LankaPulse

LankaPulse began with a simple frustration: Sri Lankan readers have to jump between many websites to follow local and world news. Team Ctrl Freaks set out to build one friendly mobile app that brings both together in a warm orange design.

None of us were expert developers, so we worked with an AI coding agent. We described what we wanted in plain language, one feature at a time. In nine steps, the app grew from an idea into a working reader with a home feed, category chips, search, saved stories, a Colombo weather card, onboarding, and AI-powered summaries using Google Gemini. We tested it on our own phones using Expo Go.

Then real problems appeared. Live news would not load, and the app kept showing sample headlines. The Local tab was empty, and in dark mode the weather card was unreadable. Instead of giving up, we traced each problem to its cause:

The news parser silently skipped every article. The app had no deployed backend address to call. Local and World were treated as categories when they are really regions. The orange buttons and the dark weather card had poor contrast.

Fixing these taught us how a real app works: a backend collects news from RSS feeds, caches it, and serves it to the phone. It also taught us that building with AI is a conversation. Clear prompts, careful testing, and reading error messages matter more than writing code yourself.

To respect publishers, LankaPulse only shows headlines, short snippets, and a link to the original article. It never copies full stories.