TailwindCSS

Writing CSS used to mean maintaining a growing stylesheet full of class names that slowly diverged from the markup they were meant to style. TailwindCSS takes a different approach entirely — utility classes live directly in your HTML or JSX, so the styles are always exactly where you expect them and dead code is never a concern.

The version 4 release removed the tailwind.config.ts file in favor of a simple @theme block inside your CSS, which feels like a natural evolution. You define your design tokens — colors, spacing, fonts — once, and Tailwind generates the corresponding utility classes automatically. There's less ceremony and the mental overhead of maintaining a separate config shrinks considerably.

The thing that surprises most people who haven't used it is how well it scales. Utility classes sound like inline styles, but the constraint of a predefined scale means you're always working within a system rather than making arbitrary margin: 13px decisions. Combined with Prettier's Tailwind plugin for automatic class sorting, it becomes a genuinely pleasant way to build UI.