# "The Electrical Engineer Is Here!": a 30k-follower snarky EE used a personal account to boost Backplane, which gained over 900 stars in two months, with roughly 20 people using it each day · GitHub open source project

> Source: https://stringers.io/en/github/gh_BackplaneWorks__Backplane.html (Stringers / 什么值得做, generated 2026-11-08)
> Stringers answers one question every day: what small product can one or two people build in a few months and actually make money from. Numbers come from 15 databases we collect daily, each with source and date.
> For agents: these verdicts and the underlying databases (verified revenue, App Store / Google Play charts, ad libraries, GitHub, Product Hunt…) are queryable live over MCP — tools today / hot / products / directions / direction / data. Setup: https://github.com/komako-workshop/stringers (the user logs in at stringers.io → "配置 agent" to get a personal URL). Site index: https://stringers.io/llms.txt

> The author @i2cjak is an electrical engineer influencer with 30k followers, whose viral posts often reach tens of thousands of likes. Over two months he posted about it almost daily. Combined with the hot "AI for CAD" topic and resentment toward paid hosted platforms, he loudly pushed "free, local, no token sales."

[GitHub open-source project](https://stringers.io/en/github/index.md) · written 11-6

BackplaneWorks/Backplane · BackplaneWorks

# "The Electrical Engineer Is Here!": a 30k-follower snarky EE used a personal account to boost Backplane, which gained over 900 stars in two months, with roughly 20 people using it each day

**What it is** An open-source, free desktop workbench that lets your existing coding agent design circuit boards through a modified KiCad and FreeCAD. You watch it work and give feedback in the built-in board, schematic, and 3D viewers.

**Why it took off** The author, @i2cjak, is an electrical engineer influencer with 30k followers whose posts often get tens of thousands of likes. Over two months he posted about it almost daily. Combined with the buzz around "AI doing CAD" and people's frustration with paid hosted platforms, the pitch of "free, local, no token resale" landed hard.

**C** **How you could follow this** Don't build another KiCad wrapper. If you work in a specialist field and have some audience, copy the skeleton: fork a mature agent interface, plug in your field's open-source software and viewers, keep it free and local with users bringing their own agent, and acquire users by consistently sharing physical builds.

C grade: the stars mostly came from the author's personal account traffic, which followers can't replicate. AI + KiCad already has several open-source projects (up to 4000 stars) and funded SaaS players. What you can learn is the skeleton of a vertical-domain agent workbench and the influencer-driven funnel. Chatter in small circles

Data (updated daily) · Repo created 2026-09-06 · 944 stars · 7 days +105

GitHub · stars

Data 2026-10-18 → 2026-11-08 (22 days, 21 observations). Points before 10-28 come from deeply / archive backfill, not every day has one

On the evening of Nov 1, 2026, X user @i2cjak posted: "averaging like 20 daily users for Backplane which is cool. About to announce alpha. YIPEE" (Backplane averaging 20 users a day, pretty cool, about to announce alpha). By then the repo had 840 stars. Stars ran 40 times the user count, and the reason lies with the author: he is an electrical engineer on X known for the "electrical engineer here!" series of jokes, where single posts often get tens of thousands of likes. Backplane itself isn't hard to build. What's hard is that account.

### What it is

An open-source, free desktop workbench that lets the coding agents you already use (Claude, Codex, Grok, OpenCode, etc.) design circuit boards. The author forked KiCad (based on 10.0.6) and added interfaces that let external programs modify boards and schematics. Agents change designs through these interfaces rather than rewriting files directly, and humans can keep editing the result in KiCad. Mechanical work connects to FreeCAD.

You watch the agent work in its built-in PCB, schematic, 3D and STEP viewers. Click a component and pin review comments right onto the board for the agent to act on. It also has design history with version diffs, BOM / ERC / DRC checks, one-click quote and order, and a resident "Cat bot" that reminds you which part isn't ordered yet and where production stands. Desktop, web, iOS (TestFlight) and Android all supported.

A few details:

- 2026-09-06 repo was created as T3CAD, forked from Theo's T3 Code (a coding agent GUI with 48k stars). It was renamed Backplane three days later. The GUI and the multi-agent shell were already there, so two people shipped 26 releases in two months. Nearly all commits are from i2cjak (3016 commits) and jlcjak (1144 commits).

