The Uncomfortable Truth About Open Source in the AI Era

The most popular CSS framework just fired 75% of their engineering team.

Downloads up 5x. Revenue down 80%. Docs traffic down 40%.

This isn't a failure story. It's worse. It's a success story that's killing them.

You're Probably Using Tailwind Right Now

If you've ever vibe coded anything... Cursor, v0, Claude Artifacts... you're using Tailwind and you might not even know it.

It's the CSS framework that powers basically everything AI builds. When you ask Claude to make a landing page, that's Tailwind. When Cursor autocompletes your styles, that's Tailwind. When v0 generates a component, that's Tailwind.

Metric	2023	2026	Change
npm Downloads	6M/week	32M/week	+433%
Revenue	Baseline	-	-80%
Docs Traffic	Baseline	-	-40%
Engineering Team	4	1	-75%

AI learned Tailwind so well that nobody needs to learn it anymore.

How Open Source Actually Makes Money

Here's what most people don't understand about open source business models.

Tailwind CSS is free. Always has been. The way they pay their team is through Tailwind Plus... beautifully designed templates and UI kits. You buy them once, you use them forever.

The only way people find out about these paid products is through the documentation. That's their entire funnel. Developers hit a problem, visit the docs, see the premium offerings, some percentage converts.

But here's the thing.

AI doesn't visit docs.

You don't visit docs anymore either. When's the last time you actually went to tailwindcss.com instead of just asking ChatGPT?

And now you've got shadcn/ui offering similar components for free. Who's buying templates when Claude can generate a decent hero section in three seconds?

"The Tailwind team is like musicians... they go into a hole, work on an album, do a drop, go on tour, and that's where they make the money. But you miss out on all the advantages of compounding." - Dax from SST

A customer you grabbed five years ago should still be paying you. That's the problem with one-time purchases in a world where AI makes everything feel disposable.

Adam Told the Truth

Then Adam Wathan did something most founders never do. He told the truth.

He posted a 33-minute voice recording while walking through the snow in Ontario. Just talking to his phone. Raw. Unedited.

And what he said was brutal.

He called it a "boiling frog" situation. Revenue had been declining so slowly for so long that he didn't even notice until he finally ran the numbers over the holidays.

The forecast showed that if nothing changed, in about six months they wouldn't be able to make payroll. So he made the call. Laid off three of his four engineers NOW so he could give them proper severance instead of waiting until the money ran out completely.

Then he wrote this on GitHub:

"75% of our engineering team lost their jobs yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business."

"I feel like a FAILURE for building this insanely successful open source thing where business success is inversely correlated with the project's popularity."

Read that again. The more successful Tailwind becomes, the faster their business dies.

This Isn't Just Tailwind

Vjeux, the guy behind React Native, Prettier, and Excalidraw, said he has the exact same problem. Prettier is used by basically everyone in the industry, but funding proper maintenance has been a constant struggle.

Jeffrey from Laracasts had to do layoffs the same week.

badlogicgames tweeted something that got over a million views: "Everything is going to be f**ked real soon."

Here's the pattern.

AI companies are making billions. The open source projects they trained on? The ones their products literally can't function without? They're dying.

Not because they're failing. Because they're too successful.

Tailwind is the first domino. It won't be the last.

There's Actually Hope

Since this news broke, donations have been pouring in. Adam posted a thank you tweet that got over a hundred thousand views. The community is rallying. People are actually signing up for Tailwind Plus, buying the Refactoring UI book, becoming sponsors.

The response has been overwhelming. Developers are waking up to the fact that the tools they rely on are built by people who need to eat.

What You Can Do

If you use Tailwind... and statistically, you probably do... here's what you can do right now:

1. Buy something. Refactoring UI is genuinely one of the best design books for developers. Tailwind Plus has templates that will save you hours.

2. Sponsor on GitHub. Even $5/month adds up when thousands of developers do it.

3. Check your other dependencies. Run npm ls and look at what you're using. See who else is struggling to keep the lights on.

4. Share this story. Most developers have no idea this is happening. The more people who understand the problem, the better chance we have of fixing it.

Because if we don't support these projects, there won't be a Tailwind v5. There won't be a Prettier update. There won't be any of the tools we rely on every single day.

The tools you rely on are built by people who need to eat. That's it. That's the whole thing.