The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such things.
While I understand that this has been difficult for him and his company... hasn't it been obvious that this would be a major issue for years?
I do worry about what this means for the future of open source software. We've long relied on value adds in the form of managed hosting, high-quality collections, and educational content. I think the unfortunate truth is that LLMs are making all of that far less valuable. I think the even more unfortunate truth is that value adds were never a good solution to begin with. The reality is that we need everyone to agree that open source software is valuable and worth supporting monetarily without any value beyond the continued maintenance of the code.
Having worked on a design system previously I think most people, especially non-frontend developers, discount how hard something like that is to build. LLMs will build stuff that looks plausible but falls short in a bunch of ways (particularly accessibility). This is for the same reason that people generate div-soup, it looks correct on the surface.
EDIT: I suppose what I'm saying is that "The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such thing." is wrong. My hunch is that AI has the appearance of eliminating the need for such things.
It's not that people care about quality, but that people expect things to "just work".
Regarding the point about accessibility, there are a ton of little details that must be explicitly written into the HTML that aren't necessarily the default behavior. Some common features of CSS and JS can break accessibility too.
None of this code would obvious to an LLM, or even human devs, but it's still what's expected. Without precisely written and effectively read-only boilerplate your webpage is gonna be trash and the specifics are a moving target and hotly debated. This back and forth is a human problem, not a code problem. That's why it's "hard".
I use the web every day as a blind user with a screenreader.
I would 100% of the time prefer to encounter the median website written by Opus 4.5 than the median website written by a human developer in terms of accessibility!
That's really interesting. Are you speaking from experience with websites where you know who authored them or from seeing code written by humans and Opus 4.5 respectively?
So I have been using the human-authored web since well... 1999 or so, starting with old AOL CDs. I've obviously seen a lot of human content.
Back in the old days you might have image links and other fun stuff. Then we entered the era of flash. Flash was great, especially the people who made their whole site out of it (2004 + not being able to order ... was it pizza? something really sticks in my memory here.)
Then we entered the era of early Bootstrap. Things got really bad for a while -- there was a whole Bootstrap-Accessibility library people ended up writing for it, and of course nobody actually used the damn thing. The most frustrating thing at this point (2010?) was any dropdown anywhere. Any bootstrap dropdown was completely inaccessible using typical techniques, and you'd have to do something tricky with ... mouse routing? Gods it's been 15 years.
CAPTCHAs for stupid things became huge there for a brief moment -- I remember needing to pass a CAPTCHA to download ... was it Creative drivers? That motivated me to make a service called CAPTCHA-Be-Gone for other blind people for a while.
Then we see ARIA start to really come into its own... except that's a whole new shitshow! So many times you'd get people who thought "Oh to add accessibility, we just add ARIA" and had no fucking idea what they were doing, to the point where the most-common A11y advice these days has become "Don't use ARIA unless you know you need it."
Oh then we had this brief flash (~10 years ago?) of "60 FPS websites!" -- let's directly render to the fucking canvas, that'll be great. Flutter? ... Ick!
Nowadays the issues are just the same as they ever were. People using divs for everything, onclick handlers instead of stuff that will be triggered with keyboard... Stuff that Opus just doesn't do!
I guess I've only been using Opus 4.5 for about a month but just ... Ask it to build something? Use it with a screen reader? Try it!
> Then we see ARIA start to really come into its own... except that's a whole new shitshow!
I am not blind, but my experience trying to write accessible web pages is that the screen readers are inconsistent with how they announce the various tags and attributes. I'm curious what you think about the screen readers out there such as NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver, TalkBack, etc. and how devs should be testing their web pages.
Many of the larger corporate clients tend to standardize on the exact behavior of JAWS and I am not sure that is helpful. It's like the Internet Explorer of screen readers.
If you want to know why a page ends up riddled with ARIA overriding everything, that's why. In even the best cases, the people paying for this dev work are looking for consistency and then not finishing the job. It's never made the highest priority work either since testing eats up a ton of time.
To reinforce my original point, I just don't think LLMs can write anything but the most naive code and everyone has opinions and biases completely incompatible with standardization. It's never "done" and fundamentally fickle and political just like the rest of the web.
Satisfying constraints like these isn't merely about knowing the spec and having lots of examples. Accessibility requirements are even more subjective than ordinary requirements already are to begin with.
But accessiblity on the frontend is to a large extend patterns - if it looks like a checkbox it should have the appropriate ARIA tag, and patterns are easy for an LLM.
