AIcowrite

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Creating your paper

Inspiration and what it does We’re a group of computer science students from Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania — not exactly the tech capital of the world, and frankly, not the easiest place to grow as future developers. We often feel like our program is stuck in the past, and it’s easy to question whether we’re truly preparing for the future. But instead of giving up, we decided to do something about it.

We wanted to build something meaningful, something students like us could use to overcome academic hurdles. After bouncing around ideas, we landed on AI-assisted writing. It felt right. It felt needed.

How we built it and what we learned With zero experience in building big projects, we dove in headfirst. There were sleepless nights. There were bugs that almost broke us. There were times we genuinely didn’t know what to do next.

But we kept going.

We spent a full month learning everything ourselves — APIs, OpenAI, Stripe, and more. None of it was taught in class. We learned it the hard way, together. And most importantly, we built it with Bolt. As amateur developers, Bolt’s beginner-friendly interface and smooth workflow helped us bring our vision to life. We honestly loved using it.

Challenges we ran into We had no experience building a full-stack project. None of us had led or even participated in something this complex before. We didn't know where to start. And once we did start, we didn’t always know what to do next.

We spent hours debugging basic errors, often stuck because we didn’t know what questions to ask.

Communicating as a team was tough. We’re all learning, and we often found ourselves unsure how to divide tasks or keep the project moving forward.

We hit roadblocks with integrating external APIs like OpenAI and Stripe — technologies we had to teach ourselves from scratch.

Deployment felt like a mountain. Figuring out how to host, test, and launch a working web app was one of our biggest hurdles.

Accomplishments that we're proud of We built a real product from scratch — with no roadmap, just determination and a lot of Googling.

We used real-world tools like Bolt, OpenAI, Stripe, and GitHub — things we don’t learn in class, but absolutely need in the field.

We created a fully functioning AI writing assistant that can help students just like us — and that feels amazing.

We learned how to work as a team. We got better at talking, sharing ideas, and supporting each other when things got tough.

We finished it. That might sound small, but for first-time developers juggling school, burnout, and a million uncertainties, it means everything.

What's next for AIcowrite We’re not stopping here. Our next step is to refine AIcowrite and take it to the next level — to the market, to real users, and hopefully, to classrooms where it can truly help others.

This may have started as just a project, but it became proof that we’re more capable than we thought. And that means everything to us.