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The single reason I do not use Tailwind CSS—It's inefficient for prototyping

mradcliffe June 6, 2026
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At this week's ColumbusJS Meetup where Nathan Lieberman presented on Tailwind CSS, I once again complained about the fact that I cannot use Tailwind CSS to prototype in the browser without context switching back to an editor. It is probably the single reason I do not use Tailwind CSS.

To explain the problem again, the work flow for using Tailwind CSS is inefficient:

  1. Add/remove/change CSS class in IDE or editor guessing what would work.
  2. Wait for hot reload.
  3. Change to a browser to visually test.
  4. Change back to IDE or editor to refine
  5. Wait for hot reload.
  6. Change to a browser to visually test.
  7. Repeat

Whereas I like to prototype directly in the browser:

  1. Make multiple possible changes in browser web inspector to visually test, refine, and complete without ever leaving the browser.
  2. Change to IDE
  3. Make change in IDE
  4. Hot Reload

This is because Tailwind CSS always has its slimmed down version.

I I've written about this before, but this time I tried again to search for maybe a plugin or solution to this problem, but either without the correct search key words on NPM, search engines being useless, or it still simply not existing, I could not find a solution.

So if anyone wants a suggestion to make Tailwind CSS usable for prototyping, then that would be it—Give me the kitchen sink in development mode.

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