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Comment by progx | Hacker News Reader

Tailwind is awesome for those who don't know much CSS or dislike to work with CSS directly, or it is great for teams, that are not able to define general rules.

If you know CSS, you have huge problem to use a tool like Tailwind, cause you always feel like "how does this save me work?" it doesn't.

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I'd wager that most people who jumped to tailwind and sing its praises never wrote good css to begin with (or never worked on a project that handled css well). Frontend culture is like that: there's a lot of novelty and fads that last a couple years.

The best css projects I ever worked on were led by people who were just good at css. They didn't write a lot of shared styles. That's my main complaint about poorly written js or css: code that depends on other code without good or self-evident reason. The argument "it's easier to write" imo doesn't hold up because you read code 10x more than you write it. Good code optimizes for reading not writing.

I'm partial to css that relies on primitives like the `rem` unit and css-modules.

This really hits why I've bounced off of Tailwind. I've largely been a backend/infra developer but for some reason CSS has always resonated with me; it makes a ton of sense to me and with HTML (or these days, a React or Svelte component) open in one pane and a SCSS file in the other, the purported benefits of Tailwind just don't exist for me.

I get why other people like it and I'll go with it flow when other people have started a project with it, but I feel much less productive when I have to go remember its syntax and behaviors instead of...CSS.

I know CSS extremely well and Tailwind was a bigger improvement in my workflow than even SASS was.

> If you know CSS, you have huge problem to use a tool like Tailwind, cause you always feel like "how does this save me work?" it doesn't.

It absolutely does. Why would you speak for everyone who "knows CSS"?

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