Are we starving the tools we depend on?

I'm an optimist when it comes to the rapid progress we’ve seen with large language models these past few years. It's fantastic that the barrier of being able to write code has been lowered, and the increase of my productivity (or output at least) is amazing.

That being said, even before this revolution, everything you do as a developer is thanks to people that came before you, that paved the road, that invented languages, technologies and frameworks. Or as Steve Jobs put it:

I didn’t invent the language or mathematics I used. I make little of my one food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. [...] We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow.

One of the "shoulders" I stand up, and use daily is Tailwind CSS. A lot of people would describe it as "styling for people that don't like CSS". And that's true, but it's also a great design system, giving you good defaults for spacing, font sizes and even colors. It's what helps me, not a designer, to make stuff that doesn't look like it was made by me.

Tailwind has been popular for years, but the rise of LLMs gave it an enormous boost. Ask an LLM to create you a web app and chances are high it will use Tailwind. Which is great, but has it drawbacks.

Today I stumbled upon this comment by Adam, the creator of Tailwind regarding the brutal impact AI is having on their business:

But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. [...]

Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework.

A beautiful open-source framework, carefully crafted by humans, used by millions around the world is unable to continue business because AI is stealing the traffic they need to be able to make money.

This breaks my heart, and it's a sad reality we must face.

Will there still be giant shoulders to stand on in the future? Or will we starve them to death?

I sure hope we don't. There's so much craft and attention to detail in something like Tailwind, and we take it too much for granted. Just like we take so many other wonderful technologies we use for granted.

So what can you do? Try to support the projects you use. If you use Tailwind, look into Tailwind Plus or sponsorship. Most projects have some kind of way to support them, and even if it doesn't look like the best deal in the world, or if you're cheaper off DIY'ing something yourself instead ... if you can afford it, if you make money by using it, support them and pay for it.