Vibe coding may be hazardous to open source

Tailwind Labs CEO Adam Wathan recently blamed AI for forcing him to lay off three workers.

Tailwind Labs oversees the development of the open source Tailwind CSS framework. And according to Wathan, AI coding tools came between the company and its customers, reducing traffic to the website, which in turn hit product exposure.

"Traffic to our docs is down about 40 percent from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever," he wrote in a GitHub Issues post earlier this month. "The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework."

A recent pre-print paper cites the situation at Tailwind Labs as evidence that the increasing adoption of AI coding tools represents a breaking change for the open source community.

The paper, titled Vibe Coding Kills Open Source, was written by Miklós Koren (Central European ...