Found on the actual first deployment: /api/v1/healthz proves the process is up, but says nothing about whether login actually works, because the session cookie is set with Secure in production. Test through a plain-HTTP address (an IP, a bare port, skipping the reverse proxy) and /auth/login still returns 200 with a valid body — the cookie is just silently dropped by the client, so the very next request looks unauthenticated. From a browser this looks exactly like "I logged in and it bounced me straight back to the login screen," with no error anywhere to point at. scripts/smoke-test.sh does the real round trip a browser does: login, confirm a session cookie was actually stored (not just sent), then an authenticated follow-up request confirming it succeeds and returns the right account. Verified it actually catches what it's meant to catch before committing: ran it against a throwaway account over plain HTTP against a production-mode container and got the expected FAIL with a diagnostic pointing at the Secure-cookie mismatch, then confirmed PASS once the container's VELODROME_ENVIRONMENT was (inadvertently, in this case) development instead. Documented in deploy/README.md as the real post-deploy check, replacing "hit /healthz and eyeball it" for anything involving auth. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01R2ZKeWkZV7ehf7fivrAkkG