Adam Wathan the creator of Tailwind CSS posted that he had to let go of 75% (from 4 people now down to 1) of his engineering team because of AI. He said traffic to the Tailwind help documentation is down 40% and that is where most people learn about his solution and then buy commercial products. He added his revenue is down 80%.
He posted this in the Github forums where he wrote the sad story about the decline. Often, most of us think AI Search is only hurting news publishers and those who create content to drive sales. But it is also hurting software platforms that produce useful help documentation to improve the web.
Adam Wathan wrote, "the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business." "Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever," he added. He then goes on to explain that "The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework."
This is all in response to adding an LLMS.txt feature, which he can't add because his development team is now 75% smaller. "I really want to figure out a way to offer LLM-optimized docs that don't make that situation even worse (again we literally had to lay off 75% of the team yesterday), but I can't prioritize it right now unfortunately, and I'm nervous to offer them without solving that problem first," he wrote. Yea, I wouldn't spend time on LLMs.txt now...
"Tailwind is growing faster than it ever has and is bigger than it ever has been, and our revenue is down close to 80%," he added at the end.
This is just so hard to hear. One of my developers at my company told me about this and we, at RustyBrick, are big fans of Tailwind CSS.
Again, most of us don't think about how so many verticals and niches are impacted in a really bad way by AI Search - but it goes far and wide. And at the same time, searchers want short AI-generated answers, so that is what Google will give them...
Here is the post:
Here is a recording from Adam:
Audio-only here if you want to listen in your podcast player:https://t.co/IQc3Wyef4R
— Adam Wathan (@adamwathan) January 7, 2026
Forum discussion at Github.
Update: At 2pm ET, Google's AI team announced they are now a sponsor of the Tailwind project:
cc @adamwathan would love to chat about how we can do more together!
— Logan Kilpatrick (@OfficialLoganK) January 8, 2026
Overwhelmed by the support over the last 24 hours, not something I was looking for and expecting when I recorded that podcast on a whim. Thanks so much to everyone with words of encouragement, the new sponsors we've brought on, and people who've used their platforms to help in…
— Adam Wathan (@adamwathan) January 8, 2026
Update 2: While Adam did not specifically say the traffic drop is from Google Search, I have to assume that to be the case. What other source of traffic can have such a devastating impact on a company? AI Overviews have shown, despite what Google has said, to hurt traffic to many publishers. I reached out to Adam to confirm this was specific with Google Search and not just AI built into coding platforms. I also replaced "Google" with "AI" in the headline of this story.
