Write CSS. Not too much. Mostly scoped.

A lot of this vibes with my experience.

The way Tailwind actively pushes against making hasty abstractions is — really — the smartest thing about it. In my experience, when you’re building something new you’re better off making something functional quickly and worrying about code elegance and deduplication and abstractions later, when you’re hopefully still in business. With a little practice, in a Tailwind project it’s relatively easy to get into a just-building-the-thing flow state. I get to shove the part of me that frets about good naming and specificity and leaking styles and efficient reuse into a drawer for a bit. It’s kinda nice.

As with anything, it’s tradeoffs all the way down.

First, Tailwind’s build tooling lets you define new classes on the fly in HTML. This can be relatively harmless like defining a one-off margin length. Or it could be like above with, sm:py-[calc(theme(spacing[1.5])-1px)] where you’re involving media queries, accessing Tailwind’s theme values, then doing math to make a one-off length and OK now admit we’re just writing CSS but doing so very awkwardly

That’s the point I often get to when using Tailwind. “Ok, can we just admit to ourselves we’re just writing CSS now, but awkwardly?”

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