Tailwind Labs, the company behind Tailwind CSS, has laid off about 75 percent of its engineering team. This comes even as Tailwind CSS continues to grow in popularity and sees more downloads than ever.
The company confirmed that the layoffs were due to the impact of AI on its business model. Tailwind CSS is free and open source, so the company earns money mainly from paid products like Tailwind UI, templates, and learning resources. These products are promoted through the official Tailwind documentation website.
According to founder Adam Wathan, AI tools now allow developers to generate Tailwind code or get answers instantly. As a result, fewer people are visiting the documentation site. Traffic to the website has reportedly dropped by around 40 percent, and revenue from paid products has fallen around 80 percent.
Even though the product is more popular than ever, the company could not sustain the previous team size, which led to the layoffs.
This shows a brutal side of AI. It is not replacing the product, but it is affecting how companies earn from open source tools. Tailwind CSS remains widely used, but the business model built around documentation-driven sales has come under pressure. The same thing is happening with web publishers. Traffic to several websites is down because people are using AI tools for information. Several big media companies had to layoff. I wrote a detailed article on how AI is killing websites’ traffic and making it hard for web publishers and bloggers to earn.
