Opening Reflection: Life in Chapters
Throughout life, we experience what many have coined as “chapters”—distinct segments where:
- one's course shifts
- the tint of the glasses through which one perceives the world deepens or fades
- or the circuitry within one's mind gets rewired.
These chapters are often marked by major events: some positive, some painful; some planned, others entirely unexpected. But all of them, in their own way, signal transformation.
Turning the Page: My Personal Reset
In a previous chapter of my own, the course I was on was unclear, my glasses were constantly fogged up, scratched or dirty, and the circuitry in my own mind evaded my understanding. I needed a new chapter. But I kept turning the pages of the previous one for far too long.
I was stuck.
I chose to change significant parts of my life—not because anything I was changing was inherently 'bad,' but because I knew that if I wanted to take the rudder back on the ship that is my life, if I wanted to remove the layers built up on my glasses, or rewire the circuitry in my mind, I'd need to start a new chapter-intentionally. So that is what I did!
I ended a romantic relationship. I severed ties with certain friends. I remodeled every room in my house. I got a dog. I got roommates for the first time in my life.
Leaving FusionAuth
And just this Friday, I turned the last page of that previous chapter, I left my employer: FusionAuth.
Interestingly, when one reflects from the vantage point of a current chapter, past chapters often appear altered or different than you remember. I mean, just ask a person who's been married for 10 years their opinion on marriage or someone that has experienced the loss of a loved one what that person means to them.
Looking Ahead: AI, Applications, and a New Challenge
The next chapter was beginning to unfold as I began looking onward for what's next. Cruising around the employment landscape, curious, and looking to be inspired by another technical challenge or project. With an updated resume I started throwing my name in the hat for a variety of positions. I found a very clear trend amongst tech companies I was applying to:
- They were are all using AI
- Almost all of them had a website field on their application forms.
Rebuilding My Site with AI
I've been in tech long enough that building a “personal” website rarely excites me. It tends to get neglected, outdated, and eventually feels like an afterthought.
I didn't want to over-engineer it or let it spiral into a never-ending side project (which, let's be honest, I always want to add one more thing). So I thought: I'll grab a template—and while I'm at it, I'll use AI to speed things up.
Templates come with their own headaches (which I'll unpack in a future post), but I dove in anyway—with AI as my copilot.
I upgraded the template from NextJS 14.3 to 15.5, swapped out the blog's WordPress fetch calls for a self-hosted database, and customized the color palette to make it mine.
Whenever I needed something—textured gradients, layout tweaks, React component refactors—I'd describe it or share a screenshot, and AI would guide me through it.
As our conversations deepened, Honey Badger (what I call my AI assistant) started to anticipate my intent, even factoring in my story when offering suggestions.
It felt weird, like I was making friends with my AI...which has never turned out well in movies.
The /admin Prompt That Made Me Pause
I had to pause.
As I was building out the components for the converted WordPress blog we came to the creation of an
/admin page for CRUD operations with blog posts. Honey badger asked if I was open to suggestions regarding blah, blah, blah, and...login. Given that just a couple days ago I was employed by a leading Customer Identity Access Management (CIAM) company, I was obviously intrigued to see what it would suggest. Of course, I obliged! The suggestion was pretty astounding.The overall gist of the reply:
- ✔ Create a route,
/login, with a text entry field for an admin password. - ✔ Store two values in an
.envfile:•ADMIN_PASSWORD='password'•NEXT_PUBLIC_ADMIN_PASSWORD='password' - ✔ Create
middleware.tsfile to intercept the/adminroute. - ✔ Check for locally stored cookie, route to
/adminor/login - ✔ User enters password and clicks login.
- ✔ Check entered password against the environment variables.
- ✔ If they match, route user to
middleware.ts, create cookie, proceed to/admin.
These chapters are often marked by major events: some positive, some painful; some planned, others entirely unexpected. But all of them, in their own way, signal transformation.
The Risk of “It Works”: AI and Authentication
This solution and all of the code to make this happen was done in mere moments and a flurry of thoughts and questions started going through my head.
- ⁉️ Every bit of code that my AI assistant shared would function as designed.
- ⁉️ Since it would "work" how many users of AI would accept this solution and simply move on?
- ⁉️ Are we essentially training AI to be complacent on such a critical portion of code?
Now, I will admit, with a few more prompts my AI assistant became more detailed. Discussing topics around securing cookies, code exchange, JWTs, JWT signing, password hashing, client side vs server side data processing, and all the stuff that goes into a good authentication system. Admittedly, it is a lot more work to implement all of the proper components of a solid authentication and authorization workflow. I'd posit, most will take AI's first suggestion.
A Farewell with Gratitude
As my journey heads in a new direction—with fresh shades and a shifting I/O algorithm in my head—my perception of previous chapters is, and will continue to be, in flux. It hasn't been long since I turned over my work laptop, but already the richness, appreciation, and respect I have for FusionAuth and the people there are so much easier to see.
I intend to embrace AI and become part of the ecosystem driving its development forward. However, don't trust that an AI-authored authentication prompt will be enough to protect what matters. When authentication fails, it’s not just a technical flaw—it’s a breach of safety, security, and identity for developers, organizations, and end users.
Reach out to the folks at FusionAuth instead! They've built something far more robust—with an amazing team and world-class support that's accurate, responsive, and empathetic!