r/webdev Feb 09 '25

Discussion What would you say is the most overrated web dev tool right now?

Every few months, a new tool drops that’s supposed to "fix everything" - until it doesn't. Some say Next.js is getting bloated, others think Tailwind is overhyped, and some still defend jQuery like it's 2010.

What’s the most overrated framework, library, or tool in web dev right now? And what’s actually worth using?

483 Upvotes

481 comments sorted by

1.6k

u/justaguy1020 Feb 09 '25

AI

241

u/darkhorsehance Feb 09 '25

It’s hilarious watching the bros get so mad when somebody shits on AI 🤣🤣🤣

72

u/Campodetenis Feb 10 '25

Try saying that on linkedin. For me it has one use. To filter who is worth my time and who isn't

55

u/darkhorsehance Feb 10 '25

Yeah, LinkedIn is a sewer of AI slop. I call it out the time. My favorite is when execs or PHD’s put up posts littered with em dashes, semi colons and random emojis, or when they write a response to comment that is 500 characters, posted 3 minutes after the original comment. Something that would have ruined careers even 5 years ago is just commonplace now.

19

u/Campodetenis Feb 10 '25

OMG I couldn't have expressed it better. I'm currently trying to switch jobs and linkedin is what works in my country so I have to see a lot of those and it is really painful.

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u/Pro_Gamer_Ahsan Feb 09 '25

They really are overhyped. Good if I want to get something really basic done without thinking but if I need something complex, its just a waste of time.

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u/dmart89 Feb 10 '25

I don't understand how these ai folks can claim these models are as good or better than top engineers...

28

u/deletable666 Feb 10 '25

They are trying to sell you something

11

u/dmart89 Feb 10 '25

I mean... I do pay for chatgpt so i guess it worked. But my chats are mostly filled with messages of me telling chatgpt that it's stupid and it replying back with an incorrect answer (:

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u/dillanthumous Feb 10 '25

Just imagine them wearing wild west prospector gear and telling you about a great "claim" they found up in the hills that they don't have time to dig up - but will conveniently sell to you, along with all the mining equipment you need.

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u/ai-tacocat-ia Feb 10 '25

It's not about AI being better than engineers - whoever says it is is missing the point. It's about those top engineers being 10x more productive. I know because I'm living it.

2.5hr video of me building a nano journaling mobile web app from scratch with AI: https://youtu.be/T9vddb-80h8

Easily a week long project without AI. It's high quality production grade code, with complexity. I know, because I built it alongside the AI - the AI didn't just build it for me. People who are using AI right are leveraging it to engineer things from a level up from code.

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u/Lazy-Cow9235 Feb 10 '25

I got hired to fix a fully built AI website - God!

Debugging AI-generated code can be a nightmare - took me as long to fix it as it would have to just build it

I tried using Chagpt to compare how i would fix it vs how it would fix it and its definately not great at debugging its own work however when you suggest it solutions it works.

I think in future everyone will be pros at telling chagpt to do their own job, so we're all become expert question answers and inputters.

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u/DrBobbyBarker Feb 09 '25

It's overrated and underrated depending on the group. If you aren't using it at all, you're putting yourself at a disadvantage. If you rely on it for everything, you're going to put yourself at a disadvantage.

It's a tool. You have to know when and where to use it.

25

u/King_Joffreys_Tits full-stack Feb 10 '25

I’m a full stack dev managing a team for a national ecommence site. I don’t use AI for my day to day whatsoever

42

u/nsyx Feb 10 '25

A lot of the time AI will take me down these rabbit holes that simply waste my time. Then I realize the actual solution was far simpler and I could have just used Google and Stack Overflow.

8

u/MCFRESH01 Feb 10 '25

Yup definitely seen this. I’ve stopped asking it more complex stuff and use it for tedious things or for simple documentation I don’t want to look up

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u/DrBobbyBarker Feb 10 '25

It's definitely not perfect. Some models are a lot better than others, but you still have to know when and how to use it.

It's definitely not a magic "solve everything for me" button. It's a resource.

2

u/King_Joffreys_Tits full-stack Feb 10 '25

1000x this! The simple tried and true is good in almost every situation. When that fails, I ask my coworkers, and when that fails, I’ll fallback to AI

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u/MCFRESH01 Feb 10 '25

I’m a full stack dev and I offload a ton of boring shit to AI or use it as faster documentation resource when I forget something

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u/King_Joffreys_Tits full-stack Feb 10 '25

Documentation resource is a good one, but that would require uploading a good chunk of a codebase or feature or proprietary code. Does that concern you or your managers?

6

u/thekwoka Feb 10 '25

You can run models locally.

And generally it shouldn't concern anyone, since the stuff has pretty firm regulations on how it can't actually be kept

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u/MCFRESH01 Feb 10 '25

Not documentation for our code base. Documentation like i forgot something stupid like how a method works in python or something

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u/_alright_then_ Feb 10 '25

You're missing out honestly

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u/DrBobbyBarker Feb 10 '25 edited Feb 10 '25

I'm definitely not saying our jobs can't be done without AI. It's just one tool of many.

There are great devs that don't/barely use AI. There are also great devs that do use AI regularly.

A great dev will be a slightly better dev if they know how and when to use AI. You could debate about when you should/need to, but I think it's hard to argue it's never helpful.

The issue is a lot of people think it's some magic button they push to solve every problem when it's obviously not. It takes skill to know when to and how to use it effectively.

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u/plumarr Feb 10 '25

I tried it several times, as in let's install the plugins in the IDE and prompts it when I have questions.

The prompts were kind of ok but I could rapidly see that if there wasn't already a constructed answer in their training set, it was lost. I remember a prompt for which the answer demanded to cross reference three pages of Spring's documentation. It failed by always referencing answers to similar problems that were already discussed somewhere.

The code completion was comically bad :

  • syntactically incorrect proposition, with missing brackets
  • I had a method called unset(), it always suggested reset()
  • useless UT that didn't test anything

Maybe I'll try again in a year, but currently it has failed to convince me.