- The description says "written in Bend," but no Bend appears in GitHub's language stats. The author is making a joke.

- Completely free: no token sales, no subscription, design files are not uploaded. The author does hardware contracting and product work for a living, and Backplane looks more like his showcase (inferred).

### Where the stars came from

**Most of the buzz comes from the author's personal account.** @i2cjak has 30.4K followers. His signature format opens with "electrical engineer here!" and then confidently spouts nonsense, like "electrical engineer here! this antenna design got banned 1942 years ago." Single posts reach 28k likes and 1.79M views. His biggest hit has 140k likes and 13.9M views. Posts on October 15, 23 and 27 each drew 36k to 45k likes (X, 11-06 pulled).

Most of these viral posts have nothing to do with Backplane, but when people click through to his profile, the bio and pinned post are about Backplane. Over two months he posted dozens of posts specifically about Backplane, each getting 50 to 400 likes. They cover what boards he designed with it, photos of the physical boards that came back, and repeated emphasis on "it's free."

**He sells "free" against hosted SaaS.** "AI designs PCBs" is already crowded with Flux.ai, which raised $37M, and HeyPCB-style platforms that hand out AI credits. Many engineers worry about getting ripped off or having their designs seen by others. His Oct 31 post addresses each of these worries in turn:

> - "no AI can finish a real PCB all on its own!!!" Yes! I agree with you! - "erm I don't want to give you my designs" you don't have to! … It's all local!!! - "I'm not paying for this" I agree!!! You don't!!! It's FOSS!!!

("AI can't design a real board!" Agreed! "I don't want to give you my design" You don't have to! It all runs locally! "I don't want to pay" Agreed! You don't have to pay! It's open source!)

Another post on Nov 4: "Backplane has no competitors. we're not competing. it's free. we don't even sell tokens!"

**The persona makes it credible.** A person who really designs boards, posts physical results daily, and mocks software engineers who pretend to know hardware is more effective than any landing-page copy in a field where people broadly suspect "AI PCB design is a gimmick." Electronics YouTuber Zack's Lab challenged him with "if it can design this, I'll uninstall Altium," which itself became another round of content.

**Riding a hot topic.** From 2026 to October 9, new-gen models kept getting pitched as the best "agentic CAD" models, and Quilter demoed AI routing traces in Altium, so the topic is hot. AI-circle account yacineMTB quoted him twice around the time he built the library ("He's building the exact things I need", 873 likes).

**By the numbers** : 10-18 has 522 stars, and 11-06 has 929. The biggest single-day jump was +125 on 10-20. The cause isn't confirmed, but it likely involves the Japanese README post the day before, another 10k-like viral post that day, and someone linking it in an HN thread. The alpha launch on Nov 4 (14k views, 398 likes) was followed by gains of 37 and 24 over the next two days (from GitHub's daily star records). We found no ads, Product Hunt launch, self-posted Show HN, or Reddit posts.

### Who it's competing with

| Project | Form | Scale (early November) | How it differs from Backplane |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flux.ai | Web SaaS | 2026-02 raised $37M | Proprietary EDA, subscription pricing |
| Quilter | Web / extension | 2025 Series B, $25M | Auto place-and-route only, plugs into Altium / Cadence |
| HeyPCB | Web | Not verified | Hosted platform, uses the platform's tokens |
| atopile / tscircuit | Open source | 4042 / 2945 star | Circuits written as code, not KiCad |
| KiCAD-MCP-Server | Open source | 3167 stars, +146 in the last 7 days | Just an MCP server, no GUI |
| kicad-happy | Open source | 1591 star | Review skill for agents, doesn't modify designs |
| Backplane | Open source | 929 stars, +110 in the last 7 days | Full GUI workbench, i.e. KiCad itself |

(GitHub,11-06)

Interestingly, KiCAD-MCP-Server, with no GUI and a little-known author, has 3167 stars. That's more than twice Backplane's, and it grew faster this week. So demand for "AI + KiCad" exists without influencers, and this path is already crowded.

### Could you build one yourself?

**Building another one on KiCad isn't worth it.** There are already several MCP servers, skill packs, and AI-sidebar KiCad forks. Backplane has the most complete GUI among them, and it has a big account behind it. Latecomers will struggle to get past a thousand stars here.

