AI is destroying the web

Hey there. How's it going? Do you love AI? No. Tough luck. We're gonna make you. There's probably 12 companies behind me with shovels that would love to have a look at your pretty mouth. Just as days go by, there's always a post regarding AI that just ends up leaving such a sour taste in my mouth. And it's so sad to see. Tailwind Labs cuts engineering team by 75% amid AIdriven revenue drop. And this is just like a small thing now, right? There's a hundred of other things. It's crazy to imagine that GPT was released what about like five years ago and the pros were versus the cons, they just outweigh each other so much. What are the pros? Well, for us senior developers, yeah, we can write code a bit faster. There's certain areas where AI can oneshot stuff, and that's great. And maybe there were certain things that you couldn't do before like other programming languages or maybe hardware with Arduino. That's quite easy to get started now if you have quad. Other than that, what's there? There's Sora, sloppy AI videos, sloppy music, a bunch of bots, AI bots everywhere. Let's not talk about the environment. Let's not talk about the job market, how it's affecting developers, open source. You can unravel this bag and there's a thousand different things that are just terrible regarding this. And it honestly makes me worried about the future of the web platform. How it's how is it going to look in five to 10 years? You also have to keep in mind that beginners that get in the field now are primarily going to rely on AI to learn and to build. And I'm not sure about you, but if I ask the LLM to make me a new project, 99% of the time it's going to be React TypeScript. I think guess what tailwind right and I'm not sure if that's good if the whole field is going to get concentrated in one direction there needs to be a balance there needs to be uh like a primary framework that's fine but there also needs to be a part where people are creative and they're trying out new stuff and experimenting because nothing ever lasts React is massive absolutely massive and won the framework war but throughout time people want new things. Could be 5 years, could be 20 years, could be 30 years, but things are going to change. People thought jQuery was the best thing ever. And eventually we ended up switching from an imperative style to more declarative style because it made more sense uh with like the component model and how we scale applications. But you never know what the future brings. And how is that going to work out where all these AI models are just primarily trained on React? And not to say that they're even good at that because a lot of times they generate some code that is very questionable. And if a beginner primarily learns through AI and they're going to see, oh, cool. I can actually conditionally render hooks and pop them in if statements and do god knows what that sometimes the AI model does. And if you're a beginner and if you don't have a llinter like biome installed, you'll never catch it. And then what's going to happen? Well, we've seen it in the last year or two where all these platforms are having issues. Why? Because who knows? Someone didn't check one specific code that the LLM generated and it just went through straight into production. And yes, for us senior developers, we can kind of get a knack for what the AI is good for. Like, oh, okay, I know it can oneshot this specific task and but not this one. It's just not fun. It's not fun to just read code all day uh versus writing it yourself. You know why? Because when you actually get the thing done, it doesn't even feel like you made it, you know? So, it's just not you don't get that satisfaction out of it at all. Okay, let's read a GitHub comment here by Adam. He says, "The reality is 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. And every second I spend trying to do a fun free things for the community like this is the second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around and making sure the people who are still here are getting their paychecks every month. Traffic to our docs is down 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework. I really want to figure out a way to offer LLM optimized docs that'll make that situation even worse. Again, we literally had to lay 75% of our team yesterday. But I can't prior prioritize it right now, unfortunately. And I'm nervous to offer them without solving the problem first. So, how crazy is this? Because if you check MPM right now, you're going to see you wouldn't even believe the amount of downloads Tailwind has. Have a look at that. 28 million downloads every week. Why? Cuz LLM LLMs just love Tailwind and it's their primary one they use. So even though with this traffic, they're barely pulling any any traffic to the actual website. And I'll tell you one thing. A couple of years ago when I was using Tailwind, I specifically had a Neoim keybinding where I click it and it would pull up uh the Tailwind docs. It was great. I loved it. But now, honestly, how many times do I go to this website? Maybe once a month where I used to go to it every day, multiple times. So, it is the sad reality because what they're relying on is is prim primarily this um kind of the UI blocks that they're selling, right? And you know what really pisses me off? You have all these huge companies that have billions and billions of dollars and you have something like Tailwind that just had such a huge impact on the web platform and they they don't give two shits about it. Not only they they took everything that they had, they gave a big you in exchange as well. What's really sad is that we could end up in a position where, you know, Adam and the team would just say that, hey, this is not worth it. This is, you know, causing more trouble than good for us and it's just not financially viable and they'll have to kind of abandon the project. And what would that mean then for for development? Because all these LLM just love Tailwind now. We'll have to smack that out of it somehow, right? Because there's still a bunch of features that get added in CSS. Keep that in mind. Every year there's something new. You have view transitions, right? You you have the new like if statements that you can do in CSS and god knows what. And those things need to be added in Tailwind, right? And if people don't get those features anymore because the project is unmaintained, they're going to want to look for a different solution. And I'm just not sure how how that transition is going to look like honestly. So my question to you is how is the web even going to look like if open-source software and you know framework authors and maintainers will have no incentive whatsoever uh to kind of push the web forward? Are we just going to end up with a bunch of slop with websites that just look the same because everyone's using the same model? Oh my god. I hope that's not going to be the future. And I'm really hoping that we can figure something out. And just shame on these large companies that don't support open-source projects as much as they deserve to be supported. So, thank you so much for watching this episode. Drop a little subscribe and I'll catch you in the next one. Let me know what you think in the comments.