Ok. How lost and far behind am I if I think this is a strange tool? What did the people at Tailwind do to create the need for an AI-assisted tool to write Tailwind classes?
Can we do a LangCSS instead but for CSS? That will help someone new to learn better; otherwise, we are building abstraction on top of an abstraction of an abstraction.
Do one for CSS, then have features to convert that to the Tailwind or FooBar Framework of the future. See, Tailwind will also eventually go away, just as Bootstrap, Foundation, or Bourbon did. Developers who depend on the tools that help them write in these frameworks will always play catch-up and never learn the real thing (CSS, in this case).
I’ve come to accept that this is just the world of CSS. I personally love CSS and find it to be a wonderfully expressive way to do things. But it’s also very different to the way other programming languages work, so people get frustrated by it. So we have a half dozen ways of using CSS without really needing to grasp CSS.
Tailwind is one of them and much like React it’s become such an abstraction over the underlying environment that you can become completely ensconced in its world without venturing to the APIs underneath.
The thing that gets me about tailwind though is that it is just css. I still have to apply identical styles that I’d apply if using raw css but instead I have to apply it per element and learn new names.
I’m glad people like it, and we’re getting great designs out of it. I happily use it as well. I just wish I better understood why people fall in love with certain tools.
> I just wish I better understood why people fall in love with certain tools.
Love is a strong word. For me it's more pleasant to use on a small scale, as I find it helpful to avoid an external stylesheet that I constantly jump to, and which constantly grows in size. Most projects I've worked on css was an "append only language".
I also find it helpful that it's a bit more concise than standard css properties (especially when dealing with most common props, like size, padding, margins, flex), and I can use them like inline styles but with the added benefit that I can rely on media queries as well.
It removes cognitive overhead. People are getting burned out on fiddle-farting with web UIs. We need styling but it is not the main focus 99% of the time and adds very little business value.
I am looking into a non-tailwind mode too. It make sense to, as so many people don't use Tailwind, and in addition, even those who do might want to occassionally break out. Luckily I chose a name/domain name that didn't imply Tailwind only!
By the way the AI isn't because Tailwind is hard or obtuse to use. The AI is because you might need help with your design. Tailwind happens to be the output mode.
I find her tailwind incredibly difficult to use, because I know what I want to achieve in CSS, I have to constantly convert to tailwind classes. It’s effectively a new language.
Your logic is flawed.
Tailwind didn't make something so complicated that it needs an "AI".
The author decided to use Tailwind, probably because of the same reason other LLM-based code generators use it - it's verbose and close to the markup, increasing the chances of getting it right.
> What did the people at Tailwind do to create the need for an AI-assisted tool to write Tailwind classes?
I'd go the other way here.
What did they do such that it's profitable (let's suppose it is for now) to have an AI tool: tailwind goes inline in the html, getting a lot of context to the LLM is much cheaper than having a bunch of random classes floating around
We're always building abstractions on top of abstractions, that's how your whole computer works! Like, Assembly is an abstraction over binary instructions, compiled languages are an abstraction over assembly, etc, etc.
I'm toying a bit with this tool, and I think it's incredibly useful for prototyping.
Can we do a LangCSS instead but for CSS? That will help someone new to learn better; otherwise, we are building abstraction on top of an abstraction of an abstraction.
Do one for CSS, then have features to convert that to the Tailwind or FooBar Framework of the future. See, Tailwind will also eventually go away, just as Bootstrap, Foundation, or Bourbon did. Developers who depend on the tools that help them write in these frameworks will always play catch-up and never learn the real thing (CSS, in this case).