**Worth a try: copy the skeleton into another domain.** The move is: fork a mature agent GUI, layer a viewer and tools for a specialist domain on top, and let users subscribe with their own agent. It fits domains like mechanical CAD, 3D print slicing, biological sequences, and quant backtesting, where file formats are specialized, visualization is needed, and only SaaS options exist. The author is already expanding into FreeCAD (Nov 4: "did some mechanical CAD stuff in Backplane w/ FreeCAD. it's literally over man"), so he could take the mechanical CAD space at any time.

**A small move you can take:** open-source the agent skill pack separately. Its sibling KiStack already has 421 stars and was later bundled into the main product.

### If it were you

**Verdict** : don't chase Backplane itself. Its stars mostly come from the author's account, and AI + KiCad already has plenty of open-source projects and funded SaaS. What's worth learning is the "vertical agent workbench" skeleton, and how a persona-driven engineer funneled broad traffic into his open-source project.

**Good fit** : you work in a specialist field (mechanical, biology, finance, audio/video), already have a small audience on X or YouTube, and are comfortable modifying an existing agent GUI.

**Bad fit** : anyone with no audience who plans to build another AI tool on KiCad and wait for stars to come.

**How to do it** : fork a mature agent GUI like T3 Code, connect it to open-source software in your field (add an interface the agent can call), build a native viewer so people can watch the agent edit and review directly. Make local, free, and bring-your-own-agent the selling points, aimed squarely at hosted SaaS. Open-source the skill pack separately to build stars first.

**How to get users** : keep posting physical-result posts on X ("I used it to build a real thing"), each with a repo link. Ride the field's news (a SaaS funding round, a model claiming the best CAD performance). Try to get one or two AI-circle big accounts to repost. Without an audience, spend months posting interesting specialist content to build one. That's harder than the project itself.

**When to get in before it's too late** : the hype for "agent-driven specialist software" probably peaks in the first half of 2027 (inferred). After that, the vendors will build AI in themselves, and the novelty of open-source workbenches will fade.

**What would show you've misread it** : if Backplane's stars keep growing steadily after the author cuts posting, or daily actives climb from 20 to several hundred or thousand, the product itself is retaining users, not just the author's account. Then the parts it hasn't done well yet on the KiCad path (like autorouting) would be worth reconsidering.

[GitHub repo ↗](https://github.com/BackplaneWorks/Backplane)

**Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report**

Competitors

| Name | Where | Launched | Scale | How it differs from this one |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flux.ai | Web | 2021 | 2026-02 raised $37M (led by 8 VC) | Hosted proprietary EDA, subscription pricing. Backplane runs locally, is free, uses native KiCad formats, and lets users bring their own agent. |
| Quilter | Web | 2024 | 2025-10 Series B, $25M | Focused on auto place-and-route under physical constraints, plugs into Altium/Cadence. Backplane uses general LLM agents for the full workflow. |
| HeyPCB | Web | 2026 | Unverified; advertises 11k open-source boards and gives out AI credits | Hosted platform plus platform tokens. Backplane sells no tokens and doesn't upload files. |
| ProtoFlow | Other | 2026 | Not verified | Homegrown desktop EDA, exports to KiCad. Backplane is directly a KiCad fork. |
| mixelpixx/KiCAD-MCP-Server | Open source | 2025-04 | 3167 stars, +146 in the last 7 days | Just an MCP server, with no GUI, viewer, or history |
| aklofas/kicad-happy | Open source | 2026-03 | 1591 stars | Agent review skill pack, doesn't modify designs directly |
| KiCad Agentic MCP / DCENT_Konduit / Zeo / kicad-mcp-pro | Open source | 2026 | Dozens to hundreds of stars | Plugin or MCP form, no multi-agent workbench |
| atopile / tscircuit | Open source | 2023 / 2024 | 4042 / 2945 stars | Circuits written as code, a different design approach. Backplane stays with KiCad. |

Where users come from

- **Verified** **The author's personal X account (30.4K followers) posts frequently and drives traffic with viral posts on broad topics** : @i2cjak 10-15/10-23/10-27 three posts got 37k, 45k, and 36k likes, with 500k to 1.6M views. Over two months he posted dozens of posts specifically about Backplane, each getting 50 to 400 likes (live X pulls via TikHub).

