#tailwind#css#frontend

Tailwind CSS at scale — when it breaks

Tailwind ships fast for small projects. On a codebase with 50+ developers and 5 years of history, the cracks show.

Small project: Tailwind beats vanilla CSS on every metric. No naming, no specificity wars, instant prototyping.

Big project pain: HTML becomes unreadable past 10 utility classes per element. Refactor of design tokens means find-replace across 1000s of files.

Solutions: extract repeating patterns into components or @apply directives. Build a design system on top of Tailwind, not raw utilities.

Or: switch to vanilla CSS with PostCSS for variables. Boring, scales linearly.

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