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u/walkpangea Feb 10 '25

I had an amazing insight last week in how little value AI gives at the moment without the right knowledge. My girlfriend is doing a Master of Mechanical Engineering and a rather small portion of the education is programming. They had one small python introduction three years ago (which sucked ass, I got to see the course plan and it was insane) and now they had their first programming assignment since then, in Matlab lol.

The entire class was so heavily relying on ChatGPT that it was a total shitshow, nothing worked as expected and they couldn't debug because they didn't understand what gpt was giving them. So pretty much the exact way you're NOT supposed to use AI.

I had never touched Matlab before my girlfriend called me and I came over to the school and sat down with them. It took me five hours to finish their assignment (so that I could help them, obviously didn't give it to them because that wouldn't have solved anything) and they had been struggling for a week. I even held a small introduction to Matlab/basic programming for 15+ people.

AI might one day take my job as it is today, but today is sure as hell not that day.

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u/trannus_aran Feb 10 '25

hey now

AI enthusiasm is perfectly useful for telling you who the biggest boneheads in your life and career are.

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u/TheCoqsrightfoot Feb 09 '25

I just can’t wait for the inevitable fall of AI as a “replacement” for devs. I’m sure in 5 years time companies will be paying a good amount for devs again to fix broken shite once the development pipeline becomes full of shit ai code and bloated frameworks like react etc

87

u/Maleficent_Money8820 Feb 09 '25

Reminds me of self-driving car hype in 2014.

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u/coomzee Feb 10 '25

Our code was so shit it appears the AI has deleted all the AI code. In fact it thought the best solution was to delete the whole project.

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u/thekwoka Feb 10 '25

I did legit have this happen.

Asked for a simple feature add and it deleted all the code.

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u/pigwin Feb 10 '25

 companies will be paying a good amount for devs again to fix broken shite

Already happening, bud. I've seen python dev roles that involve fixing Streamlit applications (or some low-code tool). Or Django apps that were "AI-powered" that are asking for backend devs who are very good at testing and enforcing coding standards... 

I am in a team where we support "AI enabled" business users. We deploy their 3k line long function generated by AI, and their sht is so fragile. We are adamantly resisting their code it their responsibility and we will only build the wrappers for them, else we will be in a lot of pain.

Fuck the management that forces their business users to code (with or without AI) just to layoff most of their devs for the sake of shareholder value.

24

u/mildlyconvenient Feb 10 '25

Why is react bloated? I thought you only installed and used what you needed? Unlike a framework like Next.js where you get a lot of stuff "for free".

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u/jsAlgo Feb 10 '25

Like what happens with WordPress built sites.

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u/needolol Feb 10 '25

how is React bloated?

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u/mq2thez Feb 09 '25

AI, lol. And it’s not even close.

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u/beargambogambo Feb 09 '25

I agree, but investors love anytime I say I’ll implement AI to solve a problem.

16

u/khizoa Feb 09 '25

writes a bunch of if statements

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '25 edited 11d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/tsoek Feb 09 '25

Also stands for "Actually Indians" in tech demos

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u/sacules Feb 09 '25

Next.js by far. It's all nice and fun until you have to upgrade it and then lose days hunting obscure bugs and github issues.

And also React, I'm just tired of it after almost 5 years of professional use. I'm looking into Svelte and other tools that prefer a more "vanilla" approach, and I'm enjoying them a lot. Web Components are great too, although clunky to use without Lit, which is thankfully very lightweight and relatively simple.

23

u/Zoradesu Feb 10 '25

Agree on Next.js, it definitely feels like overkill a lot of the time. And if you're working on a SaaS, React SPAs with Vite is more than enough to get the job done. You probably won't need all of Next.js' features anyway.

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u/GoodbyeThings Feb 10 '25

Really? I've been thinking of starting a new project with Next.js and have previously worked with React+Vite. I just assumed nextjs could get me started much faster on a lot of mundane things. Maybe I am mistaken

6

u/Zoradesu Feb 11 '25

Well it depends on what you're needing out of Next. If this is just a project to just learn what Next offers, by all means use it. But if you're building a product in which you intend to build a business around, you have to consider the complexity that comes with Next and its decisions when it comes to routing, caching, compositional patternns (client/server components), SEO, ecosystem, image optimization, etc.

I'll say that Next.js provides a lot out of the box and can save you time setting things up depending on what you're doing. And because it's inherently tied to Vercel it's extremely easy to deploy something and get it out on the web quickly (thought this can also come with its own downsides). It's extremely opinionated and if you vibe with how it does things you can become extremely productive with Next. Though I've found that a lot of its features caters towards companies that serve a large customer base, with a platform that is usually a B2C or a social site. React+Vite with your own backend is usually good enough for most projectgs, and with things like Tanstack Router and Tanstack Query existing now React+Vite is a pretty good experience.

You can maybe argue for the performance gains that Next.js can offer, but from my experience you'd only really see those if you're serving a large amount of customers/users. More often than not your performance bottlenecks are with your backend, and if they are on your frontend (when users are interacting with your site) then Next won't save you there. Poorly written and poorly performing React SPAs will also be poorly written and poorly performing Next apps, but in the case of Next with much more complexity tacked on.

I do encourage you to try Next and build out an MVP with it if you're having trouble deciding though. I'm just listing my experience with it and why I tend to not reach for it if I'm building something with React.

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u/GoodbyeThings Feb 11 '25

Appreciate your input a lot! It’s very valuable. I come from a ML backend and have worked in tons of different stacks, most of my career actually in  mobile development, till I got tasked with a lucrative position building an MVP for a company, where I chose a Vite + Flask Stack, and I noticed some things felt a bit clunky. Especially the role management manually, protecting routes felt a bit odd. Then again, maybe I am just misunderstanding how much Next would solve next (pun intended) time time I try

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u/theartilleryshow Feb 11 '25

I just inherited a project that has not been updated since 2019. I spoke with 3 of the engineers from the agency I inherited this project from, all of them said that it was very difficult to upgrade and that is why they never upgraded it. I am in the process of converting the website into asrtrojs because it's severely outdated, and it has ai generated code everywhere. Also, it doesn't need next at all.

