🧪 Session Testing in the Fog

I started with a migraine and lost a few hours to the fog. My brain felt half booted, and everything felt like I'm running at 60% clock speed. Eventually got some rest and made it back to the keyboard, but the work didn’t exactly greet me with open arms.

I’ve been buried in session testing. Man, I hate session testing. It’s finicky, boring, and invisible when it works. But also absolutely critical. Right now I’m trying to move from the old Simrata-style session cookie flow to a proper Authorization header flow on the backend. It’s more secure, more modular, and something I’ll be able to reuse across projects once it’s dialed in. But the migration isn’t smooth. I’m stuck in the in-between: login state isn’t persisting cleanly, logouts aren’t clearing as expected, and I’m just hammering at it from inside Cursor.

There’s no plan or layer running here. This isn’t structured work. It’s just me, hacking back and forth manually: trying things, inspecting headers, tweaking the auth flow until it behaves like a real app. It’s weirdly off-script from Vulcan Forge’s core workflow. I realized that’s a gap. The structured prompt-based execution is great when you're in “build the feature” mode. But when you’re deep in the “get it to actually work” zone (especially with login, state, or auth) you need looser workflows. You need to just try things. There’s no clean plan, just a wall you’re chipping away at with your head.

So that’s the update: no glory, just glue. Important glue, though. Once this is solid, I’ll be able to pull this module forward into everything else — a battle-tested login system that uses headers, handles state cleanly, and stays out of the way when it’s working.

What’s next: clean up the logout path, confirm user state is stable, and start wrapping this into a reusable auth module. Then maybe take a nap.