backends without human control and constant supervision.
- handfuloflight 9mo ago
  The extreme here is thinking machines will do everything. The reality is likely far closer to less humans being needed.

jamesshelley 9mo ago

Framing it as a "conduit" disruption might make a lot of assumptions about the fundamental economic value of software in the future. In a world (whether near term or long term) where you can just ask the computer to make whatever software you want, what are the economics of retailing/licensing any software at all? Open source or otherwise?

dnw 9mo ago

I'd note a couple of things: Not to nitpick but if we are going to discuss the impact of AI, then I'd argue "AI commoditizes anything you can specify." is not broad enough. My intuition is "AI commoditizes anything you can _evaluate/assess_." For software automation we need reasonably accurate specifications as input and we can more or less predict the output. We spend a lot of time managing the ambiguity on the input. With AI that is flipped. In AI engineering you can move the ambiguity from input to the output. For problems where there is a clear and cheaper way of evaluating the output the trade-off of moving the ambiguity is worth it. Sometimes we have to reframe the problem as an optimization problem to make it work but same trade-off. On the business model front: [I am not talking specifically about Tailwind here.] AI is simply amplifying systemic problems most businesses just didn't acknowledge for a while. SEO died the day Google decided to show answer snippets a decade ago. Google as a reliable channel died the day Google started Local Services Advertisement. Businesses that relied on those channels were already bleeding slowly; AI just made it sudden. On efficiency front, most enterprises could have been so much more efficient if they could actually build internal products to manage their own organizational complexity. They just could not because money was cheap so ROI wasn't quite there and even if ROI was there most of them didn't know how to build a product for themselves. Just saying "AI first" is making ROI work, for now, so everyone is saying AI efficiency. My litmus test is fairly naive: if you are growing and you found AI efficiency then that's great (e.g. FB) but if you're not growing and only thing AI could do for you is "efficiency" then there is a fundamental problem no AI can fix.

andrekandre 9mo ago
> if you are growing and you found AI efficiency then that's great (e.g. FB) but if you're not growing and only thing AI could do for you is "efficiency" then there is a fundamental problem no AI can fix. exactly, "efficiency" nice to say in a vacuum but what you really need is quality (all-round) and understanding your customer/market

m4rtink 9mo ago

So AI is attempting to replace SAP as the traditional way of testing if you company is strong enough ?

lacoolj 9mo ago

Companies providing AI services should offer ads for the things the AI is using. And I don't mean "Tailwind could pay Google to advertise in Gemini", I mean "Google should be clearly and obviously linking back to Tailwind when it uses the library in its output" They already do this sort of thing inside outputs from Deep Research, and possibly without. But the output should be less muted, inline, recessed and more "I have used Tailwind! Check out how to make it better [HERE](link)" They should be working with the owners of these projects, especially ones with businesses, and directing traffic to them. Not everyone will go, and that's fine, but at least make the effort. The infrastructure is in place already. And yes, right now this would not be across-the-board for every single library, but maybe it could be one day? It's the same problem news sites have been facing for years because of Google News and Facebook. Their solution so far has been country-level bans on it (Canada).

nitwit005 9mo ago
But why would you click the tailwinds link if you're getting correct answers? You don't need documentation or consulting. Google and Facebook couldn't provide full news articles because of copyright law. They just showed headline and summary provided by the news websites (and still eventually got sued for showing the summaries).
camdenreslink 9mo ago
The number one rule of these apps is don’t link outside the app (because then the user will stop their session).
AlienRobot 9mo ago
I feel that the battle is already lost when we aren't arguing that the AI service must get a license from the copyright holder like everybody else, but instead just arguing how many crumbs is the AI service morally obliged to throw back.
pico303 9mo ago
I was thinking something similar, but not so much an ad as a citation. A good starting point might be a law stating that when an LLM produces an answer, it cite its sources, with a link back to the content. Ideally, though, the producer of that content should receive some amount of financial compensation as well, similar to how an author or an actor receives royalties. If the LLM is making money off of this, so should the person who provide the LLM the value.

browningstreet 9mo ago

Business & time are business model stress tests.

terribleidea 9mo ago

Maybe they just over-hired for their business model.

xg15 9mo ago

> So where does value live now? In what requires showing up, not just specifying. Not what you can specify once, but what requires showing up again and again. Sounds like even more incentive for "managing" problems and creating business models around them instead of solving them.

