You log into a site. You click to your dashboard. Then your settings page. Then some deeply nested admin panel. Ten requests, ten different pages, and the server knows who you are the entire time. Never asks again.
But HTTP is stateless. Every single request is a blank slate. The server doesn't remember the last one. So how does this actually work?
Auth touches every app you'll ever build, and the choice between sessions and tokens has consequences most people don't think about until something breaks in production. Pick wrong and you're rewriting middleware six months in.
Here's the actual problem. You send a request. The server responds. Connection done. Next request comes in and the server has zero memory of the previous one. It's like talking to someone with amnesia every single time.
Two ways to fix this:
