What happens when auth meets money - and what I learned building it Shipping AuthShield felt good for about a day. The system worked. JWT issuance, refresh token rotation, OAuth integration, role-based access control, rate limiting - everything I'd set out to build was there. I'd documented every phase, explained every tradeoff, written about every decision that mattered. By any reasonable measure, it was done. But something kept nagging at me. AuthShield could tell you exactly who someone is. It could verify their identity in milliseconds, check their permissions, block them if they were hitting endpoints too hard. The auth layer was as tight as I could make it. And then I asked myself a question I hadn't asked before. What are they actually doing once they get in?…