28 karma · joined May 23, 2026
TBH, I've not found use case for JWTs, maybe I'm not experienced enough and if it's there, there must be a use case for it. But I've found that there are simpler authentication schemes you can do, and I try to do them instead of implementing JWT.
It can be done right, but it's harder than doing something else. Take it like this: IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING, OK, FINE, GOOD LUCK IF YOU DONT, STICK TO SOMETHING SIMPLER.
Simple solutions are better solutions, and developer time is important. Do you want to maintain simple authentication layer or you want this complex machinery, upgrade library, check for CVE, validate the library implementation, read the RFC. At that point I would be like... NO, I wanna go and do other things I'm interested in.
> Sure, agreed, but so what? It's a feature that no one uses. That doesn't invalidate other features of jwts.
True is unused feature, but then stateless part falls apart, you don't save anything but introduce complexity and maintainance problems, someone will have to go over that code, understand it and not crew things up.
> I think this misses the mark a bit. Signing/validating a jwt can be done entirely on your application server, which should easily scale horizontally. Any kind of db lookup requires a roundtrip/bottleneck which introduces complexity. So, even if it's the same # of ms, there's still an inherent advantage for validating on your application server IMO.
My position here is, if I have to hit the database, well why then I need the signing part, or encryption part, whats the benefit of it. What I understand from JWT, you dont have to store anything. That was the promise of it, and yet for secure systems you have to store something, at least to be GDPR compliant. AFAIK you need to provide the feature LOGOUT FROM EVERYTHING by GDPR, dont quote me on that, it's what I've seen, not a lawyer, simple developer.
You dont need JWT, just use something else and you will be fine, this is the gist of it.
One thing that I did AI generate is the website itself. I really didn't have the time to do it on my own and I vibe coded it
Eveything else can use plain tokens stored in the DB