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Tailwind Creator Says AI Played a Role in Downsizing

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Tailwind Creator Says AI Played a Role in Downsizing

An abstract piece that looks like cloth blowing in the wind.

Tailwind CSS, the popular CSS framework, laid off three engineers — 75% of its engineering team — on Monday. In a personal podcast posted to the X platform on Wednesday, Tailwind creator Adam Wathan claimed that AI played a significant role in the open source project’s declining revenues.

“I do think the percentage is important to share, because to say that, ‘Oh, we have to let go three people, it doesn’t sound like we have to do much, but in reality, we have four engineers on staff, and now we have one,” Wathan said of the layoffs. “So it is a big change.”

But by Thursday afternoon, the story had shifted, with frontend cloud company Vercel, Postgres development platform SupaBase, and Google AI Studio stating in tweets that they would sponsor the project. Tailwind CSS has had a sponsorship program since summer of 2025.

Wathan said Friday via Twitter that he had been “overwhelmed by the support over the last 24 hours,” which was not something he expected when he recorded a podcast about the project’s financial condition.

“Thanks so much to everyone with words of encouragement, the new sponsors we’ve brought on, and people who’ve used their platforms to help in any way, I’m extremely touched,” he wrote.

That said, he added that:

“We’re comfortable, and things like our partner program are helping a lot to fund the framework more directly instead of selling products that are more at risk of disruption. We don’t need anyone to rescue us, we’ve got lots of time and space to try new ideas and see what works 🙏🏻 I’m optimistic we’ll figure out how to get things moving in the right direction, but even if we just have be a smaller business with less budget than we’ve had in the past that’s okay too ❤️.”

Wathan said Wednesday he knew — and has publicly acknowledged — that revenue was declining, but he believed it had stabilized. Then he looked at the forecasting data over the holiday break.

He said he “was knocked off guard” when he realized the problem’s scope.

“If absolutely nothing changed, then in about six months, we would no longer be able to meet payroll obligations, which was a pretty shitty thing to realize,” he said. “Over the break, we had to make the real decision to scale down the size of the team, something the business actually can afford, because if we didn’t do it now, then we would not be able to give people generous severance packages for them to have the time to find new roles.”

It’s a surprising development from Tailwind CSS, which Wathan touted as an open source success story back in 2020.

“We’re also about to cross $2 million in revenue from Tailwind UI, our first commercial Tailwind CSS product which was released about five months ago — a bit under two years after the very first Tailwind CSS release,” he wrote at the time.

Today, Tailwind CSS is the most popular CSS framework by far in frontend development. It was cited as the preferred framework by 51% of the 5,506 survey respondents in Devographic’s 2025 State of CSS survey. Bootstrap came in second with 30% of the responses.

What changed? Wathan believes it was partly due to people using AI to summarize Tailwind’s Docs, rather than going to the actual Docs, which is where they can learn about Tailwind’s paid offerings.

“The whole AI thing is clearly a double-edged sword, because  AI is a huge reason why our business is struggling, even though it’s making Tailwind more popular than ever,” he said.

Traffic to Tailwind’s Docs is down by 40% since 2023, he said in a pull request response.

“The whole AI thing is clearly a double edged sword, because AI is a huge reason why our business is struggling, even though it’s making Tailwind more popular than ever.”
— Tailwind creator Adam Wathan

“That’s our entire distribution, and the only way that there’s money to pay anyone to work on the framework, the free, open source framework, is if people buy the products,” Wathan said in his podcast “If even more people stop looking at the Docs because they’re relying on LLMs [large language models] crawling the markdown endpoints … that just feels like even fewer people are going to find out about the paid products, because the markdown files, as they are currently, don’t do anything to inform people about the existence of the commercial stuff.”

Wathan said in the pull request that he hopes to find a way to offer LLM-optimized docs so that the situation will not worsen, but he can’t prioritize that right now. He warned that it may be harder to close PRs and develop new features with such a limited staff.

Tailwind’s remaining team includes Watham and two other owners, one engineer and a part-time operations person, Watham revealed in the podcast. He closed by highlighting the qualifications of the three engineers he’d just laid off.

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