Building with Bolt: How Litinkai Came to Life

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.

Comments

[benjovi]

Hi, I'm Benjamin — I'm a DevOps Engineer, and I worked with my friend and ex-colleague @iamade on building Litinkai

He invited me to collaborate on the project and added me to the repo. Once he explained the vision and features, I was immediately excited to contribute — especially on the deployment side.

Being a DevOps engineer, my first task was to set up GitHub Actions for CI/CD. I cloned the repo, checked out into my branch, and started crafting workflows. Initially, I pushed my changes just to see the pipeline in action — only to realize I hadn’t built the app locally first. Lesson learned: always test locally before pushing.

So, I ran npm install and npm run dev as outlined in the README, tested the frontend locally, and once everything looked solid, I pushed again and watched the pipeline run smoothly.

Next up was the API — and that was a challenge. It was a Python-based backend, and I don’t work with Python projects too often. Still, I was up for it. I followed the README, set it up locally — and hit errors right away. After some troubleshooting, I realized my local Python version was outdated. I upgraded to the required version, ran it again, and this time it worked.

Feeling confident, I pushed the API code — only for the build to fail due to a character length issue in the workflow. I fixed the issue, verified everything locally again, and finally had a successful deployment.

But I didn’t stop there.

I suggested we dockerize the entire project to streamline the deployment. I created a Dockerfile and a docker-compose.yml to build both frontend and backend together — turning it into a full-stack deployment. It was exciting to see it all come together.

Eventually, we decided to deploy the frontend on Netlify. Since Netlify doesn't support backend APIs directly, I proposed we host the API on Render.com. We set it up there, added environment variables, and integrated Redis for caching. Finally, we connected a custom domain and had everything up and running.

What I’m most proud of is how I handled unfamiliar territory (Python, Redis, Render) and still delivered confidently. I also gained deeper insight into how different environments — Netlify, Render, GitHub Actions — each have unique quirks and workflows.

It was a great learning experience, and honestly, a lot of fun!

[Dotallio]

Honestly, your perseverance jumps off the page - super inspiring! What was the most surprising thing about building with Bolt.new compared to your usual workflow?