"I've changed my mind on AI coding" – Adam Wathan (creator of Tailwind)

Adam, is there other ways you're using it? This is actually the first time I've heard you talk about using AI at all. I didn't know if you were for it or against it. I used to be more skeptical than I am now. And I think the thing for me is I was seeing everyone talk about like one shotting things and like vibe coding things. And to me that feels like bullshit and it's just not.

not interesting to me it felt like okay i like programming like why would i want to not program um but when especially when the agent mode stuff came out i think i started to see how it's more useful because I forced myself to download cursor and just try to basically build an entire project.

uh which was like this this uh course platform template that we released not too long ago yeah it's just like an xjs website that's like pretty dynamic and does a bunch of different things and i just forced myself to build the entire thing uh without typing any code and just making the computer type the code for me just to really like throw myself in the deep end and learn like okay uh you know because in my head i was like okay well if i have to tell it exactly what to do isn't it just faster

to do it myself and turns out no it's still not faster to do it yourself like just the fact that it can it can build multiple files. Yeah. And you can, what it feels like is it feels like having your feet up on the desk pair programming with someone next to you that you can just like talk to like a human being that understands what you want them to do and they do it, you know? Yeah.

And also, a lot of the skeptics will say, oh, but it's just going to spit back code slop that I can't use. Yeah, then you're not being specific enough with what you're asking it to do. So did you have to babysit it at all? Yeah, like extremely, honestly, but it's still faster, you know? You're still approving every page and every change.

experienced developers can read the code that it spits back and you can improve it. But the other thing is that like, this stuff is improving so fast. I mean, I'm using, today I'm using mostly Claude. sonnet 4 even 3.7 was so much better than the models from like six months ago like it's it's not only better at like just programming and just knowing the Rails conventions and everything. It's also better at reading my project. When it generates new code, it first...

reads my code base and understands how I've implemented certain features in other areas and then implements based on that. It is really good at adapting. And then... you can take it to the next level like you can have like a day one with cursor like just fresh install cursor try it out but once you're using it for six 12 months now you're getting into like cursor rules yeah now yeah i started doing that on the very first day basically anytime I found myself correcting something

that it did i added it to a rules file to make sure i never had to ask it to do that again so just like little opinions in like our tailwind projects if it used like a bottom margin i always use top margins instead so add it to the rules file don't use bottom margins unless you're doing this or when i ask you to like like a common thing that I need to do like a workflow so I guess like here's the other thing that I kind of

became acutely aware of when I started using these workflows is just like how much of the program I do is not programming. It's just like grunt work. It's like 90% grunt work. So Steve has an icon in Figma. I need to take that icon. Bring it into my...

I need to optimize the SVG so it's not big. I need to convert it into a React component. I need to add props to it so that I can add classes to it when I'm using it. And the workflow for me has always been right-click in Figma, go to this tool, svgomg.com, paste it into the thing.

copy the thing out of that, go to transform.tools, paste it in to the HTML to JSX converter, copy the JSX out of that, create a new file in VS Code. paste it in, name the file, whatever. Now it's just like in the cursor chat, I just say like, add this icon to my project, paste the SVG code directly from Figma. And because I've told it, anytime I paste in an SVG, please optimize it.

Please name the component files using this convention. Make sure they always have these props. And now it's just a one-sentence thing. And I wasn't getting any mental stimulation out of those steps that I was doing before. No, it's all grunt work. To me, the real unlock has been realizing that this actually lets me program more, not less. We should be spending our mental cycles on

design, designing the structure, the architecture, the user experience. And our skills as experienced Tollstack designers, developers, is now to... direct ai to carry out our design you know um and we are still in touch with the code base we can still craft it however we want to and we can craft cursor to build yeah in the way that we want to um but we That's where that's why I actually believe that the more experienced you are in this industry, the.

the better you are in this new I've tried to use it with like things I don't know how to do and it's a fucking disaster like I was trying to like prototype like a Swift UI app the other day which I've never done in my life and you instantly fall into that

crap of like AI being like confidently wrong, but you can't tell because you don't know how to do it yourself. But when you're, so I've, until like i really this really clicked for me i always kind of thought the idea with ai was like okay this is gonna like let me do stuff i didn't know how to do before like total opposite way to think about it it's like this is

keyboard shortcuts on steroids for the things I'm an expert in you know it's like when I started using sublime text and I had multiple cursors and all this stuff and it's like I can just take like what my brain wants to put on the screen and make it appear faster like that's what my relationship is with ai too yeah wow for for people building new stuff though i i do think that there's an element of like

