If you can find a way to do it better or cheaper you’re welcome to try. No one else has. Don’t think it’s a small problem. The number of user agents and platforms supported by Tailwind would melt plenty of larger organizations.
As CSS is limited in scope, ultra-well defined, testable and declarative, this should be a home run for LLMs.
Now, LLMs have all but killed that side of their business. The latest models are incredibly good at writing Tailwind, to the point where no one is buying the pre-builts.
Or at least in my experience this is where they need most human guidance. They can take screenshots and study those, but I’m not sure how well they can spot when things are a bit off.
Are we talking about the same CSS?
> We're not going back to writing hand-crafted CSS with or without LLMs.
There are still a lot of developers who loathe using Tailwind and avoid touching it like the plague. Handwritten CSS still offers more opportunities for optimization and keeps your markup much cleaner than spamming utility classes everywhere (I understand the appeal of rapidly iterating with it, though).
I spent a decent amount of time working in marketing and ad agencies, and there are absolutely still needs for custom CSS in that area, so I agree.
I was more pushing back against the idea that Tailwind will be replaced by vanilla CSS because of LLMs.
Models work in contexts. If my context is "my entire app's styling", then it's going to be really difficult to write styles in line unless it's already pretty perfect.
Tailwind doesn't have that problem. It's local. I can define a single theme and KNOW FOR A FACT how something will look before it even touches my code. That's the beauty of utility-like libraries.
I stopped working in marketing and advertising (which DID need custom styles), and went to strictly app dev where my needs completely changed.