In my experience, if you're going to aggressively componentize whatever you're building (i.e. a button isn't a css class on a simple `a` tag but a distinct component that exists in it's own file somewhere) there's huge advantages to having your styling be associated directly with your components, and Tailwind is a great option (among many) for that.

If you're building something where your unit of organization looks more like a "page" than super fine grained elements, Tailwind will just make things messy and a higher-level library or writing your own CSS would be a better approach.

I don't think this changes much with AI - right now most models are not terrific at maintaining a huge degree of context in larger projects, so I could absolutely see an agent implementing CSS that works well in isolation but breaks due to the cascade. Maybe that changes in the future, but right now if anything I think Tailwind is well suited to AI because it enforces a certain locality to the changes you're making (i.e. you can reasonably assume that a `text-red-500` class on an element isn't going to break things elsewhere and wll do what it says on the box).

Yeah, Tailwind is great as long as you have some way to reuse markup, like React. You don't have to care about class names and whether CSS defined somewhere else affects styles of a current component at all. That last point makes sense for LLMs as well: all the styles that affect the current file are automatically in context since styling is local. Admittedly, there are other ways to achieve this but the ergonomics of Tailwind are just good. Having nice defaults and good training data is an added bonus.

IMO, Tailwind is just inline CSS with standardised defaults. I think it found its place because most React devs didn't want to bother with CSS

Real answer was always no.

Tailwind is just conceptually bunch of css inline styles repackaged as classes for performance boost. It was always just shifting complexity around, but offered an immediate perception of productivity gain, because you could just make a quick edit here and there.

LLMs seem to work well with tailwind which I assume is because there was a lot of tailwind in the training data. As a human I never found tailwind to be particularly easy to work with anyway (mostly because I can't be bothered to learn another CSS framework) so I was constantly checking the docs when manually writing code. But I do like the rigidity it forces, which is probably a good thing for AI coding as well.

I only do front-end dev occasionally, but these are my 3 goto articles that make me lean towards not using Tailwind:

1: https://www.zolkos.com/2025/12/03/vanilla-css-is-all-you-nee...

2: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/subgrid/

3: https://railsdesigner.com/custom-elements/ (more Rails specific)

What's "funny" is that newer/modern CSS is often very clunky to write in Tailwind, or unsupported entirely unless you build your own selectors, but AI doesn't understand those well or how broad their support is, so getting AI to write good/modern CSS outside of Tailwind is pretty difficult. I suppose someone could make a new library that is for AI tools that focuses on the latest and greatest in CSS, but there's no market for it any more because AI would just steal it and generate UIs with it.

Vanilla CSS can take advantage of features like that "cascading" part that Tailwind goes entirely against.

If you are styling a site, there's no competition at all. But if you are styling a single interaction-heavy page, it's a lot less work to put all the formatting inline instead of thinking about a descriptive structure and write your CSS around it.

Apparently a lot of people design entire sites one page at a time.

I started with a UI framework thinking I'd need it but over time I realized that I was using it exclusively for button theming and setting the default font. I was using vanilla CSS and vanilla JavaScript and after removing the framework my package sizes reflect that fact.

I used to use tailwind a lot, but AI has made it redundant largely. There's zero reason to add any library into your stack unless it has significant advantages, tailwinds advantage was largely a developer convenience, and that's not really needed anymore. You can now maintain a design system in CSS really easily and ensure your UI conforms to it using AI tools in a way that seems way more powerful than before.

Not at all, I personally never used nor plan to.

I am a big advocate of classes, not inline styles spaghetti.

The only contact I had with it was due to FE teams jumping into it, however every couple of months is something else anyway.

Believe me, I try all the time. But HTML and CSS are not made for the modern web.

Styling radio buttons, working date inputs, forms that POST automatically, typeahead and server-side validation (eg username already taken.)

You spend all your time reinventing the wheel and then it's buggy and looks like a dog. To say nothing of the inevitable poly fills and Cross-Browser issues.