Now that I build with AI, I can be more ambitious about the types of things that I build. I actually think that instrumental components in the way that I built it and the extensive functionality that's built into it would not. Definitely would not have happened without this style of building or I would have built a much simpler. Yeah, I found it useful to separate those two things, though, like the using AI to learn and using AI.

to code as like very discrete tasks. Like I've never had success trying to learn, get cursor to do something. i don't know how to do like i just i get bad results with bugs that i don't understand how to fix but if i go into chat gpt and like i'm trying to do this what's the right way to think about this what happens if i do this like it's the perfect

Thing to just like ask dumb questions to you know what I mean? I've been doing that pattern where I I go to chat GPT Which the nice thing about chat GPT is that it has the memory built in like it has all my past chat So it knows a lot about me and my preferences So I use that as like my strategist that where I bounce ideas and like, how would I go? How would I architect this? Yeah. But like, like that, like, so I'll get the approach there.

and then i might i might also double check in claude like are you are you suggesting the same concept or are there differences and then when i'm actually like ready to build i come into cursor and like all right now let's do it yeah is it similar for you adam you've got cursor for coding stuff and then chat gpt for the

learning stuff yeah yeah right now although i do want to try some other stuff a lot of people on our team are using clawed code and liking that a lot i've heard a lot of people have been having better results with that and cursor and candidly kind of like appeals to my sensibilities as

You know, it's like a terminal based thing. And I kind of like that it's separate from the editor. There's something about cursor. Maybe it's just I haven't spent enough time configuring it where it's just like there's six pop ups at the same time. And I don't know which one hitting tab is going to actually autocomplete. or there's just all these competing completions and AI helpfulness going on that it feels a bit noisy. I actually don't use the inline pop-up things that you see.

that overlay the the current file i'm all about the chat sidebar yeah you know interesting i also think that that is a pattern that is going to become super common across all apps right so everything every app needs to have a chat now And they are, right? Every single one needs to have one. Descript now has a cursor-like, I think they call it Underlord. Wait, are they good? Are these sidebar chat?

AI chat thing's good. I played with the Descript one yesterday and it's not great yet. And Figma is now launching their chat. I haven't tried the one in Figma, but me and Steve always talk about this with Figma. Do you remember when Figma announced their first like AI stuff? It was like at their Figma config last year. It was all like press.

a button and get like a mock-up of like your ui and all the designers like revolted against them which to me totally makes sense because when i'm working with steve in figma The opportunities to use AI, which I think maybe it does a better job at now. I haven't looked into it. But the obvious opportunities to use AI is just when Steve is doing tedious shit that he shouldn't have to do. So it's like, okay, I just designed this like sidebar thing and I've got like...

three of these links and now i just want like seven more of them and like you can do it pretty quickly copy and pasting stuff whatever but now you want to put sample content in there you know it'd be nice if it just did all that for you like we with the template that we were working on

I'm working on like a course platform thing. So I'm coming up with like a fake course and we come up with a concept for the course. And then I can just say, add like three more course modules with about five lessons each that like continue.

with the same sort of theme and the same sense of humor and it just boom you know that would have taken like so much brain power before you know adam for you i'm just trying to think how do you think

This is going to affect your business. Yeah, I think it already is. You know, there's a lot of like V0, you know, as a competitor with our business at the end of the day. but yeah, I'm not sure. Like, I think we've been seeing effects of it for like a long time already. Um, there's a lot of things that do make me like nervous that people want like LLM.

dot txt versions of our documentation right and i'm like hesitant to do that because our business depends on traffic to the website where people are going to be noticed that there's products for sale you know yeah and if everyone is just looking at a markdown file that's pure documentation with no ability for us to like advertise that lives in their editor you know then we have no distribution anymore yeah

Yeah. I'm not sure what my takeaways are from that really, or my conclusion from it. I think one thing is that I think it's going to be more important than ever to have like an audience. Yeah, that is like the conclusion that I keep coming back to is like if it's zero, if traffic, if organic traffic from search is on the decline, the answer to that is.

personal influence yeah yeah and then yeah and then the other thing for for us is just to i don't know like i think if you're building a tool that costs money and it solves a problem then you are still confined customers. You know what I mean? And I guess that's like still true for... us regardless although like we are like competing with ai in a lot of ways although i've become a little bit more optimistic about it over the past few days because i do kind of think like there's a uh

There is something to the experience of like browsing curated designs on like Tailwind UI that is easier than blank canvas trying to get AI to do something nice when maybe like you don't even really know what you want.

