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Comment by ozuly | Hacker News Reader

If I'm not mistaken, this is written by the author of Lucia, a popular auth library for TypeScript [0]. He recently announced that he will be deprecating the library and be replacing it with a series of written guides [1], as he no longer feels that the Lucia library is an ergonomic way of implementing auth. He posted an early preview of the written guide [2] which I found enjoyable to read and complements The Copenhagen Book nicely.

[0] https://github.com/lucia-auth/lucia

[1] https://github.com/lucia-auth/lucia/discussions/1707

[2] https://lucia-next.pages.dev/

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> he no longer feels that the Lucia library is an ergonomic way of implementing auth

has he written up why? lots to learn here

edit: oh: https://github.com/lucia-auth/lucia/discussions/1707

this is great. he saw the coming complexity explosion, that the library was no longer useful to him personally, and took the humble route to opt out of the Standard Model of library slop development. rare.

There is a Github Discussion where he goes into more detail. He also talks about it on his twitter:

https://github.com/lucia-auth/lucia/discussions/1707

https://x.com/pilcrowonpaper/status/1843258855280742481

What an insanely impressive dude. All that and he just started going to university this year.

I often wonder what universities brings to students who are already performing in professional life. I’m tempted to ask “So what is he going to teach?” to such stories.

Awareness about fundamentals and networking with other similarly gifted people, hopefully.

Maybe they were always interested in drama or philosophical studies, CS is not the only interesting topic in this life :)

Networking, physical and information resources, help with learning things he might have had trouble grokking, and the signal provided by a degree to get into organizations or events that might not have heard of him. If a very smart and already accomplished person doesn't worry about money, academia (at least attendance) can be a very good choice.

Yeah, but Lucia is just going to be immediately replaced with some other popular auth library.

The thing is, 99% of people really do just need 'log in / log out', and this is an incredibly useful thing to have as a library.

If you need Web 8.0 passkeys served via WASM eliptic curve sockets or whatever, sure, roll your own or use Auth0. But it feels really silly for the consensus around auth to be 'oh, you're making a CRUD cooking app to share your love of baking? cool, well here's the OAuth spec and a list of footguns, go roll some auth'. It's not a good use of that person's time - they should be focussed on their actual idea rather than being forced to reinvent plumbing - and tons of people are going to get it wrong and end up with effectively no auth at all.

Haha I've been working on my cooking app[0] (not ready yet, join the waiting list!), and for the last 1 month I've been implementing auth with AuthKit (bad experience IMHO, should have just self host SuperTokens in hindsight), experiencing what you described here 1:1

[0] https://prepbook.app

Hey, I’m the founder of WorkOS (which makes AuthKit).

Would love to learn where we missed on the developer experience. Can you email me? mg@workos.com

We have hundreds of happy customers using AuthKit including high-demand apps like Cursor. Lots more features coming too.

Been rolling my own auth today for luls. Thanks for this :)

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