CSS Is Dead — And It’s Never Coming Back the Way It Was

In a previous article, I talked about how Tailwind — one of the most important CSS companies of the last decade — basically got blown up as a business over the past year. And if you missed it, here’s the short version.

Tailwind was built on a classic open-source, freemium model. They gave away beautiful, well-designed CSS frameworks so developers could make their websites look great. If you wanted something more polished, more advanced, or more enterprise-grade, you paid for it. That worked for years because Tailwind owned something valuable: taste encoded in CSS. They had figured out how to make websites look modern, clean, and professional, and they packaged that into reusable styles that millions of developers relied on.

Then the LLMs arrived.

Because Tailwind was so good at SEO and so open with their code, not only Google and Bing crawled it — every major AI model did too. All of that handcrafted CSS, all those design systems, all those layout patterns were ingested, learned, and turned into an internal design brain inside ChatGPT, Google AI Studio, Perplexity, and the rest of the vibe-coding platforms.

And suddenly Tailwind’s entire business model collapsed. Their traffic cratered. Their revenue dropped by roughly half. They laid off the majority of their engineering team. And just to make the irony complete, the same companies whose models effectively absorbed Tailwind’s value have now come back and offered them sponsorship money — basically saying, “Sorry we ate your lunch. Here’s a check.”

That alone should tell you something profound has shifted.

But it raises a much bigger question: If Tailwind can be hollowed out like that, what does that mean for CSS itself?

And the uncomfortable answer is that CSS, as a human-centered craft, is dead.

Not the syntax. Not the files. Not the browser support. That will all continue to exist. But the idea that people will build careers writing and maintaining CSS by hand the way they did for the past 20 years? That era is over.

I’ve always been a backend-first engineer. I care about databases, business logic, authentication, payments, data flows — the skeleton of the house. CSS was always the paint job. Important, yes, but secondary. You could always make the walls prettier later. The hard part was getting the foundation right.

The problem was that doing that paint job took time and real skill. If you weren’t great at CSS, you had to hire someone who was. Designers and front-end specialists made a living because they knew how to make things look right across devices, browsers, and edge cases. They knew how to turn raw HTML into something that felt like a real product.

Now I don’t need that.

I can build my entire backend, wire up my database, connect Stripe, create user accounts — and then just ask a vibe-coding platform to generate the UI and styles for me. It will spit out Tailwind, CSS-in-JS, or whatever framework is fashionable this month, already responsive, already coherent, already good enough to ship. If I don’t like something, I tweak the prompt or make a small change.

The tedious, painstaking part of CSS is gone.

And that’s why this hits designers and front-end specialists the hardest. The people who really mastered CSS weren’t hardcore systems engineers — they were the people who knew how to make things look beautiful. They built landing pages, product pages, marketing sites, dashboards. That was their craft.

But when an LLM can get you 90% of the way there instantly, nobody is going to pay premium rates for someone to hand-craft a layout from scratch. Your engineers can just clean up the last 5 or 10 percent. The market for custom CSS collapses, the same way the market for writing boilerplate code collapsed.

This is what people mean when they say the new programming language is English.

You don’t tell a computer to float a div or set a breakpoint at 768 pixels anymore. You tell a model, “Make this look like a modern fintech app,” and it does the rest. The CSS still exists — but it’s an implementation detail, not a skill you need to sell.

And the Tailwind story shows how brutal this shift is going to be.

Their code didn’t disappear. It became more valuable than ever. But that value was captured by the models, not by the company that created it. Hundreds of thousands of developers are now using Tailwind-style designs every day without ever visiting Tailwind’s website or paying Tailwind a dime. The models learned it, absorbed it, and turned it into a feature.

That’s the new reality for CSS and for a lot of other “craft” layers in software.

CSS isn’t going away.

But the world where people made a living writing it by hand is.

And it’s not coming back.