Introduction
On January 6, 2026, Adam Wathan dropped a quiet bombshell in a GitHub comment: three of Tailwind’s four engineers were fired due to AI.
Many popular vibecoding tools such as bolt.new, lovable.dev and v0.dev use Tailwind as the golden standard. So does shadcn/ui, the most popular component (distribution) library. All of this ensures Tailwind does extremely well, better than ever. However, almost every one of those tools uses Tailwind for free for a fundamental part of their entire business.
However, Tailwind’s CEO said that traffic to their docs is down by 40% since early 2023. Meaning, they are more popular than ever, with barely any traffic compared to its growth.
2025 State of CSS survey
Tailwind is a free project, their income source mostly relies on a paid templates and blocks library (Tailwind Plus), being €250 and €850 one-time purchase, but because of most traffic currently being due to the AI tools I mentioned before, very little people still read Tailwind’s docs and therefore buy their Plus product. Most Tailwind code is written by an LLM.
Adam Tweeted about it, and gained massive traction on Twitter (1.9M views).
The reaction
The massive Tailwind users (Replit, Google AI, Neon Database, Supabase, Syntax, Gumroad, Vercel, Intercom, and more) started to notice, and donations (each minimum €5k/month) started coming in with big amounts. But the question begs: why did it take this long? Why only now?
The massive corporations knew they’d also gain a lot of traction for every donation because of the big drama, if they’d done it earlier, or through DMs, they would not have gotten the same amount of traction.
So Tailwind has now gotten a lot of money recently, but we haven’t heard about the fired engineers. Are they just permanently fired now? Will Adam do it all by himself, even with him having more money now?
Recent tweets from Adam show he’s been thinking about a better way to align AI and Tailwind.