Use Cursor to trace a Laravel authentication regression to its source
At a glance
A developer used Cursor to compare framework versions, trace a changed session write to its pull request, and outline a fix. This workflow is listed under coding workflow, debugging, source-based analysis.
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What they did
1) Give Cursor the regression symptoms, the affected Laravel versions (13.32.0 and 13.36.0), and shell plus network access. 2) Ask it to fetch and diff SessionGuard.php and AuthenticateSession.php from both tags. 3) Have it narrow the behavior change to login() writing password_hash_{guard} into the session, trace that hunk to its pull request, and explain why the previous middleware behavior worked. 4) Ask for a userland workaround and a framework-level fix, then review the reasoning against the source diff; write a failing test before relying on the proposed patch.
How it went
The author said reviewing the diff and reasoning took a few minutes. When the authenticated GraphQL API returned 403, Cursor switched to reading the public HTML page.
Worth knowing
The author still wanted a real failing framework test before trusting the proposed fix. The result depended on asking the agent to check the source rather than answer from memory.
