# Encryption, Explained Properly: AES vs ChaCha20 vs Argon2id (and How to Actually Combine Them)

Let's be honest. Most developers treat encryption like a checkbox. Install a crypto library, call one function, ship it, pat yourself on the back. Meanwhile, credentials are leaking in plaintext across three microservices because nobody bothered to understand what they're actually protecting.

This isn't a tutorial. It's damage control.

## Stop Treating All Crypto as Interchangeable

You've got three different tools here. They do fundamentally different jobs. Mixing them up is how you end up with someone's password visible in your database logs.

### AES, The Workhorse (With Caveats)

AES is a block cipher. It encrypts data in 128-bit chunks using symmetric keys.…