Journal

Why I still write CSS by hand (with Tailwind)

Utility classes get a bad rap. Here is the workflow that made them click for me.

When I first met Tailwind I bounced off it hard. Long class strings felt like a regression. I had spent years naming things and now I was supposed to spray utilities everywhere?

What changed my mind was the feedback loop. With Tailwind I rarely leave the file I am working on. There is no second mental model: what I see is what gets shipped.

The trick is to lean on @apply for genuinely reused patterns and to extract a real component the moment a class string starts repeating in three places.

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