Introduction Two months ago I quit my retail job to go full indie. Then my laptop died. Since then, I’ve been building create-authenik8-app entirely on my phone , and it just crossed 177 runs with a new daily record of 51 yesterday. The idea was simple: I was tired of starting every new backend project by copy-pasting the same JWT + refresh token + Redis + RBAC code… and often getting parts of the security wrong. So I built a CLI that does it correctly from day one. npx create-authenik8-app my-app 30 seconds later you have a production-ready Express + TypeScript backend with secure authentication already solved. The Problem Most Developers Face Every backend needs authentication.…