Adam is simply trying to navigate this new reality, and he's being honest, so there's no need to criticize him.
Sucks that anytime you ask AI to generate a site for you Tailwind will have an impact on that.
We thought it would give us freedom, but all of the advantage will accrue to the hyperscalers.
If we don't build open source infra that is owned by everyone, we'll be owned by industrial giants and left with a thin crust that is barely ours. (This seems like such a far-fetched "Kumbaya, My Lord" type of wishful thinking, that it's a joke that I'm even suggesting this is possible.)
Tech is about to cease being ours.
I really like AI models, but I hate monopolies. Especially ones that treat us like cattle and depopulate the last vestiges of ownership and public commons.
But there was money to be made and the friends you thought were friends were just mercenaries with a shiv in their hand.
You can be and I am sympathetic towards the CEO! I wouldn't accept a PR for cannibalize_my_revenue.txt either. But if we insist on analyzing the issue according to the categories you're describing, it seems undeniable that the CEO is a corporatist, and that he put an unfree license on his repository to stop people from freely modifying or redistributing it.
If we didn't have open source arguably developers would be more secure, way more secure, in the face of AI.
There's no such thing. Even if on paper "everyone" has an ownership share, in practice it's going to be a relatively small number of people who actually exercise all the functions of ownership. The idea that "everyone" can somehow collectively "own" anything is a pipe dream. Ownership in practice is control--whoever controls it owns it. "Everyone" can't control anything.
> I really like AI models, but I hate monopolies. Especially ones that treat us like cattle and depopulate the last vestiges of ownership and public commons.
I would dispute whether the tech giants are "monopolies", since there's still competition between them, but that's a minor point. I agree with you that they treat individual coders like cattle--but that's because they can: because, from their standpoint, individual coders are commodities. And if automated tools, including AI models, are cheaper commodities that, from their standpoint, can do the same job, that's what they'll use. And if the end result is that whatever they're selling as end products becomes cheaper for the same functionality, then economically speaking, that's an improvement--we as coders might not like it, but we as customers are better off because things we want are cheaper.
So I'm not sure it's a consistent position to "really like AI models" but also not want the tech giants to treat you like cattle. The two things go together.
Why privilege that side of the equation over "we as workers"? Being a customer isn't all there is to life. I happen to spend quite a bit more time working than shopping.
It's not a matter of "privilege". It's simple economics: if the same functionality can be provided more cheaply, that's a gain to everyone. The gain to customers is the most obvious gain, and it's what I focused on in my previous post--but it's also a gain to producers, because it frees up resources to produce other things of value. But the producers have to be willing to change how they make use of resources in order to take advantage of those opportunities.
> I happen to spend quite a bit more time working than shopping.
Then you should be a lot more worried about AI providing the same functionality you were providing as a coder, but more cheaply--because that makes you, or at least you as a coder providing that functionality, a commodity that's no longer worth its cost. So if you want to avoid being commoditized and treated like cattle, you have to change what you produce to something that AI can't do more cheaply than you can.
Don't FOSS by default, unionize, embrace solidarity, and form worker-owned co-ops that aren't run by craven/unrealistic/non-business founders if you want any sort of stability.
According to fair use doctrine, research models would be okay. Models used in education would be okay. Models used for public betterment by the government would be okay, etc
Pie in the sky version would be that models, their output and the infrastructure they run on would be held in a public trust for everyone's benefit. They wouldn't exist without consuming all of the public's intellectual and creative labor and property, therefore they should belong to the public, for the public.
> Tech is about to cease being ours.
On the hardware side, it's bad, as well. Remote attestation is here, and the frog is just about boiled when it comes to the idea of a somewhat open and compatible PC as the platform for general computing.
It was kinda cool while it lasted, glad I got to see the early internet, but it wasn't worth it to basically sign away for my great grandchildren to be peasants or belong to some rich kid's harem.
I fail to see how open source is being "turned against" anyone here.
> we'll be owned by industrial giants
...or how anyone is being "owned by" industrial giants in any way relevant to open source.
> Tech is about to cease being ours.
This doesn't mean anything.
You're just ranting.
Reminds me of the problem with Google & their rich results which wiped out and continues to wipe out blogs who rely on people actually visiting their site vs. getting the information they seek without leaving Google.
AI eats up users caring about $company which makes library, library degrades because nobody is paying, $company goes insolvent, library goes unmaintained and eventually defunct, AI still tries to use it.
Vibe coding with libraries is a fad that is destined to die.
Vibe coding your own libraries will result in million line codebases nobody understands.
Nothing about either is sustainable, it’s all optics and optics will come crashing down eventually.
Given that countries/cities can go into this state for a very long time without resolution, I am not quite optimistic.
AI is destined to destroy software industry, but not itself.
Software does not decay by itself (it's literally the whole point of using digital media over analog). Libraries do not "degrade". "Bit rot" is an illusion, a fictitious force like centrifugal force in Newtonian dynamics, representing changes that happen not to a program, but to everything else around it.
