Sometimes it sucks, but often it's awesome. I love seeing people use what I built for them. It was also very enlightening doing prototyping and watching the customers use it. Often they would ask for something that they didn't realize they didn't actually want until they used it. Working directly with them saved potentially months of building out features that would never be used.
> the site docs garnering traffic (beyond potential tailwind labs conversions) is more of an indicator of a code or design smell than anything
I've heard this before, but it's really no different than vanilla CSS. My guess is that people started pointing this out is that Tailwind got more non-frontend people digging into styling more where they were hit with how much shit there is in CSS.
For me I know CSS quite well, but I would always have to look up some utility names that had no intuitive mapping. line-height is leading, flex-direction has no direct mapping, text-wrap is text but also font size is text, so if trying to do font-size:custom you had to do some weird syntax unlike the other custom value syntax lest it confuse text-[1rem] with a text-wrap rule. There are a lot of these weird decisions.
I love tailwind and will continue to use it, but it isn't perfect in this regard...
Is this supposed to be a plus? When you have indirections they're supposed to provide some abstraction and the abstraction might or might not provide the utilities you desire, but there is a point to it. A near 1:1 mapping is completely useless and just a different syntax for the sake of it.
Seriously. I always wonder who makes these comments, then I remember I'm old and there are people who don't remember every era of the web. Although, it's still incredibly weird to essentially claim that Tailwind solved date pickers.
You have to remember the biggest appeal of tailwind is that it throws away the entire cascade of css. The people that reach for it are choosing it because it offers less functionality, and is therefore simpler to reason about. I hesitate to say they don't understand css, I'm sure some of them do, but in my experience the devs that reach for it are the same who deride css and make statements such as "I have better things to do than learn css"
I think there's plenty of developers that are perfectly competent with CSS who still reach for Tailwind.
You're right that Tailwind throws away the cascade, or at least enables developers not to have to think about it (under the hood, Tailwind 4 uses pretty modern cascading features like layers), but people aren't reaching it because of a lack of understanding, they're reaching for it because as front-ends get increasingly componentized, the cascade becomes less and less of a benefit and more of an obstacle to be worked around, and something that gets that obstacle out of the way becomes more attractive.
I'm perfectly competent at CSS and... at this point I don't even look at CSS. I just feed descriptions of what I want to the LLM and it nails it every time. The result either looks the way I want or it doesn't.
I'm not universally pro-AI. I meticulously review every line of backend code, and still do hand edits. I review FE commits less carefully but still keep an eye on it to make sure AI doesn't go off the rails. But there's only so much trouble you can get into with CSS and the problems are the kind of bite-sized problems that LLMs excel at.
I don't think it matters at this point what you use for styling. If you like tailwind, the AIs use it just fine. If you like SASS, or raw CSS, the AIs are also just fine.
I'm not sure there's really a human job here anymore.
Do you store your CSS in separate common files independent of markup? Out of curiosity, do you run into issues with excessive token usage when you want to work with CSS?
That would be my gut instinct - you ask your agent to change a CSS rule, and your agent would feel the need to find all usage of that rule to avoid introducing unexpected changes. Does that happen? (I'm operating purely on assumptions here because I regularly use tailwind where changes are kinda definitionally local).
I'm quite versed in CSS but tailwind has convenient abstractions on top. It's like "why you need C if you have assembler". I don't remember when I wrote raw CSS last time. Even global styles I tend to express via @apply.
A bunch of people have already said this but I also have known CSS very well (being using it since its release) and even enjoyed it. Butt the moment I saw someone using Tailwind I thought, "I want that!" The idea that Tailwind is for, or rather only for, people who don't know CSS is very misguided. That said, I'm back to using vanilla CSS.
Don't forget that, in my opinion very positive way, it also normalized the concept of "uniform measurements". Every instance of `rounded-md` is the same on a site.
Indeed, I don't know what to make of such a bizarrely nonsensical assertion. Age and lack of experience doesn't really explain it, because all the poster needed to have done was make the simplest sort of web search. It's so wrong, it's... not even wrong.
That is an understatement! And not only that, "simple" is relative. The common saying that gets push back is "Do the simplest thing possible." People always seem to ignore the "possible" part of that phrase. Forgive me for being a little cute here, but a complex solution is simpler than a really complex solution.
Ha, indeed! I misguidedly turned to Reddit somewhat recently when the activity on the programming forum I spent most of my time on died down thanks to LLMs. As I got sucked into reading various shit posting on AI, there are multiple quotes daily along these lines. Many are written in a way as if it's the first time anyone has said it (probably most of them are bots). I finally deleted my Reddit account.
Anyway, a particularly funny one I read recently was "Ya, it's just like how musicians who didn't accept synthesizers got left behind." This person apparently believes there have been successful musicals acts based purely around traditional instrumentation since the ~80s.
Maybe as per usual, I think we all mostly remembered so many numbers thanks to pattern recognition. I'm old enough to have had a rotary phone in the basement growing that I used less than the various other keypad phones in the house. Whenever I was dialing (literally) a newly learned number on the rotary phone, I to think of what it looked like on touchpad first. Although very quickly I'd get to know the rotary pattern as well.
Of course, this is likely totally a regular memory device people would use. I've done no reading on this so, so if Socrates was wary of writing, was he also wary of pattern recognition or drawing as memory aids?
Back in Socrates time, masters of rhetoric used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci to memorize long texts without reading or writing. Something was definitely lost as something was gained.
...which can come in handy. Sometimes your cellphone battery dies. I still know my parents' numbers from memory (as well as some of my friends' parents' numbers, though that isn't super useful) but I am concerned about it sometimes.
> I think when people use NPC as an insult (it is a dumb insult in my opinion)
Probably not totally relevant, but a several years ago I was out for one of my best friend's very low-key bachelor party (just a few friends/family members bar-hopping, no strip clubs). We went to a bar that was recommended by one of us and the dude who greeted us was so insanely charismatic that I assumed he was someone my buddy knew and was this later joiner to the party or something. I asked my friend, "Do you know this guy?" and, you kinda have to know his humour, but he replied, "No, he's an NPC." He was not insulting the guy (in fact I think he may have even said "non-playable character" in full) just saying, "Nope, not with us," and ya... I laughed... like, really hard. Needed recovery time.
It is a fun story. Not everything needs to have a point!
If the guy was incredibly charismatic and managed to sort of join the group despite lacking a properly developed backstory, maybe he was a DMPC (dungeon master player character).
That made chuckle! Not to the point of needing recovery time, but still. Thank you for sharing the story. I can’t help you get to the point you were looking for, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
Sometimes it sucks, but often it's awesome. I love seeing people use what I built for them. It was also very enlightening doing prototyping and watching the customers use it. Often they would ask for something that they didn't realize they didn't actually want until they used it. Working directly with them saved potentially months of building out features that would never be used.
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