- production refuses to boot without JWT_SECRET instead of signing admin tokens with the published development key - CORS_ORIGINS restricts browser callers; blank keeps allow-all with a production warning so a running deployment is not cut off - the boot-time seed creates only roles and permissions in production; the demo customers, orders, debt and known-password accounts need SEED_DEMO_DATA=true Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>