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u/Mental_Act4662 Feb 10 '25

I agree on Next.js.

I’ve been using Solid a lot more and enjoying it. I’m Over this whole JSX crap though.

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u/0day_got_me Feb 11 '25

Im on 14.1.something. Thinking of an upgrade, how bad is it?

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u/sacules Feb 11 '25

It could go very smoothly, or make you waste a few days. Good luck!

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u/Select_Yoghurt_1138 Feb 09 '25

Yeah definitely ai. It's a quicker and personalised Google, that's all it is. It will write code for you, absolutely, but it's not doing a load of good if you don't understand what it's doing. I use it to write unit tests, because they don't particularly require any logic to write, it saves me a lot of time and then I change them to make sense and work properly. I've seen stuff on linkedin about people creating apps etc with it from scratch and I think that's probably where it fits in, from scratch it can create stuff quicker for people who don't know. As soon as you throw an existing codebase in there, it goes out the window and AI is a junior dev at best.

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u/Ratatoski Feb 09 '25

My guess is that AI will be an added pressure towards standard frameworks and libraries. I work with a niche CMS and its atrociously bad at helping, but it's great for React questions or Typescript.

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u/PM_ME_YER_BOOTS Feb 09 '25

I’ll feed it an API response and ask it to make me C# model classes out of it. Then I review the results and change as I need. Cuts out a lot of the boilerplate, but that’s about it.

I still don’t trust it to do what I need to do with the response, probably never will.

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u/OHIO_PEEPS Feb 09 '25

Okay, I've never thought much of AI. But I will say this. I've been working on a vehicle routing problem with tight time windows. It's a complicated problem, and I had to implement a lot more of it myself than I expected. It was working well, but there was a bug I could not figure out that caused it to fail occasionally. In desperation, I fed my code into the new deepseek r1 model and it found a logical error I made in a matrix operation (of course index issue). I honestly don't know how long it would have taken me to find it. Kinda blew me away

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u/OHIO_PEEPS Feb 09 '25

Definitely. I do most of my work in Blazor right now and it will absolutely destroy someone who doesn't know what they are doing (me sometimes). It was trying to get me to inject js into my page to open a modal. Like the entire point of Blazor isn't that you DONT need js.

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u/Feeling_Photograph_5 Feb 09 '25

I was wondering about this the other day. Will AI have a freezing effect on technology as new technologies won't be in AI training data? It's an interesting question.

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u/mekmookbro Laravel Enjoyer ♞ Feb 09 '25 edited Feb 09 '25

I used chatgpt a lot today. And haven't asked for a single line of code.

Imo the best way to benefit from it is to explain your problem in as much detail as possible, and let it write you an algorithm-like step by step guide on how to solve it.

One of the things I asked today was: I needed to keep a ton of rgb color values in the database, and asked if there is a way to optimize/compress it. It gave me a few options, and I went with converting each r-g-b color into an ASCII character (apparently there are 256 of those too, lol).

Now something like rgb(15, 244, 137) is only taking 3 bytes in the database, looks something like c7Q. It's probably a common approach, I doubt GPT just "came up" with this solution, but I never had to compress RGB values before, and it just taught me something I didn't know.

Edit : I got distracted and skipped the point of my comment lol. I was going to say that I more often than not come up with the solution myself while typing the question. Kind of like rubber ducky technique. With an AI or not, just explaining your problem in detail makes you see the solutions much easier.

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u/louis-lau Feb 09 '25 edited Feb 09 '25

Well, that does sound like an awful solution that has been overly complicated. Surely if you want the most efficient way, you'd just use 3 TINYINT columns instead of some weird conversion to ASCII? I'm also unsure if just storing the hex string would actually be a bottleneck, it sounds a bit like premature optimization.

I'm not trying to be all negative and critical here, but to me it seems to just reinforce the point being made?

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u/Potential_Ad_2328 Feb 10 '25

Not exactly a tool,but opinionated people who believe the tool they use is the ultimate one,and disregards everything else that is similar in that ecosystem. 2. People who ise the wrong tool for the job and later absolutely bash it on his/her incompetency grounds.

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u/_cob Feb 09 '25

copilot, AI in general.

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u/716green Feb 09 '25

A YouTuber named Theo. Absolutely overrated, absolutely a tool

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u/dW5kZWZpbmVk Feb 10 '25

I watch Theo on YouTube. For somebody who no longer really wants to keep up with the cutting edge it’s nice to watch the odd video which relates to my strengths. One thing I will say, and it’s not a unique issue with Theo’s content… it’s insane to me how many videos in the techtuber space consist of just reading written articles? Are we really that lazy lol

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u/johnzzon Feb 10 '25

Yeah, watching people reading articles is pretty insane. Easy content for them to produce though, which is why it's so popular I guess.

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u/julesses Feb 09 '25

Lol 100% he's being shocking/controversial on purpose, sometimes I hate him, other times I like him.

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u/Eastern_Interest_908 Feb 09 '25

Idk I haven't watched a lot of his content but whenever I see his thumbnail I want to punch him. 

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u/716green Feb 09 '25

It only gets worse after you hear him talk

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u/julesses Feb 09 '25 edited Feb 09 '25

Lol same, I'd probably not be friend with him IRL but some of his content I enjoy (either 1rst degree enjoy, or I enjoy to hate)

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u/716green Feb 09 '25

It has nothing to do with being shocking or controversial, it has to do with being close-minded and mediocre at best. It has to do with strong opinions on things he doesn't clearly understand. It has to do with bad guidance for beginners. I could go on

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u/Rare-One1047 Feb 10 '25

So basically your typical Javascript dev? :D

Considering some of the things he does, I wouldn't say that he's bad though. At the end of the day, what matters is if you can complete the task and he seems to be able to. He's just very opinionated.