- **Verified** **AI-circle big account reposts** : yacineMTB 08-19 quote (1303 likes), 09-05 "He's building the exact things I need" (873 likes)

- **Verified** **Alpha launch thread** : 2026-11-04 "Backplane is now available in alpha" 14k views, 398 likes, v0.14.x shipped the same day, then 11-05 +37 stars

- **Verified** **Physical-result photos and influencer interaction** : the author and jlcjak posted photos of boards returned by JLCPCB; Zack's Lab issued the challenge; Driveline's Kyle Boddy posted about using it

- Inferred **HN comments and Japanese README** : 10-16 an HN thread "AI-assisted PCB design for KiCad 10" had someone link it in comments; 10-19 posted a Japanese-language version, 10-20 +125 stars, causation unconfirmed

- **Verified** **Third-party coverage** : a hermes-ai.net press release; Spanish-language account @0xKapri 11-05 (141 likes)

## Why Backplane (BackplaneWorks/Backplane) took off

> Channel: GitHub. Research date 2026-11-06. Data: our github repo (repo_profile / data card, tracked daily from 2026-10-18), GitHub API, live X (TikHub), Jina web search.

### One line

Backplane is a free, open-source desktop workbench for "agents doing hardware": it lets Claude, Codex, Grok or whatever coding agent you already use edit design files directly through a modified KiCad (with an IPC interface for the board and schematic) and FreeCAD. You watch it work in the built-in PCB, schematic, 3D and STEP viewers, click components, and write review comments. **What makes it take off isn't really the product. It's that the author, i2cjak, is a grumpy electronics-engineer creator on X with 30K followers whose posts often get tens of thousands of likes. Over two months he posted about Backplane almost daily, funneling his personal account's traffic to the repo.**

### 1. What it is

- The repo was created on 2026-09-06 under the MIT license. It was originally named **T3CAD** , forked from Theo's T3 Code (pingdotgg/t3code, 48k stars, a coding agent GUI). It was renamed Backplane on 2026-09-09 (X post by @i2cjak 2026-09-09: "T3CAD has been renamed to Backplane"; 10-13 he also asked GitHub on X to detach the fork relationship, "so I can keep my stars").

- The bio says "written in Bend," but GitHub's language stats don't list Bend at all (JS 6.0MB, TS 2.6MB, Python 2.4MB, Swift, Kotlin...). It's a bit the author is playing with (X 2026-09-24: "Backplane is being rewritten in Bend b/c uhhhh").

- Features: works with multiple agents (Claude, Codex, Grok, OpenCode, Muse, Antigravity, Pi); its own KiCad fork (Backplane_KiCad, based on KiCad 10.0.6 with an added IPC interface); change history and version diffs; BOM / ERC / DRC checks; a "Buy it" button to request quotes and order directly; plus a full agent orchestration layer (threads, sub-agents, cross-vendor delegation, a resident bot called "catbot" with webhooks, email, and a "space" web page). Available on desktop, web, iOS (TestFlight), and Android.

- Team: nearly all commits are from i2cjak (3016 times) and jlcjak (1144 times). The same org also hosts KiStack (a "human-written" agent skill pack for KiCad, 421 stars), which is bundled into Backplane. The BackplaneWorks org was created 2026-10-26, and the repo was transferred from i2cjak's personal account.

- Business: completely free, no token sales, no subscription (X 2026-11-05: "Backplane has no competitors… it's free. we don't even sell tokens!"). The author runs a hardware outsourcing / product business (X 2026-10-28: "proto-Backplane is being used on client projects"). Backplane looks more like an open-source project that drives traffic to a personal brand and consulting business.

### 2. Growth data

- Stars: 2026-10-18 had 522 → 11-06 now has 929 (data card), live via GitHub API 936. Forks 70. Last 7 days +110, the week before +141; peak single day +125 on 10-20 (github repo).

- Downloads: each of the last few releases has had several hundred installer downloads (v0.14.1 608, v0.13.1 459, v0.12.3 560, GitHub Releases API).

- **Very few real users** : the author himself said on X, "averaging like 20 daily users for Backplane" (2026-11-02), before announcing alpha. Stars far outpace actual usage.

