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I don’t agree. Building a date picker used to be next to impossible. Overnight it was trivial. That’s some serious disruption.

danvayn 17d ago
That was certainly not overnight. The biggest disruption they personally did was offering a better alternative to Bootstrap. More customization, JIT compilation that allowed for custom class interpretation without any added CSS, proper flex consideration, removing unused library classes in the production compilation step, etc. Beyond this, you should really be thanking things like Shadcn for the “date picker disruption”. It is a component library which arguably could’ve existed without Tailwind ever existing.
- rgbrgb 17d ago
  why shadcn and not bootstrap? shadcn is like a cool weird approach to a ui kit but bootstrap got us a date picker iirc.
stickfigure 17d ago
Nonsense. There have been perfectly good free date picker widgets available for every era of web development, going back to clunky server-rendered html templates.
- sodapopcan 17d ago
  Seriously. I always wonder who makes these comments, then I remember I'm old and there are people who don't remember every era of the web. Although, it's still incredibly weird to essentially claim that Tailwind solved date pickers.
  - abanana 17d ago
    Indeed, I don't know what to make of such a bizarrely nonsensical assertion. Age and lack of experience doesn't really explain it, because all the poster needed to have done was make the simplest sort of web search. It's so wrong, it's... not even wrong.
  - paradox460 17d ago
    You have to remember the biggest appeal of tailwind is that it throws away the entire cascade of css. The people that reach for it are choosing it because it offers less functionality, and is therefore simpler to reason about. I hesitate to say they don't understand css, I'm sure some of them do, but in my experience the devs that reach for it are the same who deride css and make statements such as "I have better things to do than learn css"
    - ryanbrunner 17d ago
      I think there's plenty of developers that are perfectly competent with CSS who still reach for Tailwind. You're right that Tailwind throws away the cascade, or at least enables developers not to have to think about it (under the hood, Tailwind 4 uses pretty modern cascading features like layers), but people aren't reaching it because of a lack of understanding, they're reaching for it because as front-ends get increasingly componentized, the cascade becomes less and less of a benefit and more of an obstacle to be worked around, and something that gets that obstacle out of the way becomes more attractive.
      - stickfigure 16d ago
        I'm perfectly competent at CSS and... at this point I don't even look at CSS. I just feed descriptions of what I want to the LLM and it nails it every time. The result either looks the way I want or it doesn't. I'm not universally pro-AI. I meticulously review every line of backend code, and still do hand edits. I review FE commits less carefully but still keep an eye on it to make sure AI doesn't go off the rails. But there's only so much trouble you can get into with CSS and the problems are the kind of bite-sized problems that LLMs excel at. I don't think it matters at this point what you use for styling. If you like tailwind, the AIs use it just fine. If you like SASS, or raw CSS, the AIs are also just fine. I'm not sure there's really a human job here anymore.
        ryanbrunner 16d ago
        Do you store your CSS in separate common files independent of markup? Out of curiosity, do you run into issues with excessive token usage when you want to work with CSS? That would be my gut instinct - you ask your agent to change a CSS rule, and your agent would feel the need to find all usage of that rule to avoid introducing unexpected changes. Does that happen? (I'm operating purely on assumptions here because I regularly use tailwind where changes are kinda definitionally local).

danvayn 17d ago

That was certainly not overnight. The biggest disruption they personally did was offering a better alternative to Bootstrap. More customization, JIT compilation that allowed for custom class interpretation without any added CSS, proper flex consideration, removing unused library classes in the production compilation step, etc. Beyond this, you should really be thanking things like Shadcn for the “date picker disruption”. It is a component library which arguably could’ve existed without Tailwind ever existing.

rgbrgb 17d ago
why shadcn and not bootstrap? shadcn is like a cool weird approach to a ui kit but bootstrap got us a date picker iirc.

stickfigure 17d ago

Nonsense. There have been perfectly good free date picker widgets available for every era of web development, going back to clunky server-rendered html templates.

sodapopcan 17d ago
Seriously. I always wonder who makes these comments, then I remember I'm old and there are people who don't remember every era of the web. Although, it's still incredibly weird to essentially claim that Tailwind solved date pickers.
- abanana 17d ago
  Indeed, I don't know what to make of such a bizarrely nonsensical assertion. Age and lack of experience doesn't really explain it, because all the poster needed to have done was make the simplest sort of web search. It's so wrong, it's... not even wrong.
- paradox460 17d ago
  You have to remember the biggest appeal of tailwind is that it throws away the entire cascade of css. The people that reach for it are choosing it because it offers less functionality, and is therefore simpler to reason about. I hesitate to say they don't understand css, I'm sure some of them do, but in my experience the devs that reach for it are the same who deride css and make statements such as "I have better things to do than learn css"
  - ryanbrunner 17d ago
    I think there's plenty of developers that are perfectly competent with CSS who still reach for Tailwind. You're right that Tailwind throws away the cascade, or at least enables developers not to have to think about it (under the hood, Tailwind 4 uses pretty modern cascading features like layers), but people aren't reaching it because of a lack of understanding, they're reaching for it because as front-ends get increasingly componentized, the cascade becomes less and less of a benefit and more of an obstacle to be worked around, and something that gets that obstacle out of the way becomes more attractive.
    - stickfigure 16d ago
      I'm perfectly competent at CSS and... at this point I don't even look at CSS. I just feed descriptions of what I want to the LLM and it nails it every time. The result either looks the way I want or it doesn't. I'm not universally pro-AI. I meticulously review every line of backend code, and still do hand edits. I review FE commits less carefully but still keep an eye on it to make sure AI doesn't go off the rails. But there's only so much trouble you can get into with CSS and the problems are the kind of bite-sized problems that LLMs excel at. I don't think it matters at this point what you use for styling. If you like tailwind, the AIs use it just fine. If you like SASS, or raw CSS, the AIs are also just fine. I'm not sure there's really a human job here anymore.
      - ryanbrunner 16d ago
        Do you store your CSS in separate common files independent of markup? Out of curiosity, do you run into issues with excessive token usage when you want to work with CSS? That would be my gut instinct - you ask your agent to change a CSS rule, and your agent would feel the need to find all usage of that rule to avoid introducing unexpected changes. Does that happen? (I'm operating purely on assumptions here because I regularly use tailwind where changes are kinda definitionally local).