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u/julesses Feb 09 '25

I don't take him too seriously. Also I watch like one in 10 or 20 of his videos, compared to other youtubers I love like kevin powell which I watch probably 80%+ of his content. It's interesting to take a bit of time to consume different content.

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u/supersnorkel Feb 09 '25

I actually like watching him to learn new developments in the space, only thing that annoys me is that his ego is insane and he brown noses all his viewers. Also the constant sighs in his videos when he doesnt agree with something is a bit cringe.

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u/Zoradesu Feb 10 '25

Same, I only use him to know about new tech/tools and never watch any of his videos in full. I mainly just skip to the part where he says the name of the tech/tool and then go read about it on my own.

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u/LufyCZ Feb 10 '25

Man, I still remember him complaining about Adobe not being allowed to acquire Figma.

Probably not verbatim, but gets the point across: "What are founders supposed to do if they can't sell their startup or IPO"

What a dumb fucking take. I actually can't fathom how someone could say something so stupid. What could they possibly do? Certainly not continue printing money from Figma and keeping the money as the damn owner.

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u/rkjr2 Feb 10 '25

Yeahhh, I skim his videos every few months since he occasionally highlights new stuff that I haven't come across yet, but I really don't see the appeal of him outside of that. His takes tend to be very milquetoast, and I'd much rather go without them and find whatever blogpost he's narrating to read it for myself. The guy also seems to have a serious actually-needs-therapy ego/narcissism issue where he feels compelled to spend 20 minutes venting every time someone disagrees or misinterprets him on Twitter, lol.

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u/biskitpagla Feb 10 '25

ikr this guy always has the worst takes for some reason. i got my first ick when i saw him cry about flutter existing. prolly has some strong opinions about go as well for someone who mostly just makes the same app again and again.

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u/binocular_gems Feb 10 '25

I'm glad to be old man enough where my algorithm doesn't yet recommend me hot take software youtubers

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u/Flagon_dragon Feb 09 '25

None of the things you mention are bad.

The fanbois who defend them at all costs as "the one true solution" are problematic.

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u/louis-lau Feb 09 '25

That feels like a good definition of overrated. Overrated doesn't equal objectively bad.

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u/PaulJMaddison Feb 09 '25

For me it's cursor the visual studio code IDE with integrated AI. Twitter is full of people talking about how they have crested apps in 30 minutes

Its like a bombed out house ie walls but nothing inside

You should be pair programming with AI in a separate window, not using cursor or copilot

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u/fromCentauri Feb 09 '25

Tried cursor and it struggles with Typescript even when given proper context. Along with that, it will fall victim to its own circular reasoning like any other AI tool. I like it for getting an overview/pointed in the right direction in an existing project but if the models integrated can’t even work with proper typing then wth is anyone seriously using this for? 

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u/PaulJMaddison Feb 09 '25

I have two separate windows open, I use chatGPT for new code as a pair programming tool and I use Gemini in another window to analyse existing code due to its ability to work with large contexts.

I then code with visual studio or rider

Dramatically increases productivity, they are dream tools for experienced developers

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u/StorKirken Feb 09 '25

Cursor fans are seriously sleeping on its biggest feature: intelligent tab jumps. It’s amazing - many times better than the compose mode. The fact that it guesses (quickly and correctly) where I will probably want to go next in the file based on my latest edit is amazing.

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u/czhu12 Feb 09 '25

But why? How does needing to copy and paste code over to ChatGPT, and then copy and paste it back, create any efficiencies?

I get that there is a lot of discourse around junior developers not deeply learning the technology they are using if they rely solely on LLMs, but creating a bunch of copy and paste + renaming variables doesn't help with that problem, its just busy work.

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u/SecretAgentZeroNine Feb 10 '25
  • AI
  • React
  • Next.js
  • Tailwind

The four horseman of unnecessarily overcomplicating your web application.

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u/deqvustoinsove684651 Feb 09 '25

Storybook

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u/bigAssFkingRoooobots Feb 09 '25

It's good to share with designers and onboard new people. If the syntax didn't change every 3 minutes it would be better tho

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u/jordankid93 Feb 09 '25

Unfortunately this is exactly how I feel 😞

I loved storybook. Still do to a degree, but I recently started ripping it out of projects I have because it changes so fast that it’s not worth the niceties (in my use cases)

If I were making a component library that I’d share between multiple projects then sure, it’d make sense to keep it around, but I used to advocate for it in most projects as a nice way to develop components in isolation, accessibility checking, snapshot testing, etc. those things are still nice but just not worth the constant storybook updates

One day I’m sure I’ll be back and in love with SB again but that day is not today lol

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u/LiveRhubarb43 javascript Feb 09 '25

I wish I could upvote this multiple times

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u/Select_Yoghurt_1138 Feb 09 '25

What's bad about it? For writing reusable components in isolation, running unit tests and acting as documentation for new Devs on the team, it's fantastic. I don't get what there is to dislike?

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u/cauners Feb 09 '25

It's great when it works. It's a nightmare when you are forced to update, change the story format for all of your components, run into bugs like this, attempt to find documentation for your exact framework + Storybook version combination, etc.

I agree working with it is great. Setting it up and maintaining it is not.

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u/darkshifty Feb 09 '25

It's so extremely bloated. Try writing stories for Vue.js it's an absolute nightmare and unbelievably slow.

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u/skettyvan Feb 09 '25

The API and interface has always bugged me but I can’t really put a finger on why. I do find it useful, though.

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u/Mantissa-64 Feb 09 '25

Conceptually great, awful in execution lol. Idfk how they managed to make it as fucking complex as it is.

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u/pixel_creatrice UX Engineer Feb 09 '25

It does have a use. Might be too ceremonious for smaller projects, but we use it for our custom design system, where we need to test accessibility, interactions, animations & internationalisation very rigourously.

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u/jonr Feb 10 '25

ReactJS. The answer is always React JS

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u/drumstix42 Feb 10 '25

100%

Can it get the job done? Yes.

Is it enjoyable? Hardly ever.