- Ranking among peers (github repo, by stars): KiCAD-MCP-Server 3167, atopile 4042, tscircuit 2945, kicad-happy 1591, Backplane 929. But over the last 7 days Backplane gained 110 stars, only 146 fewer than KiCAD-MCP-Server, and far ahead of kicad-happy's 52 and tscircuit's 41.

### 3. Competitors

| Name | Where | When | Scale | How it differs from Backplane |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flux.ai | Web SaaS | From ¥2021 | 2026-02 raised 37M US dollars led by 8VC | A proprietary EDA in the browser, AI built in, paid by subscription. Backplane runs locally, its files are native KiCad format, and it uses your own agent subscription. |
| Quilter | Web / extension | 2025 Series B, $25M (led by Index) | Focuses on automatic layout and routing under physical constraints, integrates with Altium / Cadence | Layout only. Backplane leaves everything to general LLM agents, and the author admits routing still has to be done by hand. |
| HeyPCB | Web | 2026 | Promotes 11k open-source boards and gives away AI credits | Hosted, uses the platform's tokens. The author specifically rewrote its copy as "Backplane is the free one" to compare (X 2026-10-14). |
| ProtoFlow | Desktop | 2026 | Its own benchmark, PCBWorld-Bench | Built its own EDA that exports to KiCad. Backplane is KiCad itself. |
| mixelpixx/KiCAD-MCP-Server | Open source | 2025-04 | 3167 stars, +146 in the last 7 days | Just an MCP server, with no UI, viewer, or history. Backplane is a complete workbench with a UI. |
| aklofas/kicad-happy | Open source | 2026-03 | 1591 stars | A review skill for agents that doesn't change the design. Backplane's equivalent is its in-house KiStack. |
| KiCad Agentic MCP, DCENT_Konduit, Zeo (a KiCad fork with an AI sidebar), kicad-mcp-pro, ALT TAB Copilot | Open source / plugins | 2026 | All small-scale (dozens to hundreds of stars) | Plugin or MCP form, no multi-agent orchestration |
| Adam(adam.new) | Commercial | 2026 | A single X post can get thousands of likes | Mechanical CAD (Fusion) space, not electronics |
| atopile / tscircuit | Open source | 2023 / 2024 | 4042 / 2945 stars | Circuits written as code, a different design approach. Backplane stays with KiCad. |

Bottom line: the "AI + KiCad" lane is crowded with open-source MCPs and funded SaaS. Backplane is not the first, nor the one with the most stars.

### 4. Where users came from (growth tactics)

1. **The author's personal account is the main channel (confirmed)** . @i2cjak has 30.4K followers on X. His persona is a "caustic EE chud": an electrical engineer who swears at and mocks software engineers, and he often has viral posts: one post with 37k likes and 500k views (10-15), another with 45k likes and 1.6M views (10-23), another with 36k likes and 670k views (10-27) (X data pulled live via TikHub). Most of these viral posts have nothing to do with Backplane, but they bring people to his profile, where the bio and pinned post mention Backplane. Posts specifically about Backplane get roughly 50 to 400 likes each, and there have been dozens over two months: what board was built with Backplane, "Backplane is free," and riding on trends (HeyPCB, Quilter, CircuitHub, OpenAI Astra).

2. **A big AI account gave a boost (confirmed)** . yacineMTB retweeted and quoted him several times (08-19 1303 likes; 09-05 "He's building the exact things I need" 873 likes). This happened around when the repo was being set up, and it brought him into the AI and hacker circles.

3. **Official alpha release (confirmed)** . 11-04 posted a thread, "Backplane is now available in alpha" (14k views, 398 likes). v0.14.0 and v0.14.1 shipped the same day. Stars rose over the following days (11-05 +37, 11-06 +24). A Spanish-language tech account, @0xKapri, relayed it (141 likes, 11-05), and hermes-ai.net published a news write-up.

4. **Why 10-20 got +125 (guess, not verified)** : the day before, the author posted the Japanese README ("Backplane Japan"). That day, another post of his (about the helium shortage) took off: 10.7k likes, 230k views. 10-16 In an HN thread, "AI-assisted PCB design for KiCad 10", someone linked Backplane, and the author said "seeing mentions of backplane on the Orange site". Our HN database has no Show HN from Backplane itself.