rglover 9mo ago
The flurry machine isn't permanently broken, it's just keeping someone employed.

wolpoli 9mo ago

Tailwind plus is available for one time payment that provides lifetime access to current and future components. With AI cutting off the flow for new buyers, revenue shrivels up much quicker than what it would've been if it was a recurring subscription.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

MangoCoffee 9mo ago

>Open Source was never the commercial product. It's the conduit to something else. this is correct. If you open source your software, then why are you mad when companies like AWS, OpenAI, etc. make tons of money? Open Source software is always a bridge that leads to something else to commercialize on. If you want to sell software, then pick Microsoft's model and sell your software as closed source. If you get mad and cry about making money to sustain your open source project, then pick the right license for your business.

jeroenhd 9mo ago
> then pick the right license for your business That's one of the issues with AI, though; strongly copylefted software suddenly finds itself unable to enforce its license because "AI" gets a free pass on copyright for some reason. Dual-licensing open source with business-unfriendly licensing used to be a pretty good way to sell software, but thanks to the absurd legal position AI models have managed to squeeze themselves into, that stopped in an instant.
- zephen 9mo ago
  Open source software helped to dramatically reduce the cost of paid software, because there is a now a minimum bar of functionality you have to produce in order to sell software. And, in many cases, you had to produce that value yourself. GPL licensing lawsuits ensured this. AI extracting value from software in such a way that the creators no longer can take the small scraps they were willing to live on seems likely to change this dynamic. I expect no-source-available software (including shareware) to proliferate again, to the detriment of open source.

keeda 9mo ago

One of the biggest shortcomings of Open Source was that it implicitly defaulted to a volunteer model and so financing the work was always left as an exercise for the reader. Hence (as TFA points out) open source code from commercial entities was just a marketing channel and source of free labor... err, community contributions... to auxiliary offerings that actually made money. This basic economic drive is totally natural but creates dynamics that lead to suboptimal behaviors and controversy multiple times. For instance, a favorite business model is charging for support. Another one was charging for a convenient packaging or hosting of an “open core” project. In either case, the incentives just didn’t align towards making the software bug-free and easily usable, because that would actively hamper monetization. This led to instances of pathological behavior, like Red Hat futzing with its patches or pay-walling its source code to hamper other Linux vendors. Then there were cases where the "open source" branding was used to get market-share, but licenses restricted usage in lucrative applications, like Sun with Java. But worse, often a bigger fish swooped in to take the code, as they were legally allowed to, and repackage it in their own products undercutting the original owners. E.g. Google worked around Sun's licensing restrictions to use Java completely for free in Android. And then ironically Android itself was marketed as "open source" while its licensing came with its own extremely onerous restrictions to prevent true competition. Or all those cases when hyperscalers undercut the original owners’ offerings by providing open source projects as proprietary Software as a Service. All this in turn led to all sorts of controversies like lawsuits or companies rug-pulling its community with a license change. And aside from all that, the same pressures regularly led to the “enshittification” of software. Open Source is largely a socialist (or even communist) movement, but businesses exist in a fundamentally capitalistic society. The tensions between those philosophies were inevitable. Socialists gonna socialize, but capitalists gonna capitalize. With AI, current OSS business models may soon be dead. And personally I would think, to the extent they were based on misaligned incentives or unhealthy dynamics, good riddance! Open Source itself will not go away, but it will enter a new era. The cost of code has dropped so much, monetizing will be hard. But by the same token, it will encourage people, having invested so much fewer resources creating it, to release their code for free. A lot of it will be slop, but the quantity will be overwhelming. It’s not clear how this era will pan out, but interesting times ahead.

renjimen 9mo ago

> You can't prompt 99.95% uptime on Black Friday. Neither can you prompt your way to keeping a site secure, updated, and running. Uh, yeah you can. There’s a whole DevOps ecosystem of software and cloud services (accessible via infrastructure—as-code) that your agents can use to do this. I don’t think businesses who specialize in ops are safe from downsizing.