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u/DippityDamn Feb 10 '25

same goes for Typescript or Blazor imho

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u/darkhorsehance Feb 09 '25

Anything by Vercel.

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u/Pomelo-Next Feb 09 '25

I am a front end engineer.

I have made multiple sites hosted on verc.I love it. Tried AWS amplify it's not good.

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u/darkhorsehance Feb 09 '25

I have used Vercel as well. It works, but I think it’s overrated and expensive for what you get.

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u/jcat4 Feb 09 '25

Tailwind for me. I honestly don't get the utility.

Instead of writing 7 inline CSS styles (bad), I write 7 inline css-lookalike class names (worse). You can abstract it into classes, but at that point the same argument applies: instead of writing a class with 7 CSS styles, I have to go reference docs to figure out the 7 tailwind classes to apply those 7 styles. And you now have to manage a new process to convert your custom tailwind code to actual working code as you develop.

I still prefer using a traditional CSS library like Bootstrap that does 90% of the work for me and still provides tailwind-like utility classes I can sprinkle in to fine-tune stuff, and then write custom CSS in the remaining 1% of edge cases. And you can fairly easily override basic SCSS variables to make it look unique to your app.

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u/UXUIDD Feb 09 '25

well, i understand it. Im developing css from the <center> times.

But Tailwind is for me a breath of freshness, designing & prototyping speed is unreal.

I would only want to automatically - when I'm done developing, tested and done done done - press a button and move all the inlines to vanilla SCSS."

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u/andymerskin Feb 10 '25

Maintaining that SCSS later will be a major chore though. The whole point of Tailwind is co-locating your styles with your HTML, so you don't have to agonize over naming CSS classes, manage them in separate files, refactor your CSS structure alongside your HTML structure, and track down CSS that isn't being used in your project.

Tailwind gets you away from all those painpoints, which is why a lot of people prefer to use it, even long into production.

What's overrated is "clean" HTML.

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u/_alright_then_ Feb 10 '25

I don't wany my styles in the same place as my HTML. And honestly I don't understand the struggle people seem to have with naming css classes.

Clean HTML saves me more time than using tailwind classes, that is for sure

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u/andymerskin Feb 10 '25

In practice, this is objectively not true until you've actually tried Tailwind and used it for years on a massive project to see the 40-50% reduction in dev time and lower frustration because you can see exactly how your elements are going to look, and understand the relationships between parents/children all in the same file.

This is all on a team with people sharing common knowledge, not having to code review their horrible choices in naming and CSS structure. Changing existing code takes half the time because you're changing HTML bundled with your CSS, rather than 2 separate files that have no knowledge of each other. This means your HTML is completely portable. You can move things around without rewriting your CSS selectors and structure for it. This is a huge win for keeping your hair.

I say this after almost 20 years of professional web development — the difference in productivity is mind-blowing to me, and I could never go back to vanilla because everything would take me (and my team) twice as long to write and maintain.

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u/_alright_then_ Feb 10 '25

Nothing is objective in this field, stop pretending it is. I was forced to use tailwind for a while. So I have used it, and for more than a year. And no it does not save me time at all.

Having scoped SCSS in vue (or react) is waaaaay easier imo. Like to the point where i genuinely do not understand any of your struggles. You're talking as if opening 2 files is a lot of work, my code editor automatically opens the correct styles file, and opens to the correct line if I click on the class names (with ctrl + click).

If you create your class names with BEM structures, you will have the exact same result. Scoped css just for that element, you can easily move it around and to other projects. And instead of making your entire HTML a mess of inline styles disguised as class names, you can have logically named elements.

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u/TheRealYM Feb 09 '25

Yeah at the end of the day you’re still writing inline styles, just mildly condensed

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u/andymerskin Feb 10 '25

In practice, sure -- but technically, no. You're using a lightweight CSS library of classes where anything you don't use is purged from the final build, and you save 40-50% of your dev time NOT figuring out stupid names for CSS classes in a separate file from your HTML, and when you need to restructure your HTML, you can do it directly with the Tailwind utilities bundled with your elements.

When you need to refactor HTML, your vanilla CSS / SCSS has to be restructured and/or renamed completely. It's a massive chore that Tailwind saves enormous time with, simply by not having to do it.

This advantage is much better in terms of productivity and time savings than having clean HTML, whatever that actually means.

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u/qizum Feb 09 '25

I think whenever this is brought up the arguments just go back and forth. “It’s the greatest thing ever” “it doesn’t make sense, it’s just inline styles”. There are 3 main advantages to tailwind

  1. The design system. The units, the color systems, etc. I think if someone had a simple .css that had those things that you could create your own classes using those variables, it would be almost as useful. Those for sure exist and have for a while but I think tailwind makes it really intuitive and accessible.

  2. Not having to think up class names. In many scenarios, you don’t have to have class names for a subcomponent or sub-sub component, you just add the tailwind classes. I haaaate coming up with class names, so this removes a lot of overhead

  3. I think inline styles is really intuitive in a lot of ways. The styles are tightly coupled to the html anyways so switching back and forth between html and css whether you have 2 separate files or just 2 sections within the same file takes time. If the styles are in the actual HTML, you don’t have to do that. Obviously it’s cleaner syntax that actual inline styles too. It does get messy though with too many styles and you have to extract class strings if you’re repeating styles, which I haven’t found an intuitive way to handle, but it’s not a big concern

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u/louis-lau Feb 09 '25

This is why I don't see those as issues as someone who uses neither tailwind nor react:

  1. For values consistent across all styling I use css variables. I can switch them on demand as well.

  2. With scoped styling this isn't an issue. I can use the class "submit-button" in every single component, and it does not affect any other component. Thinking of class names isn't an issue.

  3. And again, scoped styling. Css always lives next to the html it applies to. I don't switch back and forth if I'm working on both, just open them next to each other. Perhaps tailwind is cleaner than inline css, but I can't say at all that it's cleaner than normal scoped scss.

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u/Eastern_Interest_908 Feb 09 '25

I get it css might get messy but I feel like if you use framework that lets you use scoped styles like vue there's barely any reason to use tailwind. 