This is a good discussion: do LLMs change the calculus for DRY?

A major point of components is having a single place where you can change design and behavior across your entire codebase. With LLMs you can with very good accuracy tell them to change the look of "all buttons that are confirmation buttons in modals but not in the login modal". Doesn't matter if there are 10 such buttons or 1000, it'll take a few seconds for them to accomplish it.

I'm slowly forming the opinion that nowadays having copy-and-pasted "components", with their whole HTML just repeated over and over, is now a much less worrying thing in a codebase. Even a bloated CSS can be quickly fixed by a LLM.

And like you said: you eliminate the build phase entirely and frontend development ergonomics goes back to how it was in the early 2000s.

There's never been a need to reach for tailwind. It's really a matter of preference.

Yes. Good design and a developer with good taste can make your site so much better than something mechanically excellent, but tasteless or derivative.

Writing CSS in a way that will scale up with the size of your project and team is just as hard as it's ever been, you still have to come up with a convention for doing that, including taking into account what newer features bring to the table. Having to manually edit it was never the pain point.

Short answer: no, not necessary. Long answer: https://mastrojs.github.io/blog/2025-11-27-why-not-just-use-...

Personally I still find it really helpful to have a proven framework to rely on so that I can be confident I'll have a reasonably consistent looking UI across a range of browsers, browser versions, screen sizes, and OS even versions.

I like vanilla CSS, but agents in my experience seem to deliver more uniform results when using tailwind.

Imo no

CSS is really good these days. Scope rules and the new selectors available mean you actually have to work hard to mess things up like you did in previous eras

is there a need to reach for compiled languages if you are building a new program? Won't using vanilla assembly while taking advantage of the latest instructions be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining assembly), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?

(Abstractions are still very useful to LLMs)

I believe if react had made inline styling of components less verbose then tailwind wouldn't exist

As someone that hates Tailwind, I think there is actually a use case here. If you are fluent in CSS reaching for Tailwind is probably a mistake. But for better or for worse there are lots of developers who can write HTML and JavaScript (or more likely React) who will not, and do not want to, learn CSS, for them things like Tailwind is a godsent.

I do think Tailwind is overused, but it obviously has some legitimate use case.

There’s been a lot of devs reaching for StyleX over Tailwind recently. Not sure if hype or there’s real advantages.

Tailwind is still considerably easier to work with than vanilla CSS. You just have to write less.

It still helps deduplicate.

Don't do a lot of technical work nowadays, but tailwind is still my go-to. Vanilla CSS just doesn't have nice ergonomics.

With AI I guess you could skip it, but I like to understand the code.

What do you mean by vanilla CSS?

I can't be the only one who has no idea what this means. Do you mean high-abstraction classes that are bound to the DOM arbitrarily, and are difficult to change later? We've had 25+ years to see how that doesn't scale.

Do you mean Tailwind-style functional CSS written by hand? What would be the point of that?

Without tailwind LLMs tend to use inline random colors, random sizes and radiuses. Project becomes an unmaintainable design soup really fast. Even with tailwind first priority is to define dark/light theme with semantic colors. After it's a smooth sail (sort of, routing, forms, state ownership and persistent url state are still an alien concept for clankers).

A few of my teams use tailwind. As someone who used css directly for years, this just means I have to waste time looking up the tailwind equivalent of things I know (if I’m not vibecoding). Strongly dislike it for that. But css management is really bad without it too. If I knew all the tailwindisms, it would probably be a clear winner.

If it's the case that there's almost never the need to reach for it, and I do find myself in that camp, then a harder question is begged, why is it so popular?

I think there's a lot of technologies that are in the category of categoric mistakes to use, but popular enough and inert enough that they don't get dropped. There might be lots of different explanations depending on the technology, a lot have a reason the moment they are released.

Many third party tech becomes de facto standard at some era, then those features get incorporated into more mainstream tooling like browser css, and at that point the third party tooling exists only because of inertia and adds little value, but increasing supply chain and complexity risk.