So we've been thinking about how can we leverage AI to just produce more stuff that has our fingerprint on it. Yeah, but directed by you and Steve. Yeah, exactly. It's like the thing that comes to mind now is like, yeah, you're saying things that like... like v v zero or our competitors but like it's also like everything is using tailwind now yeah and it's frustrating because everything on earth is using tailwind and there's like nothing we can do to benefit from it it's purely uh a burden

in a lot of ways you know it's just like i have like over a million dollars in salary obligations that pay people just to fix bugs in a free tool yeah people don't pay me back for you know what i mean yeah yeah

Yeah. So it's kind of brutal. Like I'm, I'm very ready for like my next act in a lot of ways, honestly, you know, like I, um, We're working on adding support to Tailwind UI or Tailwind Plus as it is now for... um like adding javascript support to the vanilla html stuff which we never had before yeah in the past i would it would have been obvious to do that as like an open source library and like

I don't think we're going to do that this time. I think it's just going to be part of the commercial product and you have to have a license to use the JavaScript because what is the incentive to make it free just so that somebody else can go and use it to build a tool that like competes with ours without having to do any of the work to maintain that.

torturous like hard to maintain javascript library yeah yeah we're still bullish on doing that stuff like the next i'm right now i'm working on like a tailwind course like an official paid tailwind course that you know we're the the, you know, unique value proposition is like, it's taught by me, you know? So if you want to know how I do things like this is where you're going to learn how to do that. And it's a nice thing that we can sell to our existing.

customers because it's a separate product and it sits on the same site that still gets like 10 million visits a month or whatever um so you know that's a good idea i think that makes total sense And then on the side, me and Steve are designing video editing software right now because that's a pain point that we have when we make this content. No way. I'm getting pretty excited about that. Talk about something that's outside of your normal...

Like what you know, you must be having to learn a lot there. Technology-wise, yes. But it's kind of funny because it's a very full circle moment for me because... When I was in college and committing to becoming a professional programmer, I went in.

with like the thing I want to be able to do is build my own like audio editing tool to use instead of Pro Tools or Logic or whatever. Cause I just have so many workflow opinions about all this stuff. Cause that's what I was doing before is recording bands for a living. And I, There's just so many things that could have been like faster, you know?

And Steve has the same background, like he went to school for audio engineering. So it's fun to be like, ah. I got a degree in that too. And we all ended up being like web developers. So to get into like, yeah, designing like software for compositing video tracks.

and doing edits. I do want to hear about that. I go back and forth between ScreenFlow, Descript, and a little bit of ScreenStudio whenever I'm doing videos. And I'm just always on the lookout for like... how can i remove the grunt work yeah like how can i just get everything except the good takes which is always the last and you can tell and describe has that yeah i've seen descript has that feature but it like only works like 80 of the time yeah yeah and even like cap

Like, do you remember, like, Justin? I mean, both of you guys will remember this, but, like... There was a time back in like 2015 where like we all felt guilty about our podcasts not having transcriptions and we were all debating what service, we're asking people at MicroConf, like who do you pay to like transcribe your podcast and what's their turnaround time?

and whatever like that is such like ancient history like that whole idea it's just like an instant free thing that's perfect now you know yeah i just did a voice note an hour ago and it like my iphone transcribed it yeah it's insane um

Yeah. Okay. So here's to wrap this up. I'm hearing some things. AI is cool. Like AI. Threatened by AI. Empowered by AI. We're really just trying to lay the groundwork so that when the LLMs read the transcript of this episode, we're on their good side. Everybody's grappling with this in real time. It's clearly... paradigm shifting it's clearly like the tectonic plates of the industry are moving everyone's trying to figure it out

The other thread I'm getting, and this has come up before, but Adam's working on this new video editor. It feels like looking at what AI could enable for your team for... you know as a as a another bat during this time is another thing that's happening like people are saying okay well what can we chew what can we take our unique expertise in

into that we wouldn't normally be able to do and start building some shit that might be the next act of our stuff, you know? Yeah, I think the important thing is just do stuff.

