POST /book and POST /appointments now resolve the specialist via autoAssign (or isAvailable-guard a chosen one) inside BEGIN IMMEDIATE...COMMIT, returning 409 on conflict. Slots endpoint derives the day window from real working_hours and ranks the best specialist per slot. settings/employees expose + persist the new fields. Adds booking-e2e.mjs and adapts e2e-test.mjs fixtures to in-hours slots.