# How I Built an AI-Powered Literature Review Tool for Thesis Students

A solo developer built LitAssist, a full-stack web app that automates academic literature reviews by scraping Google Scholar, Scopus, and Semantic Scholar, processing results through a hybrid Node.js + Python pipeline, and generating AI summaries via Google Gemini 2.5 Flash. The hardest engineering challenge was handling Google Scholar's CAPTCHA blocking, solved by embedding a noVNC panel so users can solve CAPTCHAs in real-time without breaking the scraping flow.