Another example on this category is Axios which was essentially a cleaner DX for XMLHTTPRequests in client side javascript before Fetch, and later a polyfill for it. Nowadays it's a blunder to include it, but it ended up in stackoverflow answers and training sets, so it's "safe" to include. Developers that are on the bleeding edge drop it, but those that are catching up and reading tutorials or classes from the previous era, or using llms, use the previous era cutting edge technique, because they aren't evaluating all the parameters of a choice, they are just going with whatever someone else is using, which causes a coalescing around certain central technologies like React, Kafka, Redis.

Regarding Redis, my understanding is that it was popular during one era where databases were used to store state because we didn't know any better and people were moving fast and breaking things, so it was developed as a sort of hack to move things from a database into memory. But nowadays people just use it wherever (because it really is the most blank microservice you can think of, you can slap it anywhere), and people implement it off the bat.

There's lots of more specific reasons why bad third party deps persist. In python there's a library called python-dotenv, which is a categorical mistake to include, but people do it because they come from Node where it is a standard practice. But there's the standard nuance that in Node, it is a built in, but in python it is a third party dependency from a random dev (no offense to the dep dev, only to the users of the dep). It literally is replaceable by calling Open(), write(), and close(), but there it is with a lot of downloads waiting for the day it is targetted and hacked to capture millions of .env files. Personally to me it would be strike 1 of 2 if someone imports it, but there you go.

Yes, there's no reason to import tailwind, it adds nothing, the idea of:

red-color { color: red}

big-text { font-size: 14px}

<p class="red-color big-text"></p>

Is as laughably low quality, the application of a technique in form but not substance, similar to Getters and setters in Java, effectively making every property of a class public, but formally implementing the private keyword and access through functions. 100% a categoric mistake to implement.

I've written elsewhere of a phenomenon where devs avoid lerning a base technology, and rather end up learning a tech on a higher abstraction that ends up being a 1-for-1 of the lower tech, but it gave them the hope that they could avoid doing that learning, and they only drop into that realization by piecemeal ala "we did it not because it was easy, but because we thought it would be easy", and the only cost is that they learned the non-portable version of that technology and now they are vendor-locked professionally into that technology so they will spread it to the next repo, company, job posting and so on.

There's analogues in biology of inert viruses or parasites that don't materially cause damages, but their lifecycle depends on the host. Although to some extent, by competing for resources they always cause SOME damage, but it is important to notice that not all viruses or damages are highly damaging, that's a rare situation of very extreme pathogens, it isn't very beneficial to kill or damage your host. In fact many may be commensal, but there is a tendency to harm.

In conclusion, I think tailwind and such pre-ai slop-deps are more popular because they are inert viral parasites rather than because they provide value.

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there's never a need to reach for tailwind, it's just a pathology some people like because someone else did the design work for them

I quite like Tailwind. I've had great experiences with it, especially on projects where the skill level of contributors was highly variable.

That said, Tailwind is not as powerful as plain old CSS. It's a bit like training wheels for CSS—you gain some guardrails and prevent newbies from messing things up too badly, but you also give up the power modern CSS affords you.

E.g. I invite you to look at some of Ahmed Shadeed's (https://ishadeed.com) layout tutorials, or whatever you find on the CSS-Tricks/Masters.dev homepage today. It's bonkers what you can do with modern CSS!

Tailwind gives you access some of what's possible with CSS today, and they keep adding support for new features, but it's impossible to express everything CSS is capable of using only utility classes. At some point, you need to write some actual real CSS code.

So personally, it's a tradeoff for me. If I really want the full power of CSS, I use plain old CSS. If I'm willing to trade power for the convenience of Tailwind's built-in design tokens and guardrails, then I pick Tailwind.

Both approaches are good and valid. The right choice is context dependent. With And with LLMs in the mix, it's not that hard to port a Tailwind codebase to plain CSS, or vice versa, so picking the wrong thing doesn't have as high a cost as it used to.