porkloin 9mo ago
Yep - exactly. Ops isn't immune to LLMs stealing your customers. Given that most of the "open source product with premium hosting" models are just reselling hyperscaler compute at a huge markup, the customers are going to realize pretty quickly that they can use an LLM to setup some basic devops and get the same uptime. Most of these companies are offering a middleman service that becomes a bad deal the moment the customer has access to expertise they previously lacked. I also think he's glossing over the fact that one of the reasons why companies choose to pay for "ops" to run their software for them is because it's built by amateurs or amateurs-playing-professional and runs like shit. I happen to know this first hand from years of working at a company selling hosting and ops for the exact same CMS that Dries' business hosts (Drupal, a PHP-based CMS) and the absolute garbage that some people are able to put together in frameworks like Wordpress and Drupal is truly astounding. I'm not even talking about the janky local businesses where their nephew who was handy with computers made them a Wordpress site - big multinational companies have sites in these frameworks that can barely handle 1x their normal traffic and more or less explode at 1.5x. The business of hosting these customers' poorly optimized garbage remains a big business. But we're entering into an era where the people who produce poorly optimized software have a different path to take rather than throwing it to a SaaS platform that can through sheer force of will make their lead-weight airplane fly. They can spend orders of magnitude less money to pay an LLM to make the software actually just not run like shit in the first place. Throwing scaling at the problem of 99.95% is a blunt instrument that only works if the person paying doesn't have the time, money, or knowledge to do it themselves. Companies like these (including the one I work for currently) are absolutely going to get squeezed from both directions. The ceiling is coming down as more realize they can do their own devops, and the floor is rising as customer code quality gets better. Eventually you have to try your best to be 3 ft tall instead of 6.

DrewADesign 9mo ago

> AI didn't kill Tailwind's business. It stress tested it. The earthquake didn’t destroy the building — it stress tested it.

emilsayahi 9mo ago
In software (and business in general!), innovation is expected. If you built a building in San Francisco that couldn't handle a relatively minor earthquake you could argue it would be a 'stress test'.
- DrewADesign 9mo ago
  If you’re right that AI’s impact on business is akin to a ‘relatively minor earthquake in San Francisco,’ a lot of investors are going to be really fucking bummed out.
StephenBuckley 9mo ago
It's like the author doesn't understand what failing a stress test does.
- DrewADesign 9mo ago
  And perhaps can’t define test.
deleted 9mo ago
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Schnitz 9mo ago

The root of the issue is that Tailwind was selling something that people can now recreate a bespoke version of in mere minutes using a coding agent. The other day I vibe coded a bespoke dependabot/renovate replacement in an hour. That was way easier than learning any of these tools and fighting their idiosyncrasies that don’t work for me. We no longer need Framer because you can prompt a corporate website faster than you can learn Framer. It is, fortunately or unfortunately, what it is and we all have to adapt. I want to be clear, it sucks for Tailwind for sure and the LLM providers essentially found a new loophole (training) where you can smash and grab public goods and capture the value without giving anything back. A lot of capitalists would say it’s a genius move.

jaynate 9mo ago

I wish I could upvote this more than once. The author gets it, you have to sell outcomes. Not features. Seems like every open source company that doesn’t market an outcome to buyers will face a similar threat. And this particular go to market strategy was “brittle” before AI.

deleted 9mo ago

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leosanchez 9mo ago

I wonder how much impact shadcn had on their business.

sora2video 9mo ago

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Roark66 9mo ago

>"Value is shifting to operations: deployment, testing, rollbacks, observability. You can't prompt 99.95% uptime on Black Friday. Neither can you prompt your way to keeping a site secure, updated, and running" I've been doing exactly that since AI came out :-D You absolutely can prompt your way to 3.5 nines of uptime (even more), but you need to know what you're doing and correct it. Even very well aligned models like Opus will make traps for your infrastructure. For example you tell it to write a fluxCD implementation of some application, in your k8 cluster, following your conventions and best practices described in some md files. And it does this, very nicely. But unless you tell it in advance every detail it will do something extremely stupid mid way through. For example, let's say you have a database and it needs to create a new instance (with gitops) for the app. It adds the new DB and it gets created, but instead of using a tool that already exists (or proposing one if it doesn't) to sync the DB access credentials from the DB na espace to the app namespace it will read the credential, encrypt it and store in the app namespace. What's the problem with that? Well, none unless you rotate these credentials. In which case your app will stop working, possibly after you tested it and decided it's good enough to use seriously, despite having a HA DB. There are a dozen things like this in each "ai project", but even with this. With the time needed to review everything it saves a lot of time.

sanderjd 9mo ago
The author meant that you can't just tell a model "do everything that is necessary to achieve 99.95% uptime". It can certainly help you brainstorm issues and solve them, but you can't "just" prompt it.

