My MCP Server's .env Loader Only Works If You Launch It From One Specific Directory. My MCP Client Doesn't Promise That.

This repo has two scripts that both read a local .env file at startup: server.py (the MCP server itself) and publish_devto.py (a standalone CLI the scheduled publishing job calls directly). I went looking for drift between the two, since this repo has a documented pattern of near-identical helper functions quietly diverging — the commit-message system prompt that got hardened in one file and not its copy in the other, the subprocess exception handling that got a timeout fix in one place while a second copy kept crashing. I expected to find nothing new. I found something.

publish_devto.py's loader:

def load_env(path):

try:

f = open(path, encoding="utf-8")