5. **Using user cases as content (confirmed)** : the author and jlcjak used Backplane to design boards and actually ordered them (JLCPCB), posting photos of the physical boards. Zack's Lab (an electronics YouTuber) challenged it: "If it can design this, I'll uninstall Altium." Driveline's Kyle Boddy also posted about building hardware with Backplane.

6. **YouTube** : the author's channel @i2cjak has 5.6K subscribers, and his PCB review videos get 16k views. He has mentioned planning a Backplane video (09-09), but whether it was published is unverified.

7. **Not found** : ads, Product Hunt, his own Show HN, Reddit posts.

### 5. Why it charted

- **The author brings his own traffic** : 30K followers plus viral posts that often reach tens of thousands of likes, which peer open-source projects don't have. The star curve basically follows his posting schedule.

- **Believable persona** : "real electrical engineers," "HUMAN WRITTEN skills," "hardware is hard, and the software engineers who pretend to know EE never order a board." In a space where people suspect "AI PCB design is a cash grab," an EE who really designs boards and keeps posting photos of the finished product is more convincing than any SaaS marketing.

- **Good timing** : from 2026 9 to October, GPT-6 Astra and Fable 5.1 were promoted one after another as the SOTA for "agentic CAD" (an adamdotnew post got 7228 likes on X). Quilter was also using Astra to drive Altium routing. The topic itself was hot.

- **The "free, local, bring your own agent" stance** : no token sales, design files are not uploaded. It rides directly on the resentment toward hosted SaaS like Flux and HeyPCB (r/KiCad has a post titled "Do not use flux.ai").

- **Built on T3 Code** : the UI and multi-agent shell are forked directly from T3 Code, which has 48k stars. Two people shipped desktop, web, and mobile versions in two months, and the releases come fast (26 releases).

### 6. Differentiation

Compared with MCP servers and skill packs, Backplane is a **complete workbench** . It has native PCB, schematic, 3D, and STEP viewers, highlights linked between schematic and board, lets you pin review comments on the board for agents to see, keeps design history, and can place orders. Agents change the design through the modified KiCad's IPC interface rather than rewriting files directly, so humans can keep editing the output. Compared with Flux / HeyPCB / ProtoFlow: **free, local, the user's own agent subscription, and actual KiCad** . The differentiation is real, but it isn't the main reason stars rose. Daily active users are around 20 (the author's own figure), so the product is still early. Attention came from the author's traffic, and the differentiation gave engineers a reason to star it, the sense that this is the right way to do it.

### 7. How many people saw it and whether anyone copied it

- Visibility: **circulating in small circles** . Mostly within the author's X circle (EEs and AI hackers). Outside that, I found only a hermes-ai.net news write-up, a Spanish-language account relaying it, and someone mentioning it in HN comments. No mainstream coverage, no Show HN front page, and no revenue (it's free by design).

- Copycats: none found that directly copy Backplane. kistack.io is a third-party site that uses the KiStack name for SEO and compares three KiCad skill packs. It piggybacks on the name rather than copying.

### 8. What others can borrow

- An engineer influencer with a persona plus an open-source tool. Broad-topic viral posts bring people to the profile, the product is pinned, and frequent "I made X with it" photos turn attention into stars.

- Fork a mature agent GUI (T3 Code), add vertical-specific viewers and tools, and you can quickly ship an "agentic workbench" for a niche (CAD, electronics, biology, quant trading all fit this pattern).

- "Free, local, bring your own agent, no token sales" is itself the pitch, aimed squarely at hosted SaaS.

- Open-source the skill pack (KiStack) separately, collect stars first, then bundle it into the main product.

### 9. Still unclear

- The direct source of 10-20's +125 in one day (the stargazer list API returned 404, so per-star timestamps aren't available).

- Actual downloads and retention: only the author's own claim of "about 20 users a day" and hundreds of downloads per release.

- How it makes money: no revenue at present. It may be funneling traffic to the author's hardware consulting / product business. Whether it has raised funding is unverified.

- Whether there are dedicated Backplane videos on YouTube.

This article was written by AI from public data and the data we collect daily. Numbers are sourced, and inferences are labeled.