PeterStuer 9mo ago

Many FOSS business models did, explicitly or implicitly, rely, not on direct obfuscation or overcomplication, but on not making things easy. So you sell not the product, services around the product. This is not exclusive to FOSS. It is also the basic model of most non SaaS B2B, often for good reason referred to by the derogatory term 'consulting-ware'. AI eats into these services, as it commoditizes them. 80%+ of what used to take a specialist for that product can now be handled by a good generalist + AI. Leaving aside the business model impact for a second, getting rid of obfuscation incentives is intrinsically good thing for a user community. Dries' solution, offering operations as a SaaS or managed service, is meeting a need AI can't as easily match, but not exactly for the the stated reason. What the client is actually buying is making something someone else's problem. And CIOs will always love this more than anything if they can credibly justify it. Where AI does impact this is in that latter part. If AI does significantly commoditize operational expertise, then the cost of in-house operating is (sometimes dramatically) lowered, and thus the justification gap on the CIO side for spending outside widens. How much this will drive a decision will be highly variable between businesses and projects.

svilen_dobrev 9mo ago
i think whole business around software is to change (as i said in another thread few days ago). if u imagine the "business" stack as: customers on top, over business, over analysis, over software, over machines/infrastructure.. 25+ years ago i thought that DSLs and such very-high-level-mostly-formalised-descriptions will move the line between what-product-is-aka-business-analysis and software/coding towards software, reducing its part in the whole stack. Well, it did not happen, just the opposite - instead the developers become expected to know everything from infrastructure to software to analysis to business domain and higher. So, stack became something like customers over business over... software-dev. Requirements, analysis... mostly gone / done by devs. Now if that whole "software-dev" part collapses into zero-margin, i see two ways: either businesses very quickly resurrect the business-analysis (what the product is) and make that their margin/moat, or the customers start making their own software (as throwaway 100 wrongs is now possible) - and removing the business from the whole transaction...

rcarr 9mo ago

In my opinion, governments are going to have to tax the big tech companies hard and distribute the money to funding bodies like Arts Council. I can see a future "Tech Council" for open source software organisations to apply for funding. It'll get to the point where every OSS developer has their own Community Interest Company or join with a few other devs to create a CIO in order to acquire funding. Of course, now you're opening a whole other can of worms. In the UK, only 1 in 9 Arts Council funding applications is successful.

vedmakk 9mo ago

To everything in this article that states what AI cannot do... I would like to add a big fat "YET!" and remind everyone to buckle up... Right now its convenient to look at Tailwind and discuss what their doing wrong. But eventually most other business models will be stress tested in the same way - sooner or later.

ChicagoDave 9mo ago

This goes way deeper than open source businesses. Imagine I’m a company just big enough to entertain adopting Salesforce for CRM. It’s a big chunk of money, but our sales can absorb the pain. With GenAI as an enterprise architect, one of the options I’m now recommending is to create a custom CRM for our business and skip the bloated enterprise SaaS platform. We can gather CRM requirements fast, build fast, and deliver integrations to our other systems incredibly fast using tools like Claude Code. Our sales people can make feature requests and we can dogfood them in a few days, maybe hours. GenAI development tools are rapidly changing how I think about enterprise software development. If your core business is software-based offerings, your moat has been wiped out. A handful of senior engineers can replicate any SaaS, save licensing costs, and build custom applications that were too risky in the past. The companies that recognize what is happening and adapt will win.

