Building with Bolt: How Litinkai Came to Life

IAMADE — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 17:05:08 +0000

This is a submission for the World's Largest Hackathon Writing Challenge: Building with Bolt.

Where do I start? I'm just really grateful I got the chance to join this hackathon — and above all, that I was able to submit something. As an unemployed software developer, I had a lot to prove to myself. After more than 8 months of failed interviews, learning new concepts, and attending hackathons and tech events, the Bolt.new World's Largest Hackathon was the one that made the most impact.

I built three apps during the hackathon, but only managed to complete one in time for submission. It’s not perfect yet, but it works: https://litinkai.com

About the Project
Litinkai was the final name. It started out as Natural Intelligence Scholar, but I soon realized it needed a more engaging, entertainment-oriented identity. Litinkai stands for Literature Ink AI — with it, we aim to transform any book into immersive, AI-powered learning adventures or interactive entertainment experiences.

The future of reading is here: https://litinkai.com

The Journey
Starting a business has been on my mind for the last five years, and Bolt.new confirmed that I'm on the right path. After building with Bolt, there's no going back — I now feel unstoppable.

Litinkai is far from perfect. There are still bugs to fix. It’s AI-heavy, and we’re actively working on improving token usage, context management, and video generation quality.

One of the biggest challenges I had with the Bolt.new Agent was that it would constantly change the design and backend code after every prompt. That inconsistency led me to use Cursor as my local IDE — which turned out to be a great decision. I had actually deleted Cursor a year ago, believing that as a developer, I needed to "do things the hard way." But this time, it saved the day.

Thankfully, Bolt.new’s Discuss feature made up for the Agent’s quirks — that feature is just perfect.

To describe it in team terms:

Bolt.new was the Team Lead

Cursor was the Senior Dev

I was the CTO and CEO

Acknowledgments
A huge shoutout to Ben Durojaiye, the biggest, baddest DevOps engineer I know — and a key member of my team (who unfortunately forgot to accept the Devpost hackathon team invitation 😅).

Finally, a massive thank you to the Bolt.new team. Thank you for building such an inspiring platform and organizing this hackathon. You’ve helped bring my dream to life.

DEV Community: IAMADE

Building with Bolt: How Litinkai Came to Life