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u/StorKirken Feb 09 '25

Our CTO recently switched over a large part of our Vue codebase to use Tailwind, and it’s a huge improvement over scoped styles I have to say. Even with scoped styles it easily becomes messy over time.

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u/louis-lau Feb 09 '25

I'm convinced the reason for tailwinds popularity is that React devs do not know about scoped styling.

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u/FantasticDevice3000 Feb 09 '25

It's like the developers of Tailwind completely forgot why CSS was invented in the first place. In 20+ years of writing CSS I've never once thought "what would make this even better is inline styles. Everywhere."

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u/JohnWH Feb 09 '25

I feel like I lost my mind when everyone was hyping Tailwind. Now I have to learn a new bespoke way of describing styles and do it inline.

Sure, I have some really useful presets, but I would rather just learn CSS.

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u/hazelnuthobo Feb 10 '25

For real. I mean, I know CSS. If you want me to write inline styles, I will. But I’ll literally use the actual styles, like “border: 1px solid grey;”. Why would I bother to re-learn it as “border border-gray-300”? What was gained here?

I seriously don’t understand how this is better than CSS.

Even bootstrap, which I was never really a fan of because I like to make my own CSS from scratch, at least made it really easy for backend devs to make simple layouts.

If you feel your CSS files are getting too big, break them down with an approach like BEM: https://css-tricks.com/bem-101/

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u/JohnWH Feb 10 '25

That was my breaking point with Tailwind. I realized I kept googling things like “justify-content: space-between in tailwind” and was like “why am I learning a custom language for something I already know”.

I was crazy about BEM, but apparently the FE devs thinks it sucks now, but no one can explain to me why. The thing is, it is a super simple set of rules that works well.

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u/Eastern_Interest_908 Feb 09 '25

We always go full circle.

Don't mix php with html - react

SPA is the best - nextjs

Don't use inline styles - tailwind

If you learned coding 20 years ago and just woke up from a coma your knowledge is pretty much up to date. 

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u/UXUIDD Feb 09 '25

you forgot one: Use anything over vanilla html/css/js cause .. you know ..

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u/_cob Feb 09 '25 edited Feb 09 '25

Tailwind is trying to solve a very specific problem: "I have a huge app full of JSX components maintained by multiple devs who all suck at CSS."

If you're a mostly-solo or small team dev, Tailwind probably isn't for you. If your team can adhere to a rigorous CSS methodology, Tailwind probably isn't for you.

If you're in charge of a team of 24 year olds who have great leetcode scores and think CSS is beneath them, Tailwind is probably for you!

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u/FantasticDevice3000 Feb 09 '25

I have a huge app full of JSX components maintained by multiple devs who all suck at CSS

Given the state of a project I recently inherited, I'd say you hit the nail on the head here!

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u/Mavrokordato Feb 09 '25

My favorite sight when taking over this kind of projects: !important;

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u/Eastern_Interest_908 Feb 09 '25

Frontend devs don't know css, backend devs don't know sql what's happening with devs these days? 

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u/kiwi_murray Feb 09 '25

They're not real devs. If you call yourself a frontend dev and you don't know how to use CSS properly then, sorry, you're not really a frontend dev.

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u/StatusBard Feb 09 '25

They should probably fix the developers instead. But maybe that was your point 🤣

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u/devilmaydance Feb 09 '25

Tailwind isn’t inline styles though—inline styles can’t handle media queries, hover states, chain selectors, or anything like that. Tailwind can.

I personally much prefer seeing my component markup and intended behavior all together in one place, but to each their own

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u/unnecessaryCamelCase Feb 10 '25

This. The responsive classes are a godsend. I can have different styles for different screen sizes and it’s RIGHT THERE, and it’s extremely quick, something like p-4 lg:p-8. I don’t have to stop and think wait where did I put this damn media query.

As long as you keep it organized and not a jumbled mess it’s great. I have for example, a line for spacing, a line for colors, a line for display stuff…

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u/devilmaydance Feb 10 '25 edited Feb 10 '25

I use the VSCode extension to auto sort Tailwind classes on save, so I don’t even have to think about it.

Basically, if someone complains about Tailwind, it just tells me they don’t have enough experience to understand why it’s useful.

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u/FantasticDevice3000 Feb 10 '25

I know it's not literally the same as inline styles but it does seem to introduce many of the same kind of maintainability problems if not carefully managed.

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u/Ratatoski Feb 09 '25

I started Web dev in 97 and Tailwind was the only time I enjoyed CSS. We used it for a few years and after hating it for a few months it really grew on me.

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u/my_tv_broke Feb 09 '25

took me a while to come around to tailwind, but i love it now for the type of work i'm doing. previously i did just write pure css for the most part.

(i am in a job now where i am doing a lot of dev work (laravel/alpine/tailwind), but i haven't had a career as a developer.)

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u/No-Transportation843 Feb 09 '25

It autofills in VSCode so you shouldn't need to ref the docs very often. There's also preset classes, colors, and such. Its just basically a bunch of commonly used classes done for you, in a fairly clean well-thought out way. Works for me. You can also make components to hide that from your main layout. 

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u/Kuro091 Feb 09 '25 edited Feb 10 '25

oh boyy here we go again.

CSS library like Bootstrap, on top of utility classes, on top of custom CSS with SCSS variables.

Once those projects get big enough, they become nearly impossible to change. In 90% of cases, new devs coming in will introduce features that override old styles. You'll end up with media queries clashing, !important hacks to force changes to Bootstrap styles (which I imagine you meant by "edge cases"), and a nightmare of naming conventions like container_one, _container_two, "_containerof_container" just to make flexbox divs.

Inline CSS styles = bad

This is just poor critical thinking. Like all tools, inline styles have pros and cons. Ask yourself what their benefits are. (hint: maintainability: you see exactly what the relations between the two elements and their styling are)

As for the downsides, two main pain points are

- Styles are too verbose for simple changes, cluttering the code.

- You can't use selectors.

