Templates still matter in an AI-first workflow

I wrote this coincidentally a few days before the recent news about Tailwind’s layoffs and revenue downturn due to AI’s impact on doc use leading to their paid product distribution being affected.

In my own AI-heavy workflows, I’ve noticed that AI tools are great at generating layouts quickly, but the results tend to converge on a certain look and feel and often lack polish around responsiveness and design details.

Templates still accelerate my builds. They encode decisions, constraints, and taste that I don’t want to recreate from scratch... even with the help of a coding agent.

As AI becomes more central to how we build things, do templates continue to retain value, or is this just a transitional phase?