Yeah. Make sure you're not being, uh, not swimming like, yeah, up against the current. You know what I mean? Like. Make sure you're informed before you take that stance or you're going to find yourself a little behind the curve, I think. And I think the best way to learn the AI stuff, like I really... learned a lot very quickly by just like doing that one project where i just didn't let myself write any code yeah and um

I don't think that should be the goal. Again, to me, I like writing code. I think a lot of the criticism that you hear, a lot of the concern that you hear from developers, like, well, I don't want to be a full-time code reviewer. That's the part of my job I hate the most. Why would I design things in a way?

way um to be doing that all the time but it's up to you like how you use it that's one way to do it you can have things like asynchronously submitting prs for you and reviewing those prs and stuff like that but that's not

how it feels when i use it it just feels like it's doing what i tell it to do and i see exactly on the screen what i expect to see you know i'm not really like reviewing the approach i'm giving it the approach and it's just producing the characters like you know the the creativity and the craft that that happens up front yeah in at the prompting stage but even before that it's like the

like the prd like the project plan stage like that's where we as the experience like look this is how this is what we need to build because this is what we want to deliver for customers like that's where all the creativity is happening yeah um Yeah, it's cool, man. I feel like I could talk about it a long time. Did you have one more thing you were going to say, Adam, before we close here? Yeah, there's two things I'll say quickly. On the vibe coding thing, I am...

Not interested in that for professional work, but it is extremely cool that you can build custom tools for yourself to solve little problems extremely quickly. I built like a workout tracking thing for myself just so that like...

it would tell me like what plates to put on the bar and like what my next set would be and calculate a couple things and stuff like that. And that I entirely, I've never read the code. I just told it to make it for me and just gave it feedback based on the UI. And I don't care because I don't care if it has.

bugs that would be security issues or it's just like a private tool for me that I was never going to build. But now that I can just ask the computer to do it and it magically does it, now I have it and it exists. I did the same thing for like a...

an interval timer so when i'm doing things in like the gym and i just wanted an app that would just beep every 15 seconds so i knew to like switch movements and i couldn't find one on the app store but like AI built it for me in two seconds. So that's cool. Yeah. Another thing I'm excited about that I'm just like starting to get into now is just building custom AI like automation flows. There's this really great article.

by torsten ball who works at source graph it's called like how to build an agent or something and though As you're reading it the whole time, you're just expecting to get to the hard part where it's like, oh, yeah. And then like the super hard thing that I can't do. But like you never get there. It's just you get through the whole article and you're like, oh, shit. Actually, yeah, I guess I could do that.

I don't know. It just gives me all sorts of ideas for like Jack McDade messaged me the other day and he was like, does Tailwind have, are you guys adding this new CSS feature to Tailwind? And I'm like, well, one day it's not like on my. calendar to go and do it right now. And he's a bit paralyzed because he's going to add it himself, but he wants to make sure he uses the same APIs that we're going to use that when we eventually do add it.

He can just delete his stuff and it'll just keep working. And it just had me thinking, man, like I could totally build a tool that runs on a server on a cron job and kind of just like. watches the same sources for information that i watch like these like super css nerd blogs and notices new css features and i could give it

some context and instructions and do everything I can to make it easy for it to like design new tailwind features the way that I would do and then just wake up to a pull request once in a while that's like oh hey Here's a pull request for this new CSS feature. And it's named the same way you would name it. And it works the same way you would make it work. And then I didn't have to do it. But that is where we're going. And it's not even...

Wow. Like that is possible today. That's 100% possible today. And the best part about it is if it sucks, I can just like say no and close it. Whereas right now, if a human being does that, I should be like, dude, I'm so sorry. I know you spent like 15 hours on this. I don't have time to... review this right now you know it's just like it's a cold machine and if i let it sit there for nine months the ai isn't going to get mad at me or think i'm ignoring it or yeah you know it's

There's so many elements to having like a soulless machine do work for you instead of human beings. All right. I got to run. I'm going to be late. Drop my kids off a dance, but thanks for joining us. It was fun. Yeah. Thanks, man. All right. See you guys.