I've been writing CSS since it practically came into existence. Over the years, I've mastered every nuance of the cascade, specificity rules, and the art of writing maintainable stylesheets. I was proud of this expertise. But here's the uncomfortable truth: that very expertise made me blind to one of the most significant improvements in how we style web applications.

This is a story about Tailwind CSS, but more importantly, it's a story about how experience can sometimes be our biggest obstacle to growth.

The Cascade Mindset

The word "cascading" in Cascading Style Sheets isn't accidental. CSS was designed with a specific philosophy: styles flow from top to bottom, from parent to child, creating elegant inheritance patterns across entire HTML documents.

For decades, this made perfect sense. Servers rendered complete HTML pages, and CSS provided a beautiful way to define consistent styling from a central location. Write once, apply everywhere. The cascade was elegant, efficient, and exactly what we needed.

When JavaScript-based styling solutions started emerging, I dismissed them immediately. This goes against everything CSS stands for, I thought. And when Tailwind arrived with its utility-first approach? I was genuinely horrified.

The Horror of Utility Classes

I still remember my first encounter with Tailwind code. Endless strings of cryptic class names cluttering the HTML:

<div class="flex items-center justify-between p-4 bg-white rounded-lg shadow-md hover:shadow-lg transition-shadow duration-200">

"You can't be serious," I told my colleagues. "This is everything we've fought against for years. It's inline styles with extra steps. It violates separation of concerns. It will create maintenance nightmares. This is an anti-pattern!"

I was convinced that anyone who couldn't see these obvious problems simply didn't understand CSS deeply enough. They were naive developers seduced by a shiny new tool, unable to appreciate the elegance of properly structured stylesheets.

I was wrong.

The World Changed, I Didn't Notice

Here's what my experience-clouded judgment failed to recognize: the web development landscape had fundamentally shifted. We weren't building server-rendered pages anymore. We were building component-based applications.

In a world of React, Vue, and Angular, the cascade that CSS was designed for becomes a liability, not an asset. When you're building isolated components:

• Global styles become dangerous - A style change in one component can unexpectedly affect another
• Naming becomes a nightmare - You need increasingly complex BEM-style names to avoid conflicts
• Bundle size grows linearly - Every new component adds more CSS, even if it uses similar styles
• Context switching hurts productivity - Jumping between HTML and CSS files breaks flow

Shadow DOM attempted to solve the encapsulation problem, but it didn't address the fundamental issue of CSS bloat and the mental overhead of maintaining separate stylesheets.

The Tailwind Revelation

When I finally gave Tailwind an honest try, something clicked. The "problems" I saw were actually solutions to problems I refused to acknowledge:

• No naming decisions - I spent countless hours debating class names. With Tailwind, you just describe what you want
• True encapsulation - Styles are right there with the component, impossible to leak
• Constant bundle size - The CSS doesn't grow with your application because you're reusing utility classes
• Immediate visual feedback - Change a class, see the result, no file switching

Don't like the long class strings? Use the cn() function pattern to organize them across multiple lines. The structure is entirely up to you:

className={cn(
  "flex items-center justify-between",
  "p-4 bg-white rounded-lg",
  "shadow-md hover:shadow-lg",
  "transition-shadow duration-200"
)}

Tailwind didn't ignore CSS principles out of ignorance. It recognized that those principles were designed for a different era and offered a pragmatic solution for today's component-based world.

The AI Era Vindication

And then came AI-assisted development, and Tailwind's approach proved almost prophetic.

When you ask an AI to style a component, Tailwind is the perfect language. The styling is declarative, explicit, and directly attached to the elements. No need to understand complex cascade relationships, no hunting through separate files, no worrying about unintended side effects.

AI can read a Tailwind component and immediately understand exactly how it looks. It can modify styles with precision because everything is right there, explicit and self-contained. The directness that I once dismissed as primitive turned out to be exactly what modern tooling needed.

What I called an anti-pattern was actually ahead of its time.

The Lesson in Humility

This experience taught me something valuable about expertise. Deep knowledge in any field creates mental models, strong opinions about how things should work. These models are usually helpful, but they can also become prisons.

When a new approach violates your mental model, you have two choices:

1. Assume the new approach is wrong because it doesn't fit your model
2. Question whether your model still applies in the current context

I chose the first option for far too long. My expertise in "how CSS should work" blinded me to the reality that the problems CSS was designed to solve had changed.

Experience vs. Adaptability

This doesn't mean experience is worthless. Far from it. Experience gives us pattern recognition, helps us avoid known pitfalls, and provides the foundation for understanding new concepts.

But experience needs a companion: intellectual humility.

• When something new gains traction despite your objections, ask yourself why it's succeeding
• When younger developers embrace something you reject, consider that they might see something you don't
• When your criticism sounds like "this isn't how it was designed to work," question whether that original design still applies

Technologies like Tailwind succeeded not despite experienced developers' objections, but often in spite of them. The industry moved forward, and some of us grumpy veterans eventually had to admit we were wrong.

Moving Forward

Today, Tailwind is essentially a standard in modern web development. The community has grown, the tooling is excellent, and even the most skeptical developers have largely come around. I'm one of them.

But I try to carry this lesson with me: the next time something new comes along that violates my deeply held beliefs about "how things should work," I'll try to pause. I'll try to understand the problem it's solving, the context it was designed for, and whether my mental models are still relevant.

Because sometimes, the grumpy old developer convinced that everyone else is wrong... is the one who needs to learn something new.