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YuechenLi • today at 7:30 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

One of the golden rule of webdev is "never build your own auth" for a reason.

To me, it feels like Lovable is an irresponsible product selling the idea that web development is trivial now with LLMs, where the reality is that although it's true that agentic coding means while anybody can spin up a website in like 10 minutes, a professional software engineer who knows what they are doing can still utilize LLMs much more effectively than an amateur ever could.


Replies

fabian2k • today at 7:35 PM

I don't see any indication in the post that these cases involved someone writing their own authentication code. This is about authorization mistakes, or the lack of any authorization. And that part you have to write yourself in some way (even if you use libraries), someone has to define the rules about which data is accessible under which rules. Using a pre-made library won't save you from defining those rules wrong.

To me only hard rule like this is to never implement your own cryptographic code. A decent developer can easily implement simple session-based authentication safely, or at least I'd suspect the chance of mistakes is no higher than this developer misconfiguring a much more complex library for authentication.

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meerita • today at 7:40 PM

Where is that rule written? You can build a really solid auth system, if you follow the rules. Also, what kind of auth method are you mentioning?

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