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CP Caleb Porzio Caleb Porzio Creator of Livewire, Alpine.js and Flux UI, open source tools that let Laravel developers build interactive frontends without leaving PHP. Writes and records No...

“One of the findings that we found is AI produces worse results with Tailwind than with pure HTML and CSS. So we don't even use Tailwind in Paraframe anymore. … Ask AI how many pixels padding are in this card. It has to add up like MT1, PB4, all these words of Tailwind. Where with CSS, it just spatially knows things better. So with Tailwind, we were getting so much misalignment.”

Laravel Podcast · Laravel Ecosystem · November 2026

“One of the findings that we found is AI produces worse results with Tailwind than with pure HTML and CSS. So we don't even use Tailwind in Paraframe anymore. … Ask AI how many pixels padding are in this card. It has to add up like MT1, PB4, all these words of Tailwind. Where with CSS, it just spatially knows things better. So with Tailwind, we were getting so much misalignment.” — Caleb Porzio, Laravel Podcast

Context

Asked whether his new AI design tool Paraframe assumes users are on Tailwind, Caleb Porzio says his team dropped it internally. The model made more layout mistakes with utility classes than with plain CSS.

Read the original → More from Caleb Porzio → More Laravel Ecosystem quotes →

Transcript

Laravel Podcast Around 47:42 into the episode
Caleb Porzio

…it wasn't going to be in Infinite Canvas for the longest time. So a lot of it's about sort of the secret sauce. And it has nothing to do with Flux. We just eventually realize that all of our stuff applies more broadly than Flux entirely. So it learns the style of your app and such, but there's

Matt Stauffer

assuming that they are going to be doing at least Tailwind. Like you're not doing it.

Caleb Porzio

No. So one of the findings that we found is AI produces worse results with Tailwind than with pure HTML and CSS. So we don't even use Tailwind in Paraframe anymore. And this is crazy. And this is why I think this is my hypothesis. You know how you ask AI how many E's are in 17 and it's wrong because that's not what it's good at? Ask AI how many pixels padding are in this card. It has to add up like MT1, you know, PB4, you know, like all these like words of Tailwind. Where with CSS, it just like spatially knows things better. So with Tailwind, we were getting so much misalignment, so many misalignments was the biggest one. And so when you switch over to HTML and CSS, it's like, this is indistinguishable. You can't see a difference. It doesn't look any worse. It's just everything is way more on the rails. I'm

Matt Stauffer

going to give you a feature request right now.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Matt Stauffer

Give me an export via Tailwind button. Your whole app run, hold on, your whole app runs in CSS.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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