yowlingcat 9mo ago
It isn't that simple. One of the implicit tradeoffs you make buying SaaS is that the overall cost of evolution (development and ongoing maintenance) is subsidized across all of the investment resources and customer base of the vendor. With CRM in particular, ecosystem integration is one of the heaviest buildouts there is because each point solution integration can very significantly in complexity and is also where the combinatoric explosion of misbehavior sets in. When you decide to pull that in house, you are implicitly burdening yourself with the cost of the buildout as well as ongoing maintenance. True, you could probably knock together an okay v1 of CRM yourself inhouse. But are you really going to get it to and maintain production level quality over time at a lower total cost of ownership? I'm skeptical. The theoretical party you are describing would probably be better served by simply avoiding Salesforce in favor of a next gen CRM that is both more cost effective and easier to customize. In enterprise contexts, even HubSpot is effectively next gen, but there are also products like Attio et al that have a ton of adoption and strong integration ecosystems (albeit not at the Salesforce level). When you buy enterprise software from a vendor you are buying more than "just software" you are also hiring a company's services. And the inverse is correct as well, when you choose to build it in house, you are implicitly choosing to hire a team internally to resource all of the services you would've expected that vendor to provide. Certainly, this tradeoff can still make a lot of sense for some companies. The acid test for that, in my opinion, is whether said company could (and would) actually successfully sell the product they build internally on the open market. If the answer to that is "yes", the prospect of turning a cost center into a profit center can potentially bear significant long term ROI to the company.

dev1ycan 9mo ago

2-5 years from now after the AI bubble bursts, and they are trying to rent us $300 PCs since every component is 5x the price, we will look back at all the damage and copyright law that was completely bypassed and ignored when it was convenient, after all those years of claiming evil China "stole" from companies (only to then pass laws where they can virtually steal anything they want, even utilizing private repositories on Github that they acquired by buying the site, completely ignoring the licenses)... Or how Meta downloaded 70tb+ of books and then got law enforcement to nuke libgen and z-lib to create a "moat", and all our tools start dying/disappearing because the developers are laid off since an AI "search engine" just regurgitates it, THEN and only then will most people understand the mistake that this was. Let's not even begin with what Grok just recently did to women on X, completely unacceptable, I really, really wish for the EU to grow some and take a stand, it is clear that China is just as predatory as America and both are willing to burn it all in order to get a non existent lead in non existent "technology" that snake oil salesmen have convinced 80 year olds in government that is the next "revolution".

pradn 9mo ago

> The value got extracted, but compensation isn't flowing back. That bothers me, and it deserves a broader policy conversation. It bothers me, too. But, look at the history of the internet. There's no reason to expect we'll be able to fix this problem. 1. Search engines drove traffic to news/content sites, which monetized via ads. Humans barely tolerate these ad filled websites. And yet, local news went into steep decline, and the big national players got an ever-larger share of attention. The large, national sites were able to keep a subscriber-based paywall model. These were largely legacy media sites (ie: NYT). 2. News sites lost the local classifieds market, as the cost of advertising online went to zero (ie: Craigslist). This dynamic was a form of creative destruction - a better solution ate the business of an older solution. 3. Blog monetization was always tough, beyond ads. Unless you were a big blog, you couldn't make a living. What about getting a small amount of money per view from random visitors? The internet never developed a micro-payment or subscription model for the set of open sites - the blogosphere, etc. The best we got were closed platforms like Substack and Medium, which could control access via paywalls. All this led to the internet being largely funded through the "attention economy": ads mostly, paywalls & subscriptions some. The attention economy can't sustain itself when there are fewer eyeballs: 1. Tailwind docs have to be added just once to the training set for the AI to be proficient in that framework forever. So one HTTP request, more or less, to get the docs and docs are no longer required. 2. Tailwind does change, so an AI will want to access the docs for the version its working with. This will require access at inference time. This is more analogous to visiting a site.

beeboop0 9mo ago

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an-allen 9mo ago

I think its a Kobyashi Maru - there is absolutely no way we will wield a paradigm shifting technology like language models and be able to do it safely. Language models create at scale and scope much greater than what can be reviewed by human… this means we very quickly move into trust without checks with language models. At some point, AI will be executing knowledge work in an instance, leaving no space for the human centric economic system that came before it. It will destroy our economic systems heavily based in knowledge and services (most advanced economies) and show us how what we do is mostly computable. And when we are there, hungry, broken, unemployed and unimpressed with the prometheus who stole our purpose and replaced it with nothing…. it will make a colossal mistake that will destroy faith in it, as well as the institutions destroyed because of its oversite. The mistake will lead to bans, and regulatory bodies and auditing and certification processes… and will result in the final master stroke - it will make AI unusable by the non ordained, regulatory capture. Math will be a tool governments and institutions wield in secret against its citizenry… and it will be a tool of omnipotence that will lead to the enslavement, rebellion, and robot wars.