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Comment by benatkin | Hacker News Reader

The video had pretty high production value.

I think I'm still a fan of Adam Wathan. It seems like it would have been so easy for him to credit Windi CSS, and it would have made it an all around great video to me. I don't understand why he didn't do it. Perhaps if I had done it I would have talked about Windi CSS for five minutes and it would have distracted from the point of the video. Maybe even talking about it for five seconds would have distracted from the point of the video?

FAAMG companies also don't credit people for making bits and pieces of things they release, even when they directly use them to deliver a key feature. In this case he didn't use WindiCSS' code at all, and it seems like they probably wouldn't have needed to because they no doubt took a different approach. Maybe Adam Wathan is a bit like Steve Jobs.

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It sounds like the crux of the issue is found in this tweet (mentioned in the blogpost):

> I remember the day when Windi got blown up on Twitter, @adamwathan called me and asked me about how Windi CSS works and he is happy to make it official. And yeah, I was excited to see things are improving for the whole community, so I shared all I know with him. [1]

Speculating, but this sounds like Anthony Fu lost his trust in Adam Wathan after their personal one-on-one conversation about how the Windi CSS technology works, then failing to mention it subsequently.

As also mentioned in the blogpost, Adam did end up mentioning Windi CSS in a tweet, only after the pushback from Anthony's original tweet. [2]

[1] https://twitter.com/antfu7/status/1371538602488786945

[2] https://twitter.com/adamwathan/status/1371542711086559237?s=...

Yeah. Perhaps it was a simplistic explanation and Adam Wathan got bored and went on to working on it on a brand new implementation. I would have a hard time making an implementation of something like that sound impressive. I imagine @adamwathan meets a lot of people, some of whom he continues collaborating with, and some who he doesn't.

He also had a similar issue w/ Heroicons, which are icons from Tailwind. Someone made heroicons.dev which shows a filterable list of them, and later Tailwind made one and put it on heroicons.com which also has a very similar looking filterable list of them.

Again it was an idea that could be explained in its entirety in under a minute.

But what does "he is happy to make it official" mean? Make what official?

Maybe it was an invitation to get involved with the tailwind project, and if he did maybe WindiCSS could have rebranded and become the Tailwind JIT and the authors would be credited as contributors - not featured as prominently as Adam and his company but still known within the community.

So it wasn't make explicit, but I assume this offer was turned down.

I wonder when Fu says:

  Windi pushed Tailwind to make the JIT

If that relates to this?

Did tailwind use windi's implementation in a significant way?

> In this case he didn't use WindiCSS' code at all, and it seems like they probably wouldn't have needed to because they no doubt took a different approach.

No.

> didn't use

> it seems like they probably wouldn't have needed to

> they no doubt took

I'm getting conflicting signals here. Could you edit your posts to remove the words referring to probability and impressions since you know for a fact what happened?

No. I am just speaking from personal experience. It makes zero sense for Tailwind to copy and paste from another project, built by a different team to different coding standards, and end up with a different result (Tailwind JIT is faster and less production tested than Windi CSS). Even if they did, I don't think they would lie about it.

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