It's just… a lot of people don't see this on their bottom line. Or any line. My awareness of accessibility issues is the Web Accessibility Initiative and the Apple Developer talks and docs, but I don't think I've ever once been asked to focus on them. If anything, I've had ideas shot down.
What AI does do is make it cheap to fill in gaps. 1500 junior developers for the price of one, if you know how to manage them. But still, even there, they'd only be filling in gaps as well as the nature of those gaps have been documented in text, not the lived experience of people with e.g. limited vision, or limited joint mobility whose fingers won't perform all the usual gestures.
Even without that issue, I'd expect any person with a disability to describe an AI-developed accessibility solution as "slop": because I've had to fix up a real codebase where nobody before me had noticed the FAQ was entirely Bob Ross quotes (the app wasn't about painting, or indeed in English), I absolutely anticipate that a vibe-coded accessibility solution will do something equally weird, perhaps having some equivalent to "As a large language model…" or to hard-code some example data that has nothing to do with the current real value of a widget.
Accessibility testing sounds like something an LLM might be good at. Provide it with tools to access your website only through a screen reader (simulated, text not audio), ask it to complete tasks, measure success rate. That should be way easier for an LLM than image-based driving a web browser.
I think perhaps the nuance in the middle here is that for most projects, the quality that professional components bring is less important.
Internal tools and prototypes, both things that quality components can accelerate, have been strong use-cases for these component libraries, just as much as polished commercial customer-facing products.
And I bet volume-wise there's way more of the former than the latter.
So while I think most people who care about quality know you can't (yet) blindly use LLM output in your final product, it's completely ok for internal tools and prototyping.
The Tailwind Team's Refactoring UI book was a big eye opener for me. I had no idea how many subtle insights are required to create truly effective UX.
I think people vastly underestimate just how much work goes into determining the correct set of primitives create a design system like Tailwind, let alone a full blown component library like TailwindUI.
While I believe you, its an argument that artists bring forward since the beginning of art, so even many hundred years before the internet on average humankind did not value this work.
It's not really a refutation of my point about how building a good component library is hard, to suggest using another component library. Of course, if you use one it's easier, that was my entire point.
shadcn ui is not a component library but the basis for a component library that has great accessibility built-in from the start, so yes, it is a refutation.
Maybe we're arguing semantics, but I think calling shadcn a "basis for a design system" is more accurate than a traditional component library. The difference to me is that shadcn lives inside your codebase and you can fully customize it as you please. You cannot customize a component library like MUI nearly to that extent.
> The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such things.
Or more cynically that it eliminates the need to pay for such things. Claude and friends were no doubt trained on the commercial Tailwind components, so the question becomes whether those models could have done the job of Tailwind UI without piggybacking on the unpaid labour of the Tailwind UI developers. If not then we clearly have a sustainability problem here - someone still has to do the hard work to push things forward, but with the knowledge that any attempt to profit from that work will be instantly undercut by the copyright laundering Borg.
I bought a Tailwind Plus trial a few years ago and I've been using AI tools since they came out. I typically find the block or template I want to use via the Tailwind Plus site and then feed it into Claude Code and ask the agent to modify them as required. This has been working well for me. I think the problem is that the Internet is absolutely full of people who expect free shit and never even consider paying for it to support the devs. I don't really know how you fix that. In a sane world, we'd be funding the most popular/useful projects using government grants, since our entire fucking economy sits atop a pile of OSS.
I think AI has come as the industry was somewhat maturing and most frameworks/software had previous incarnations that mostly did the same thing or could be done adhoc anyway. The need for libraries as the models get better probably declines as well.
Not all open source but a lot of it is fundamentally for humans to consume. If AI can, at its extreme (still remains to be seen), just magic up the software then the value of libraries and a lot of open source software will decline. In some ways its a fundamentally different paradigm of computing, and we don't yet understand what that looks like.
As AI gets better OSS contributes to it; but in its source code feeding the training data not as a direct framework dependency. If the LLM's continue to get better I can see the whole concept of frameworks being less and less necessary.