The current degree of churn in webshit ecosystem (whose anti-patterns are increasingly seeping in and infecting other software ecosystems) is not a natural state of things. Reducing churn won't kill existing software - on the contrary, it'll just let it continue to work without changes.
I hear you about damning shitty code which the web industry as a whole is quite responsible for, but I don't see how them dying outright is better.
Your original point was that libraries do not need companies behind them. From what you have written here a reason for that is that (web) libraries mostly create churn by introducing constant changes. What I think you follow from that, is that those libraries aren't necessary and that "freezing" everything would not do any harm to the state of web development but would do good by decreasing churn of constantly updating to the newest state.
What I struggle to understand is (1) how does AI fit into this? And (2) Why do you think there is so much development happening in that space creating all the churn you mention? At this point in time all of this development is still mostly created by humans which are likely paid for what they do. Who pays them and why?
But after just months of being unmaintained, even the best libraries start to rot away due to bugs and vulnerabilities going unfixed. Users, AI included, will start applying workarounds and mitigations, and the rot spreads to the applications (or libraries) they maintain.
Unmaintained software is entropy, and entropy is infectious. Eventually, entire ecosystems will succumb to it, even if some life forms continue living in the hazardous wasteland.
Bit rot isn’t some mystical decay, it’s dependency drift: APIs change, platforms evolve, security assumptions expire, build chains break. Software survives because people continuously adapt it to a moving substrate.
Reducing churn is good. Pretending maintenance disappears is fantasy. Software doesn’t decay in isolation, it decays relative to everything it depends on. And it sounds like you don’t know anything about Newtonian dynamics either.
1. Plant new trees,
2. Eat fruit from trees, get used to delicious fruit,
3. Planting trees hard, easier to wring out more juice from existing fruit,
4. Forget how to maintain trees, trees die, go to 1.
We are entering stage 3.
There are people who will use AI (out of their own pocket for trivial costs) to build a library and maintain it simply out of the passion, ego, and perhaps some technical clout.
That's the same with OSS libraries in-general. Some are maintained at-cost, others are run like a business where the founders try to break even.
I don’t understand how someone can display such contempt towards the maintainer of a thing they’ve used for free.
You can block accounts on GitHub and add a note as to why. Might be simpler and more accessible later on than a random TXT (plus, it probably updates if they change their username).
Note that blocking also means they can’t contribute to your repos. Which you may not care about anyway.
Pull up a chair. This is going to take while...
Well, Microsoft is vile. I won’t expand because there’s plenty online on the topic. And I don’t like their acquisition of GitHub, which has turned into an ecosystem for laundering open-source code through LLMs.
Left are the three owners of tailwind, one engineer and one ops+customer service + partner sails person.
Who trusted you with hiring
I thought we learned years ago that exposure doesn't keep the lights on. That mentality is nothing but entitlement
One comment stated that "it's not our fault the founder was unable to manage his finances to pay his people" well if open source worked the way people try to act like it does, he shouldn't have to pay anyone, right? But here we are
I sympathise that it sucks having to fire people, been there. But it sucks more to get fired.
I am not seeing that. I have a few AI-assisted projects using tailwind and scrolling through it now 99% of it looks... completely modern and professional. I had previously asked it to "completely refactor, a rewrite if needed, all the tailwind/css/app styles. ensure visual and code consistency across pages".
Modern coding tools add tons of their own content, but none of the above was "a lot of context engineering".
And it looks completely the same, so much so that people can tell it's AI generated now simply due to the gradient, among other design choices LLMs seem to make by default: https://prg.sh/ramblings/Why-Your-AI-Keeps-Building-the-Same...
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...
The way you write websites that actually work imo, is you understand how your chosen CSS layout engine works roughly, and try to avoid switching between layout modes - traditional to flexbox to grid to flexbox again down the tree can drive the most brillant devs utterly mad .
But seriously, after a certain complexity threshold, it becomes impossible to tell what's going on and why.
And if you don't think about it in advance, it's very easy to reach that threshold, especially if you don't get to write the whole page from scratch, but have to build on the work of others.
AI (and many frontend devs) do write-only CSS - they add classes until the code they write looks right.
But code like that tends to fall apart under multiple resolutions, browsers, screen sizes, devices etc.
I am not a frontend dev, and came pretty late to the frontend party. That said I felt that anything that obscures the raw CSS makes it much harder to deliver UI that works right, as it peppers hidden side effects across your code.
That's why I wasn't too keen on CSS frameworks like Tailwind - I found that when writing frontend code the writing part takes up the minority of the time, it's producing a well thought out layout flow is what is actually the biggest sink of time and effort.
That said, I'm not a frontend dev, and I'm to too good at CSS - but not horrible either - so I defer to the judgement of others who are pros at this, its just my opinion and experience.
Funny, this also qualifies most of the _human_ written CSS I've seen. !important all the things!
Whats the 2026 version of "you should learn to code"?
Nah man, this stuff isn't happening anywhere else. We can simply say "No, you don't get to ruin the economy for your personal profit."