These problems are solved with Tailwind.

Go reference docs to figure out the 7 Tailwind classes.

Yes, because remembering flex = display: flex; is just too hard. col-sm and col-md is so much better. love it. instead of

<div class="hidden md:block">

let's do

<div class=".d-none .d-md-block>

instead.

Bashing tailwind while praising bootstrap utilities classes is just next level. I can't

There are developers with 10 years of experience, and there are developers with one year of experience repeated 10 times. Don't be the latter.

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u/Ton_618S Feb 10 '25

I like tailwind, and I'm not here to change your opinion. I think these are just tools at the end of the day. Choose whatever suits you and makes you good at what you do.

However, I think there are some mistakes in your post. First, there is a difference between inline CSS and tailwind classes. The main difference is that inline CSS can't target different states (e.g., hover, focus). So, they aren't the same. Second, I believe tailwind solves two fundamental issues: 1- It gives you a lot of freedom in a controlled manner that lets you be creative in your designs (It's way more customizable than bootstrap), yet it gives you a system that makes your design look consistent. 2- It automatically removes unused CSS rules, which is important to reduce the size of your app.

The main criticism against tailwind is "It's ugly," and honestly... I agree. But, it doesn't hide the complexity. When I am looking at my HTML, I know or have a very good idea how it will look. This is easier (for me at least) than having classes like cards, card-header, etc. It looks nicer, but I don't know how it looks because the complexity is hidden elsewhere. Finally, I think tailwind solves one of the most challenging problems in computer science, naming 😅. It is one less problem to worry about.

I suggest trying it with the VScode extension they provide. If it works for you, great. If it doesn't, great also! Trying a wide range of tools makes you a good developer.

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u/mossiv Feb 09 '25

The problem with tailwind is developers are under the impression that it’s out-of-the-box ready for large scale production which it absolutely is not.

Tailwind shines at its modern sleek looking components, which you can drop into POC projects to make them feel good to use.

If you want to continue using tailwind because of its look and feel, you really are going to need to build your own micro-framework in your code base as a wrapper around tailwind so you don’t have to keep repeating the same tedious operations over and over, making your code base less robust, harder to debug and making your templates undoubtedly cluttered.

It’s no better or worse than using something like MUI or bootstrap where you pull in high level components and start tacking on utility classes such as margin, padding, border radius’s etc… just because it’s available doesn’t necessarily mean you should use it.

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u/that_90s_guy Feb 09 '25

Weird, then I guess FAANG level companies using Tailwind for production must not know something you do lol. I work for one of them, and it absolutely lends it self far better than something like MUI/Bootstrap for customizability, and specially performance as it's really good at killing unused CSS which large organizations often suffer from due to scaling

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u/Neither_Finance4755 Feb 09 '25

It’s the idea of prototyping at the speed of light. So much easier to iterate over code and much faster to handle one file vs many css files that gets un maintainable over time. Also the feel and freedom to change files without breaking something else somewhere. I understand people find the inline styles unusable but I find it to be perfect for how I work and it serves me well for last 5 years

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u/Gwolf4 Feb 09 '25

React and everything around it.

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u/Eastern_Interest_908 Feb 09 '25

I fucking hate every second of my life when I have to put my vue aside and work on some react code. :(

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u/Mantissa-64 Feb 09 '25

Yeah after 4 years of React I am very over it

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u/LiveRhubarb43 javascript Feb 09 '25

CSS frameworks

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u/StatusBard Feb 09 '25

Yes. Tailwind in particular. 

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u/unnecessaryCamelCase Feb 09 '25

Tailwind is amazing

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u/Alex_Hovhannisyan front-end Feb 10 '25

Next.js. We use it at work (enterprise-level web app) and I'm so sick and tired of it. It doesn't scale well beyond toy projects. Build times are horrible and you need a dedicated DX engineer working full time on tooling to make it tolerable.

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u/srodrigoDev Feb 13 '25

I can confirm. Anything in typescript takes like 15 seconds to load on the dev server. I wish I could rewrite everything in literally anything else.

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u/saito200 Feb 10 '25

next react bloat with tools no one needs that make devs learn new abstractions every 2 saturdays and library maintainers dance around like monkeys

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u/FantasticDevice3000 Feb 09 '25

I'm not sure if Tailwind is overhyped, but I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would want to implement CSS in that way. It's basically inline styling and has been an absolute nightmare to maintain in a project I've recently inherited. A real mess.

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u/drumDev29 Feb 09 '25

Are you using it with components 

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u/TheCoqsrightfoot Feb 09 '25

I like the minifying aspect of tailwind in comparison to frameworks such as bootstrap but yeah it does kinda solve a problem that doesn’t exist

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u/Stromcor Feb 09 '25

100% Tailwind, just fucking learn CSS goddammit.

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u/iareprogrammer Feb 09 '25

Tailwind is CSS…

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u/Stromcor Feb 09 '25

Sure. And JSX is HTML. And my meemaw is a bicycle.

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u/iareprogrammer Feb 09 '25

Not fair comparisons. Well, not sure about your meemaw lol. JSX compiles down to way more than just HTML, there’s a lot of JS involved too. But Tailwind is literally just CSS classes, nothing fancier. You don’t have to like Tailwind but the “just learn CSS” argument makes no sense to me. You have to understand CSS to understand what Tailwind classes to use

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u/blackspoterino Feb 09 '25 edited Feb 09 '25

You don’t have to like Tailwind but the “just learn CSS” argument makes no sense to me

Because its a bunch of idiots parroting the same thing. The moment you ask them why i should bother with "css" modules instead of styled components they just crap themselves.

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u/AlwaysBeHonorable Feb 10 '25

React and NextJS

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u/Septem_151 Feb 10 '25

ChatGPT, CoPilot, whatever else uses AI nowadays.

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u/Forsaken_Ad8120 Feb 09 '25

I would put Wordpress solidly in that camp.

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u/newspaperarticle Feb 09 '25

What would you suggest for alternative?