Mostly. I had the "AI bot tsunami" problem on my own personal site and blocked a bunch of bot user agents in robots.txt. Most of them were from companies I had never heard of before. The only big AI name I recognized was GPTBot from OpenAI.
https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs/5025624008 - "Research Engineer – Cybersecurity RL" - "This role blends research and engineering, requiring you to both develop novel approaches and realize them in code. Your work will include designing and implementing RL environments, conducting experiments and evaluations, delivering your work into production training runs, and collaborating with other researchers, engineers, and cybersecurity specialists across and outside Anthropic."
https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs/4924308008 - "Research Engineer / Research Scientist, Biology & Life Sciences" - "As a founding member of our team, you'll work at the intersection of cutting-edge AI and the biological sciences, developing rigorous methods to measure and improve model performance on complex scientific tasks."
The key trend in 2025 was a new emphasis on reinforcement learning - models are no longer just trained by dumping in a ton of scraped text, there's now a TON of work involved designing reinforcement learning loops that teach them how to do specific useful things - and designing those loops requires subject-matter expertise.
That's why they got so much better at code over the past six months - code is the perfect target for RL because you can run generated code and see if it works or not.
The funny part is how they think this will give them the power to take control of what is the defacto standard and circumvent standards.
It will instead further distinguish what is AI slop because it doesn't work and be siloed off to people who don't care about the code so can't fix it.
If people want good interoperable production ready code that can be deployed instantly and just works and meets all current standards and ongoing discussions, we've had it for many decades and it's called open source.
Well, you can tell from the tone of his post that he isn't blaming anyone directly. They monetized convenience, and something more convenient came along.
I think it's more shocking to everyone how quickly something like that happens.
Exactly the business model wasn't strong enough, just upselling templates for hundreds of dollars which AI can churn in few tokens was easy to disrupt.
The business model is strong. AI is stealing traffic/money from creators. That's not a problem with the business model, it's a problem with AI. AI hyperscalers shamelessly monetize other people's work without compensation. Truly an awful dystopia.
The output of AIs that is "churned out" wouldn't exist without templates like this being used as an input to the training. But that isn't "Copyright Infringement", according to the AI companies.
You and I would not get away with this no matter how much lawyering we buy.
This has nothing to do with the actual facts or arguments of the case. Our "Justice" system has openly and capriciously emphasized corporate rights over individual rights for at least 50 years now.
I disagree. The bare minimum they could have done in all these years was build a proper high quality, tightly coupled component library instead of riding this "copy paste your way to a result" trend.
Not stuff like shadcn and Tailwind Catalyst, but a proper versioned, tightly coupled UI library with rich theming capabilities made for the 99% of users who aren't skilled enough at design to be cobbling together their own design systems or editing a Button component directly.
Instead they rode the wave (despite being best positioned to redirect the wave) and they're paying the price.
If it wasn't AI it'd be the first version of MUI that moves on from Material Design 2 as a default. Or Hero UI v3. Or literally anyone who brings sanity back to the space of component libraries and leaves "copy and paste code snippets" behind
There are more knobs to turn when you have an actual library, and you become a lot less fungible than a random collection of TW classes.
HeroUI faces the same problem, and now their React Native library includes an optional (paid) conpiler solution that makes it faster.
MUI has the same problem but besides templates they have their MUI X data components which aren't limited in complexity to what can be ergonomically copy and pasted to a clipboard.
If a business model can't withstand being disrupted, it is no longer viable. It's like Uber putting cabs out of business with something better. Selling templates is now no longer viable, and blaming AI will not do anything. As Darwin would say, adapt or die.
Just like piracy isn't theft, so too isn't AI scraping. Personally I think copyright should be abolished and I think it's wild to see people on HN turn from hackers to copyright hawks literally supporting massive corporations which are the primary beneficiaries of long copyright laws, like Disney and their Mickey Mouse laws.
Now is not the time to take a principal stance on copyright. The harsh reality is that trillion dollar companies are taking the word of individual creators like Tailwind for free and monetizing it without any form of compensation. That feels incredibly unjust and needs to be fixed. I don't care what the fix is called.
I'm not a fan of copyright either but big corporations have abused them for so long, either enforce them to punish these companies or abolish them so these companies die, either one is fine with me. But don't just selectively enforce them to the benefit of these corpos but ignore them when they punish them, that's the worst of both worlds.
I think the era of buying templates is over, when you can get a tool that listens to you patiently, iterates again and again till you're satisfied for pennies, why would you pay hundred's for a template that is there for anyone else to buy as well.
The selling feature is that it's more polished (and has good accessibility etc), they're still intended to be customised, which you could use AI for. Why use Tailwind itself when you could generate one with AI? Because it's solidly tested and polished, similarly.
