Use Claude to Scaffold a FastAPI Application with Auth

FastAPI's async-first design and automatic docs are great — but the boilerplate for JWT auth, schemas, and routing still slows you down. Let Claude bootstrap the whole thing.

Scaffold a FastAPI app with JWT authentication. Include /auth/register and /auth/login endpoints, a /users/me protected route, SQLAlchemy models for User, and Pydantic schemas. Use bcrypt for password hashing and Alembic for migrations.

Claude generates the full project structure with working auth middleware, a reusable get_current_user dependency, and wired-up OpenAPI schemas — so /docs shows the lock icon on every protected route automatically.

The generated dependency looks like this:

async def get_current_user(
    token: str = Depends(oauth2_scheme),
    db: AsyncSession = Depends(get_db),
) -> User:
    payload = jwt.decode(token, SECRET_KEY, algorithms=[ALGORITHM])
    user = await db.get(User, payload.get("sub"))
    if not user:
        raise HTTPException(status_code=401, detail="Invalid credentials")
    return user

From there, layer on more features without fighting the plumbing:

Add role-based access control with admin and standard roles. Admin-only routes should raise 403 for standard users.

Ask Claude to extend it with refresh tokens, rate limiting via slowapi, or background tasks using FastAPI's BackgroundTasks — one requirement at a time.

Start with a production-grade foundation — not a tutorial skeleton.