I don't really have sympathy for people attached to their careers. They did that to themselves.
what actually happened was that he sat around purposeless because it turns out that the motivation of producing a paycheck or product was actually the reason he did things. He stopped showering, became depressed, and neglected his health.
And this isn't an uncommon reaction to the open-ended 'free-form' life post-retirement. Some people very realistically need to have some level of structure imposed on their life or otherwise be taught how to create that structure themselves. I think this will be a very real problem whenever UBI gets closer to reality.
But chin up, peasant, each and every one of us can dream of one day being a billionaire as well if only we act as wise and as kind as they do.
(I know this was written satirically) but this is a nice example of doublespeak and I immediately got reminded of it.
I wouldn't say that we have reached 1984 level, there is still some decentralization where you can get hosting and then self host from small vps providers as well etc.
Not that most people do such things tho. Internet is still heavily centralized but overall, there are still outlets of escape legally and you are able to sometimes even talk to vps provider owners themselves directly in some cases if they are small enough.
But still, each year although we get away from 1984 the year, we get near to 1984 the book.
This makes me happy that I'm nearing retirement but that switch flipping is being delayed by my hourly rate going up for possessing forgotten knowledge. Sigh...
If we are to just have UBI. Have basic sustenance for no effort, while we have unlimited entertainment and porn at our finger tips. It would be a disaster. I would literally we rather have make work programs.
The problem is you don't understand how terrible life on earth is currently for the majority of people, you are coddled.
displaced factory workers mostly drift into janitorial or cab driving sorts of work. Why would it be different for other sorts of workers?
The rest of us will struggle without your help because that's what we been doing. We are literally struggling to fulfill our purposes because we have jobs.
The industry wanted all of that and did not get its way after some time. You can ban "AI", make companies respect copyright. You can do all sorts of things.
Since "AI" can only plagiarize, countries that do the above will have an edge (I'm not talking about military applications that can still be allowed or should be regulated like in treaties for nuclear weapons).
Then use it to pay for services like healthcare and education so that everyone has a safety net and opportunity to thrive without just giving everyone enough cash so that they are incentivized to slack.
It feels like UBI is (at best) likely to become as complicated and corrupt as our tax system already is.
I suggest and ask for nothing but consistency, irrespective of if you like or dislike the people who are affected.
> It is "progress" when class traitors displace labor, but it is "heartbreaking" when a class traitor gets displaced by other class traitors.
it becomes clear that the original comment was a pointless strawman of a position that nobody holds. A class traitor wouldn't be expressing sympathy about displacement in the first place. It only seemed to make sense because, when you say "tech bro", people superimpose the general category of technologists who think they can make the world better on top of one specific stereotypical guy who believes all the worst things they've ever heard a technologist say.
I would love to be proven wrong, truly, because this is a path to the death of craftsmanship, deep knowledge, and to some extent, curiosity, in the domain.
The sell out is the biggest fundamental issue in this equation because it is the part of the equation which doesn't reward Quality,ethics,sustainability and engineering rigor overall.
Welcome to the AI bubble fueling it.
I genuinely don't know but I think AI prototyping/using it for personal use cases are fine but when we completely start to vibecode, if your project is complex enough, you will reach problems and all the other factors/researches point out. In my opinion, for longevity, vibecoding is not the deal.
But as you said, longevity isnt rewarded. I really hate how the system has become of just selling businesses.
I feel like as such the businesses who are truly passionate about their product (because they faced the problems themselves or are heavily interested in it/passionate about it) might win "long term"
To me trust feels the biggest resource in this day and age. Information era has now been sloppified. Trust is what matters now.
I don't know but I will take the slow but overall steady route. There is a sense of commitment with human trust which I feel would set apart businesses and I will try to create side projects with that initiative
One of the ways I feel like acheiving it while still getting the shipfast aspect is that I just build things for myself, vibe coding in this case can help and I launch it for public, if there is interest in any product or smth, I will try to respond and try to add feedbacks fast (perhaps still using vibecoding) but in long term, I try to promise to keep the code lean (usually approx 2-3k lines of code at max) and then if I see prospect and interest about the idea, I have tried to think that a middle way is either rewriting or completely understanding AI generated code to its core and having a very restrictive AI access afterwards any product feels good and then the trust aspect of things can be gained.
I don't know too much about side hustles. I just build things for myself in whatever I want mostly I must admit using vibe code and end up usually sharing it online/deploying it for others as well if it might help.
I don't know why people keep saying this, as if quality, ethics and sustainability mattered before and every developer was a pure artisan of their craft. In reality, having been in many companies and looking at their codebases, it has always been slop, with very few exceptions.
Elderly care.
Just posting the "75%" without context is a bit of an odd choice. He explains why in the podcast, but it still feels like he should have specified immediately to avoid assumptions about scale.
oh, come the fuck on. it's "AI made us do it" drivel that companies began to justify layoffs with in 2023 (!!!).
Tailwind is just another FOTM frontend thing. I saw dozens of them come, gain some popularity, then abruptly disappear once the marketing budget ran out.
I understand, they have UI kits, books, etc. but just fundamentally, it was never going to be easy to monetize around that long term, with or without AI.