Codex review pointed out that even with the sync-assets fix applied,
_build_web_ui still crashes on a stock Windows console before reaching
npm: Python stdout defaults to cp1252 (or similar) and raises
UnicodeEncodeError when print() hits the arrow/check glyphs used for
status messages (→, ✗, ⚠, ✓). Reproduced locally in PowerShell:
$ PYTHONIOENCODING=cp1252 python -c "from hermes_cli.main import _build_web_ui; _build_web_ui(Path('web'), fatal=True)"
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\u2192' ...
The previous PR body claimed "end-to-end verified on Windows 11", but
that was under the venv's default (utf-8) stdout. A plain `py` or
PowerShell invocation would still fail before sync-assets ever ran.
Fix: inner _say() helper that falls back to
text.encode(sys.stdout.encoding, errors="replace")
when print() raises UnicodeEncodeError. Glyphs degrade to '?' on
ASCII / cp1252 consoles; utf-8 consoles are unaffected. Verified the
full build pipeline runs to completion with PYTHONIOENCODING=cp1252.
Scoped tightly to _build_web_ui (the function this PR already touches);
other call sites in the codebase with the same risk are out of scope.
ioannis
38ea2a57a5