Building in Public: Week 2 — Auth, the First Real Code Commit and the AEO Expansion (Women-in-AI | BuildClub.ai)

Series: Building in Public Journal | Week 2 of 4

Week 1 was architecture on paper. Week 2 is where the build gets real.

If you missed the first entry in this series, the short version is this: I am four weeks into the Women in AI Accelerator run by Build Club, and I am using the sprint to upgrade the LITV AI SEO Agent 1.0 from a single-purpose audit tool at version 1.0 to a full system engine at 2.0. Week 1 was about locking the architecture and choosing the harder future-proof build path over the faster and shakier one. You can read that full decision log in the Week 1 build journal. Week 2 was about shipping.

What Week 2 was actually About

The Week 1 decision to build properly with authenticated product layers, real plan tier logic, and a migration path for existing users meant that Week 2 had a very clear mandate: get the auth layer live on staging. Literally live, working, tested.

That sounds like one task. I kid you not. Authentication is one of the most consequential infrastructure decisions in any application or a SaaS product, and getting it wrong early creates the kind of technical debt that follows you into every subsequent sprint. I had already argued this point in Week 1 and lost to the better argument. Week 2 was the proof of that choice.

The Key Decision that Shaped the Entire Week

The single most important call I made in Week 2 was choosing Supabase Auth over a license-key-only model. The license-key approach would have been faster to ship.

Supabase Auth, specifically the auth flow, captures a verified email from the first interaction, requires no password, and eliminates the single biggest friction point at sign-up. The upfront cost was an additional four to six hours of build time in Week 2.

What Shipped in Week 2

24 files shipped across the API backend and the React frontend. Here is what that means in plain English without the full technical breakdown.

Passwordless authentication is live. Users log in via a secure link sent to their email with no password required. The API is protected with tokens and three permission levels. A rate limiter is in place for keeping the product layer sustainable without open abuse. The dashboard shows each user their current tier, their remaining audit quota, and their last few remaining audits. And critically, existing 1.0 users have a clean migration path to bind their license keys to the new account system in a single step, with no loss of access.

The Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) layer was also significantly expanded this week. For context, AEO is about making your content legible and citable to AI-powered answer tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. As I wrote in my earlier post on how AI overviews are reducing organic clicks, the brands that are not structuring their content for AI-mediated search are losing visibility they cannot easily recover. The expanded AEO layer now checks for specific schemas, content signals, complete structured data coverage, and a portion of tech coding validity, among others. These are not edge cases as they are now primary signals in how AI search tools evaluate and surface content.

What Building Solo actually Feels like at this Stage

There is a particular kind of pressure that comes with building a product alone on a four-week sprint while that sprint is publicly tracked. Week 2 had that pressure in full. The auth layer works but still need a bit more of the “hit the nail on the head”. The migration path works. But there were also three separate moments this week where something did not work, required a lot of debugging at a level that consumed hours I had not planned for, and sent me back to the architecture with fresh questions I had not anticipated.

This is the part of building in public that I think is genuinely underrepresented in the content most builders share. The progress posts tend to celebrate the wins and skim past the hours of confusion, the dead ends, a bit of AI slop at times, and the moments where the right answer only becomes obvious after you have tried a few wrong turns. I am not skimming past those here – they did happened and in turn, my glucose level dropped immensely. These factors make up a part of the build, and they did not stop the delivery since they can be costly for solo builders who should not be surprised at all.

The build is on schedule. Week 3 has started.

What is Coming in Week 3

Week 3 is the deep abyss of GEO engine rewrite, which has been the most strategically anticipated component of the entire 2.0 system since I locked the GEO Audit Engine Spec v3.0 in Week 1. The GEO engine is where the LITV AI SEO Agent 1.0 is quite the most differentiated from the tools already available in the market. Some SEO audit tools treat GEO as an afterthought. This build treats it as a primary discipline with its own signal architecture and output framework.

I will document the rewrite as it progresses and publish the Week 3 update here. If you want to follow the build between posts, the most direct place to do that is @fsmarcomtech on Instagram, where shorter build notes go up in real time.

The current version of the agent, LITV AI SEO Agent 1.0, is live and free to use at seoagent.ladyintechverse.com. Run an audit. See exactly what 2.0 is being built to surpass. And check back here for Week 3.

Thanks to Build Club, Annie Liao and Caroline Ciaramitaro for hosting and facilitating this 4-week immersive AI building programme.