But the broader, more important point: an open source project previously could be funded by using attention to sell other services or add-ons. But that model might be gone if users no longer visit or know the creators.
Is AI making component libraries redundant? Or is it just making it really easy to use free component libraries?
(Or is it really more about traffic to the documentation site and thus eyeballs on the sales pitch?)
I'm making an app using ShadCN, which is pretty good and free -- maybe Tailwind Plus would be significantly better, I don't know, I had to consider the possibility that this project never makes any money so I wanted free for the first shot. And the LLMs turn out to know it pretty well.
Once I get it built using ShadCN, it's hard to imagine when I'd have time to go redo all the component hackery with another library, even if it were way better.
I guess my point is just that "paid UI components" is a really tough business when there are so many people willing to make components just for the fun/glory/practice. Same with a lot of UI stuff it seems -- I highly respect icon designers, but I'm probably just going to use Lucide.
I think all kinds of libraries are becoming redundant. Unless the library solves significant technical problems its likely AI will generate whatever you need. Even tailwind itself is kind of unnecessary, I've used it a lot, but recently been just using AI to generate raw css on side projects, I feel it works pretty well. Tailwind is really a developer convivence, it made things pretty fast to style, but now I don't really think it has anywhere near the advantages it did. If you aren't writing tailwindcss but generating it, almost all the advantage is gone. Only thing it kind of provides is a set of defaults / standards
I've known of the paid components for years and never thought of buying them. It's so easy to build things with Tailwind that it never crossed my mind.
Fwiw I don’t even think shadcn is good, but our app is built on top of those components already, so we can’t change it without changing everything, so we’re stuck with it.
Does it matter whether it's been obvious that it would be a major issue? It's not unlikely that he did realise this a long time ago, and if he did, it's also not unlikely that he still hasn't found a solution, because there might not be one.
Well.. there are many fast growing companies that provide UI + APIs for certain components of your app. Sure you can build things easier in-house, but the opportunity cost of doing so also went up. Supabase, Stream, Clerk, Stainless all growing very well.
> I think the even more unfortunate truth is that value adds were never a good solution to begin with.
This is the money quote for me - charging for a different thing than the one that brings the value is unsustainable, and AI is accelerating that realization.
Unfortunately, without free distribution, Tailwind would never gain anywhere close to its current mindshare, so there just might not be an opening there (save for a "this year is a year of Linux on desktop" dream of bots and pnpm install paying with micropayments for each download).
How does it eliminates the need for simple templates and components? Templates and components are always gonna be more cost effective, back in the day we used to buy simple jQuery components for like 5*$ and even LLMs cant beat that, you will quickly end up with a shittier component with 0 accessibility and end up paying more to the Claude Opus
> The reality is that we need everyone to agree that open source software is valuable and worth supporting monetarily
The reality is that you need to figure out is that if you want people to pay when they make a ton of money from your code, you should put that in the license.
I think we just need better platforms for enterprise procurement.
The issue is that currently you either publish as free & open-source and get tons of traction and usage but little funding, or you publish as paid and get no traction.
The blocker for paid software isn't actually the money itself (this is solvable by just pricing it reasonably), it's all the red tape that someone has to go through to get their company to purchase a license to begin with.
Maybe a marketplace that preemptively does audits, provides insurance, code escrow, licensing, etc ahead of time, that vendors can put their software on it proactively and companies can have accounts where their employees can just open an "app store" and just buy/license software directly? Similar to the AWS marketplace but for libraries.
Meanwhile Evan You of Vue JS was making something like 200k just from Patreon before starting void(0) which is venture backed, it's all a marketing problem because I don't think anyone knew their GitHub sponsors even existed, people just don't seem to use it in general.
I don't know why Tailwind needed anyone more than Adam, I understand that more people makes the work go faster such as for their Rust compiler but then you run into money problems like this.
I'm sorry but it simply does not cost a million dollars to maintain Tailwind, a CSS library that has no compelling reason to ever change at this point.
While I understand that this has been difficult for him and his company... hasn't it been obvious that this would be a major issue for years?
I do worry about what this means for the future of open source software. We've long relied on value adds in the form of managed hosting, high-quality collections, and educational content. I think the unfortunate truth is that LLMs are making all of that far less valuable. I think the even more unfortunate truth is that value adds were never a good solution to begin with. The reality is that we need everyone to agree that open source software is valuable and worth supporting monetarily without any value beyond the continued maintenance of the code.