Yeah, I’mma call bullshit on this. No sane boss refers to 3 out of a team of 4 as “75%”. Also, everything in the article sounds like a marketing person looking for excuses for his business not working out.
I think 75% is apt here, tailwind is incredibly popular and most people wouldn’t know how many engineers they have. If it said “tailwind let 3 people go” I bet most (including me) would assume alright… tailwinds big they may have 30-50 people around… 3 is not too bad right?
I also disagree with this being entirely bullshit, I think he is right that the impact of AI has made the situation worse for him by impacting his most valuable sales funnel (their own documentation pages). But separately, it is a very populated space (UI libraries) with multiple options to compete with, some of which are rather well established and free - so it was an uphill battle to begin with.
What would be wrong with saying “3 of their 4 engineers”?
Nothing, if that was your point then I misunderstood what you were suggesting - also perfectly valid.
People who are discounting this because the project maintainer used sensational phrasing (75%) or because he was monetizing open source are ignoring the important part:
Traffic is down 40%
This is really bad news. All open source projects need attention in order to succeed.
“Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI
The real threat isn’t AI using open knowledge — it’s AI companies killing the projects that make knowledge free
https://www.citationneeded.news/free-and-open-access-in-the-age-of-generative-ai/
This headline keeps being repeated by this one for profit CEO. Have you looked at the business model being “disrupted”? It’s ads and upsells for premade CSS widgets.
One extremely loud developer has claimed repeatedly that their project’s recent difficulties are due to AI
OK
I’m seeing it quite a lot on mastodon where maintainers from big projects, like even curl, are expressing their grief and annoyance with ai generated bug reports wasting their time and overwhelming them. I don’t think it’s an isolated incident.
That’s completely different though. I’ve seen (legitimate) complaints that AI-generated reports are popping up and swamping projects while adding little to no value, but that’s not killing the projects. This article is solely about Tailwind, where the developer asserts that LLMs are responsible for people no longer reading the project’s documentation, which then is where the project directs users to its paid tiers and so (they allege) the project is suffering an unsustainable drop in subscriptions.
A project’s premium subscriptions drying up is different from a project’s developers being hit with time-wasting bug reports.
One can only be happy for those three lucky ones who no longer have to do those stupid monkey jobs at tailwind.
deleted by creator
