Desktop's send path pre-analyzed every attached image with the auxiliary
vision model serially, BEFORE dispatching the turn (_enrich_with_attached_
images). Users saw the progress box sit idle 25s-4min for messages that
take ~4s in the CLI; failures were silently swallowed, and touching
another session during the window killed the turn with zero API calls
(#83291). The prepended description also poisoned session auto-titles
(#82339).
Replace pre-analysis with _build_image_ref_message: reference the image
paths in the message and let the agent analyze them in-loop with
vision_analyze — its own retries, visible tool progress, and the turn
starts immediately. This is exactly how the @folder: reference path
already behaves, which responds in seconds for the same images.
Native-vision routing is unchanged; only the "text" mode (non-vision
main model / codex_app_server) loses the blocking submit-path calls.
Tests: tests/tui_gateway/test_image_ref_message.py (6 cases) including
a guard asserting the submit path never invokes the vision tool;
sabotage-verified (restoring the old blocking body fails 5/6).
Teknium