I've been a huge fan of tailwind for over half a decade. Partially because it's a great library but also because it was cool to see a small team ship and maintain a functional business while maintaining it. It's been tough to see they had to lay off most of their engineers because of LLMs and I was happy to see them get back in the ring with a new product: ui.sh.

The experience of ui.sh is pretty interesting too. From the outset, it just looks like a skill that tells the LLM to be more helpful in design tasks. One of my favorite features is that it can make 4 designs for your site that you can review as part of the feedback cycle. It's a nice touch.

But if they had made a new business out of sharing a few text files they'd be ripe for total disruption again. So instead, the skill points to an MCP that they have full control over. The agent can talk to it, but only if I keep paying for the service.

And that is almost more interesting. The MCP hype never really landed with me, but this setup makes a lot of sense. The MCP lets businesses connect to agents in a way that a CLI never really could. You could find ways to inspect the CLI, but you can't see what's on the other side of the MCP wall.

And if this is a way for great projects to maintain their standing, I'm all for it.