On Tailwind and character

Up north on the coast where I’m from, we say “Gegenwind formt Charakter” — headwind shapes character. And after five years of Tailwind, the CSS framework, it’s time for an honest assessment. What started as a fresh breeze for rapid development has slowly turned into unpredictable gusts for my team.

We use Tailwind in our design system’s components, with a mix of CSS modules when needed. Given that our web app uses a mix of CSS and SCSS / modules, this results in a constant back-and-forth between syntaxes. This isn’t just mentally draining; it’s also turned our files into a tangled mess and slows down our pair programming sessions.

Maybe it’s my design background, but I love that Tailwind says leading instead of the usual CSS line-height. For a lot of front-end folks, though, it’s just confusing — yet another language on top of the many they already speak. A dialect, some might argue. One that was meant to ease communication but, spoken rarely, becomes its own little language barrier — a bit like the Plattdeutsch I’ve bracketed this text with.

So where do I land? Use Tailwind for fast prototyping and solo projects — but on bigger, enterprise-scale work, I’d think twice. As we say up north, “De Wind kummt immer van vörn” — the wind always comes from the front.