Up to now NEURA has lived entirely on my own hardware, which is exactly how I want it to stay. But there is a version of this product where I can reach my companion from a phone, from a coffee shop, from anywhere that is not my desk, and that means there has to be an optional cloud layer sitting on top of the local core. This week I started building it. Part one.
The first piece is the boring, unglamorous, absolutely necessary thing: accounts. I built a proper account system with email and password, plus Google sign-in for the people who do not want another password to remember, and real sessions behind it so you stay logged in without me doing anything sketchy with tokens. None of this is flashy. All of it has to be right the first time, because everything else leans on it.
The heart of the week was the key vault. If NEURA is going to run in the cloud for you, it needs your API keys, and I was not about to store those sitting in plain text in a database like it is 2009. So the vault encrypts every key, stores it per account, and locks it down so that even I cannot casually read it. Your keys are yours.
I spent extra time on the crypto and on the password hashing, more than I probably budgeted for, and I do not regret a minute of it. This is the part where the privacy story stops being a paragraph on a landing page and starts being actual code. If I get this wrong, nothing else I build matters.
It feels good to have the foundation down. This is the groundwork that makes the phone app and the online modes possible, and now that it exists I can start building the fun stuff on top of it. Part two next week.