Dingboard founder Yacine left X to focus on his meme-making app after the xAI merger turbocharged the codebase
Jun 23, 2025 with Yacine
Key Points
- Yacine left X after the xAI merger accelerated engineering velocity so dramatically that remote work became untenable, coinciding with the birth of his son and family resistance to relocation.
- Dingboard, his meme-making app, peaked at $10K MRR on a $12.99 monthly subscription; Yacine is rewriting it using a cross-platform graphics transpiler and explicitly rejects institutional funding.
- Yacine would return to a large tech company for $2.5M and targets Shopify or Cohere, while pursuing robotics ventures including a disposable lawn robot subscription and reinforcement learning research.
Summary
Yacine left X after the xAI merger accelerated the platform's engineering velocity to the point where remote work became untenable. His son is seven months old, his wife opposed the relocation timing, and when his manager asked him to come in, he declined. He was let go shortly after.
The xAI merger made staying difficult. Yacine used to read every commit pushed to the X codebase, clicking through his inbox to archive them one by one. After xAI engineers joined, that became impossible. The shipping pace was simply too high. He compares it to taking dinosaur material under extreme pressure to produce diamonds, and he was genuinely bullish on what was happening, which made the decision to leave harder.
Dingboard
Dingboard is a mobile meme-making tool. Yacine built it because a diagramming tool he used for memes added a watermark, so he decided to build his own. Peak monthly recurring revenue reached around $10K. He has explicitly dismissed raising a $15M institutional round as lame and has no interest in that path. Now working on it full-time, he is fixing bugs he never had time to address while employed.
The product costs $12.99 per month. He is mid-rewrite to deploy via a cross-platform GL transpiler called Soal, which lets him write graphics code once and compile to iOS, Android, and web from the same codebase.
Future projects
Yacine wants to become a billionaire through a series of small businesses that compound into something larger. His immediate project is the Dingbot, a cheap, disposable lawn robot built from 3D-printed parts, an ESP32 microcontroller, and AliExpress components totalling a few dollars. The subscription model costs $25 per month, with the assumption that robots break and get replaced. He plans to laser-etch "Made in Ottawa" on a maple wood chassis, with Chinese motors inside until he figures out how to manufacture his own.
He is also interested in reinforcement learning for task-specific robots, with dandelion removal as the concrete use case. He draws on his network at ETH Zurich for research and code support. He explicitly rules out humanoid robots.
Another idea is a parenting hardware concept: a pair of synced e-ink drawing tablets, one for the child and one for the parents, so families can write to each other over distance and teach handwriting in the process.
Developer tooling
Yacine uses a custom Neovim framework rather than Cursor, built around a local server that creates a facade across multiple LLM providers including Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini Flash, Claude, OpenAI, and DeepSeek via OpenRouter as fallback. Gemini 2.5 Pro is his primary coding model because of its cost, speed, and what he describes as sufficient intelligence for React-level work. He won't open-source the setup because he doesn't want to field issues.
Return price
Yacine says he would find it hard to say no to $2.5M to return to a large tech company. The companies he would consider are Shopify—he sold Dingboard t-shirts on it and respects founder Tobi Lütke—and Cohere, partly because it is closer to Ottawa than California and partly because Aidan Gomez wore a Death Grips t-shirt in an interview.