Tailwind CSS is a very popular open-source framework to build modern websites. The GitHub repository has over 92,000 stars and almost 5,000 forks. It is also updated actively, with the latest version released just last month. However, AI seems to be creating challenges for the business viability of the project, with Tailwind"s founder confirming that 75% of his team was laid off yesterday.
This revelation was made after a contributor created a pull request in November 2025 that built a text-only version of Tailwind CSS" documentation that could be easily consumed by a large language model (LLM). This request was not entertained by the Tailwind team until two days ago when Tailwind CEO Adam Wathan replied that he is declining the request because there are more pressing matters at hand, such as figuring out "how to make enough money for the business to be sustainable".
Upon further pressing from the community, Wathan explained that he had to lay off 75% of his team yesterday because of the "brutal" impact of AI on their business. He noted that the company"s documentation is a key driver behind paid conversions for its premium products, which users find out about only if they visit the Tailwind documentation website. LLM"s scraping this content and generating Tailwind code by themselves had led to a 40% decline in terms of website traffic compared to 2023. Wathan highlighted that Tailwind"s revenue is also down by 80%, emphasizing that:
Right now there"s just no correlation between making Tailwind easier to use and making development of the framework more sustainable. I need to fix that before making Tailwind easier to use benefits anyone, because if I can"t fix that this project is going to become unmaintained abandonware when there is no one left employed to work on it. I appreciate the sentiment and agree in spirit, it"s just more complicated than that [making it easier for people to write Tailwind code faster with LLMs] in reality right now.
The GitHub thread has been locked by Wathan now, but you can check out the detailed discussion here.