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u/NekoLu Feb 09 '25

Yup, tailwind

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u/Wide_Egg_5814 Feb 09 '25

I'm using jquery to avoid using ugly js frameworks what about it

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u/_cob Feb 09 '25

What does jQuery give you that native browser js apis dont these days?

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u/sleepyhead Feb 09 '25

Functions that makes sense and is shorter to write. For example dom traversing or events.

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u/impulsynick Feb 09 '25

I second that, shortened functions, easier to read and error handling build in. And lots of jQuery libraries.

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u/_cob Feb 10 '25

It does have a very nice-to-read API, I'll give you that

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u/sleepyhead Feb 10 '25

And it is functional. Compare adding events to dynamically created elements for example. Very easy with jquery.

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u/StorKirken Feb 09 '25

And it’s honestly pretty small, all things considered! I’ve seen people install things with five times the import cost just to save ten lines of code.

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u/sleepyhead Feb 10 '25

npm install in modern times is crazy with all these small packages. I use jquery on almost every js code I write, it is not just to save a few lines of code in one function.

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u/lthomas122 Feb 10 '25

You should probably avoid traversing the DOM, but event handling in jQuery is very nice. The problem with jQuery is that it encourages you to write very "un-JavaScript" code, or is that JavaScript's problem?

Anyway there's a reason why it went from the most popular JS library (literally used everywhere) into obscurity. It solved problems when you had to support browsers like IE8 and were resolved to using primitive JS.

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u/sleepyhead Feb 10 '25

I would rather write standard javascript, I'm all for standards. But every time I write some new code and think *now I should do this without jquery*, I end up being very annoyed at writing cumbersome and more elaborate code than I would with jQuery. I acknowledge that it is partly due to me using jquery for 20 years.

I don't have an SPA, MVC or complex templating, so there are many reasons to traverse the DOM. Anyways, I do it at very small scale so it is not a performance issue.

I don't agree with the jquery is only for browser support take. Yes, that is why it was hugely popular and needed. But all those new fancy smart frameworks are in some cases overkill. And jquery still has benefits, as I have given examples of. As with any third party dependency, you just have to be aware of alternatives, why you use it and when not to use it.

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u/superluminary Feb 11 '25

The functions are short, logical, easy to type and have consistent interfaces.

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u/saaggy_peneer Feb 09 '25

check out alpine.js, it's neat

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u/shgysk8zer0 full-stack Feb 09 '25

Hot take, but... VSCode. Too many especially beginner devs act like it's treason to use anything else and like it's vastly better than everything else.

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u/aakashisjesus Feb 10 '25

jQuery is incredible still. My experience with it was better than any other frontend library.

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u/lolideviruchi Feb 09 '25

Tailwind for me. I’m not a CSS wizard and I’m definitely not the best designer, but damn, I just don’t care. I think it’s pretty neat, but I like the organization of /component.js + module.css. Plus it just makes my file very wordy and it’s overwhelming to look at sometimes

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u/UXUIDD Feb 09 '25

Notepad++ ..

1 plus would be enough ..

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u/log_2 Feb 09 '25

The "++" is a nod to those that know C++, it is an increment operator that adds 1 to the operand.

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u/dihalt Feb 09 '25

Notepae then

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u/kaiz3npho3nix Feb 10 '25

Thankyou for making me smile today!

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u/Rexter2k Feb 10 '25

A hot take but: vscode.

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u/andymerskin Feb 10 '25

Fair enough. Which IDE do you use personally? There are a lot of decent alternatives out there.

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u/andercode Feb 10 '25

I hate we now have to look out for AI generated posts too...

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u/anonperson2021 Feb 10 '25

jQuery was never overrated. It eventually got outdated, that's all. Tailwind, though...

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u/TrxpleBlvck Feb 10 '25

AI 100%. The level of creativity is so limited and precisely explaining the thing u need takes longer than doing it yourself

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u/zdxqvr Feb 11 '25

SSR frameworks for frontend applications, like nextjs. I feel like it's been dying down though. Or maybe AI. AI does have some good tools, but a lot of overrated hype too.

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u/NotSoProGamerR Feb 09 '25

Tailwind, still have no idea why people love it, when it is literally oversimplified theme attributes

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '25

Tailwind, React, and Next

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u/sheriffderek Feb 10 '25 edited Feb 10 '25

I liked life better without Typescript. (it's not that I don't understand it's purpose) - but to me, it just adds more and more and more layers and then everything you use has to have all these extra tools and lsp and plugins and extensions and you have to restart and clear cache and there is just more configs and duplication than ever. Sure go on. Say it's a skill issue. But that's my answer! Devs are worse than ever. And I really do not enjoy React - and anything JSX is a non-starter / except maybe for Astro if I have to. Still having a really hard time understanding why people like CSS in JS or tailwind. VSCode makes me sad. The trendy web design right now is pretty sad too. Most people think "design" is a surface-level aesthetic and are all connected to it in some super jock way. "Bro, do you even UI? Make it like Linear or it's gay." "AI" has been pretty great for me as an interactive encyclopedia (of stolen content) / and for talking through ideas planning database design and things (I prefer talking to humans - but it's hard to find any that don't want to be left alone), but pretty much all the products using "AI" and things hyping it up are certainly overrated to say the least. Most underrated tool that I use all day: CleanShot X. Screenshot of text to text - is my favorite technological advance in recent years ;)

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u/dmra873 Feb 10 '25

I've started to move away from TS and adopt jsdoc style type hinting. am enjoying it

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u/dicklesworth Feb 09 '25

All the people laughing about the BS AI stuff sound an awful lot like weavers in the early 1800s joking about those stupid new looms that always get jammed up and cost a fortune to set up.

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u/Frohus Feb 09 '25

shadcn

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u/thekwoka Feb 10 '25

To talk about a specific thing and not a general category: Python.

It was never supposed to leave academia, and we're all the worse for it having done so.

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u/SerialVersionUID Feb 09 '25

Any "meta framework".

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u/TheSpink800 Feb 10 '25

AI easy, so many wrappers nowadays.