fix(agent): fallback to latin-1 when loading repo .env in hermes_base_env

[Dusk1e]

Windows users often run into a UnicodeDecodeError right at the start because their .env files might be saved in regional encodings (like cp1252) rather than pure UTF-8. Since this happens during the initial import of hermes_base_env, it effectively bricks the environment before it even starts.

I've updated the loading logic to be more resilient. It now tries UTF-8 first, and if that fails, it falls back to Latin-1 instead of crashing. This ensures the agent can still boot even if there are non-ASCII characters in the config.

Key changes:

• Wrapped the file read in a helper that handles the encoding fallback.
• Added a regression test that specifically mocks a decode failure to verify the fallback path.

Test run: python -m pytest tests/environments/test_hermes_base_env_env_loading.py passed with 48 checks.

[alt-glitch]

Related to #8415 (unified .env loading), #7098 (same fix, marked as dup of this). This is the original PR for UTF-8/latin-1 .env fallback.

[alt-glitch]

Related to #8415 (unified .env loading), #7098 (same fix, marked as dup of this). This is the original PR for UTF-8/latin-1 .env fallback.

[teknium1]

Thanks for the Windows encoding resilience work. This is an automated hermes-sweeper review; the requested behavior is already implemented on current main through the unified dotenv loader.

• hermes_cli/env_loader.py:154-158 loads UTF-8 first and retries with encoding="latin-1" on UnicodeDecodeError.
• hermes_cli/env_loader.py:263-265 applies that helper to project .env files, and active startup paths such as run_agent.py:127 use this shared loader.
• The implementation was introduced in f24c00a5bf8845fd07e059cce3ded7056af9fec2 (fix(config): reload .env over stale shell overrides), before this PR was opened.
• The member discussion linking fix(cli): load Hermes dotenv in mini_swe and sample_and_compress #8415 and duplicate fix(env): add encoding fallback for .env loading in base environment #7098 aligns with this unified-loader implementation. The PR's environments/hermes_base_env.py target no longer exists on current main.

Closing as implemented on main.