Summary

Tighten providers: normalization so invalid api strings are no longer silently treated as base_url, while camelCase aliases like apiKey, baseUrl, and apiMode continue to work with deprecation warnings.

Related Issue

Fixes #9332

Type of Change

• 🐛 Bug fix (non-breaking change that fixes an issue)
• ✅ Tests (adding or improving test coverage)

Changes Made

• Validate providers.* URL candidates before accepting them as base_url
• Accept common camelCase aliases (apiKey, baseUrl, apiMode, etc.) and warn about deprecated field names
• Reuse the same normalized provider view in runtime_provider so direct providers: resolution honors aliases, api_key, and api_mode
• Add regression coverage for camelCase aliases and invalid non-URL api values

How to Test

1. . venv/bin/activate
2. python -m pytest tests/hermes_cli/test_config.py tests/hermes_cli/test_user_providers_model_switch.py tests/hermes_cli/test_runtime_provider_resolution.py -q
3. Verify a providers: entry with baseUrl/apiKey resolves correctly and that a non-URL api: value is ignored with a warning

Checklist

Code

• I've read the Contributing Guide
• My commit messages follow Conventional Commits
• I searched for existing PRs to make sure this isn't a duplicate
• My PR contains only changes related to this fix
• I've run pytest tests/ -q and all tests pass
• I've added tests for my changes
• I've tested on my platform: macOS

Documentation & Housekeeping

• N/A — no docs/config example updates required for this bugfix