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Comment by aurareturn | Hacker News Reader

I think maybe they should have kept building Tailwinds CSS, release new versions, then charge a subscription to teams for their agents to access latest changes in their documents.

In other words, the documents for the latest versions are hidden behind a pay wall.

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That's one way to ensure Tailwind v4 remains forever the only version anyone uses. Agents already are not very responsive to framework changes.

That's ok. Teams who pay can use the new versions.

And the AIs they use would have no inherent training on those new versions.

While everyone else migrates to something else because v4 eventually becomes legacy and the only way to get modern features is to use something open and available. Charging for access to new versions only gives you short-term runway at the expense of giving your entire user base a very good reason to leave.

If people can't get paid to pay their rent and eat to write and support code, how is it relevant what the consumers of the code freeriding get? If the AI machine requires ongoing fuel to improve, they can pay for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem

They don't get paid to write more of it, but maybe we had enough tailwind and invisible boot of market is giving those people a gentle kick to force them to do something else.

If you release new versions without documentation it's easy for agents to generate that missing documentation.

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