Vanilla JavaScript support for Tailwind Plus

The world would be a significantly better place if someone could throw a small mountain of money at the Tailwind folks so that they can stop worrying about money and simply make the full tailwind experience freely available. There are so many lost opportunities for deep integration with other projects.

Kind of like how Jeff Bezos threw a bunch of money at 37signals at some insane valuation, which helped them completely avoid the VC trap.

The “full Tailwind experience” is already freely available. What “lost opportunities for deep integration” is a frontend CSS framework missing?

Tailwind Plus (the commercial product) is like buying an off-the-shelf template. It’s just a collection of themes and pre-built components — useful for devs who want to get started quickly on a project, but it’s cookie-cutter and can easily be replicated by anyone with Tailwind itself.

> There are so many lost opportunities for deep integration with other projects.

What kind of integrations are you thinking of?

Worried about money? They are already rich beyond their wildest dreams. They are, reasonably, excited about growing and expanding and building a company that does much more, but that is not driven by a need for money, it is driven by their ambition.

edit: I can’t speak for Adam etc., this is just my impression. My impression is that they want to build a business of which tailwind (the open source project) is one part. I think that regardless of money in the bank they would want to have revenue generating projects. Laravel is a good comparable.

There are devs who think the currently available HTML elements are all we needed. But there are many more that believe we are missing primitives that Tailwind (and others) is attempting to solve for.

> It’s just a collection of themes and pre-built components

All reusable web components could be described as an optionally themed pre-built component. That's kind of the point.

> Kind of like how Jeff Bezos threw a bunch of money at 37signals

Honestly, I kinda feel like 37Signals would have been better off with the founders having someone to report to...

How so? As an outsider, they appear to be a healthy business ans a good employer to work for?

Didn't see today's DHH rant about talk therapy?

Where he encouraged people to lean into intentionality and finding purpose rather than using therapy as a replacement?

I have a diagnosed anxiety disorder and I’ve benefited GREATLY from talk therapy in numerous ways. I’m an advocate for therapy. I simultaneously stand behind his post as a healthy nudge for many.

I think you are confused? Tailwind is already free and open source? These are just components they sale that are pre-made to save you time. It doesn’t take away much at all from the full experience?

interesting, i had just watched Primeagens Standup with Adam and got the impression they don't do well for money, but a quick google came up with a bunch of posts from Adam himself disclosing some fairly impressive numbers.

No idea if he still does ok from it, but he certainly did at one stage.

Fwiw I feel like their components are something I'd be less likely to want to pay for now that you can generate tailwind components so easily with ai. I guess now that I think of it I actually paid for them back when it was called Tailwind UI, but instead of using them I'm just telling claude to generate a UI for me, which has the advantage that there's no licensing issues. It'll be interesting to see how their business does going forward

From the linked article:

> To pull this off, we built @tailwindplus/elements — a library we're releasing exclusively for Tailwind Plus customers.

This means if you want to use the Tailwind UI components without a Javascript framework, you have to build them all yourself, or pay.

How has shipping high quality products using AI generated tailwind components actually been working for you? I think the problem that I and many others have/had, is that it can certainly build a few components that look good in isolation, but it doesn’t do a good job at maintaining a cohesive theme/idea across many different page sections/components etc. I built blendful [0] to solve this, and sort of lost interest when LLMs became increasingly capable. However, seeing them not making any gains, really, on visual cohesion between sections and components provoked enough excitement to continue working on it this year.

We will see how long it takes for LLMs to make headway in this area specifically.

[0]: https://www.blendful.com

We are still healthy and profitable but revenue is down about 60% from peak, and continuing to trend down (I think mostly due to AI and open-source alternatives to the things we've historically charged for.)

So things are fine but we do need to reverse the trend which is why we are pretty focused on the commercial side of things right now.

We started a corporate sponsors/partner program recently, and I'm hoping that will earn us enough funding to focus more on the free/open-source stuff, since that's where we create the most value for the world anyways. Fingers crossed!

I'm not there yet, but I wouldn't say I've ever shipped anything with a high quality cohesive frontend. In general though, don't people usually ditch these component libraries and write their own set of components once they reach a certain point?

I no longer see value in prebuilt templates since LLMs can put things together sufficiently well for prototyping. Even when using templates before you still needed to customise them. Feels like we are going through a transition period.

Dude, a lot of devs bought their products during pandemic. They had a great launch if I remember correctly.

Adam, the Tailwind corporate sponsorship program is a great example of how to do it. I hope other notable open source projects learn from you.

I don't think people in CS should be giving broad overly simplistic mental health advice. Let's leave that to the pros. I'm grateful of DHH's contributions to society but his hot takes are marketing ploys. Mental health should not be leveraged as a marketing ploy.

Fwiw, I struggled with anxiety and depression for nearly 20 years. Commitment to therapy and my modalities brought me out of that. My _therapist_ guided me, including finding purpose and building meaningful relationships.