[KillerQueen-Z]

Problem and resulting behavior

Desktop beta.9 ignores screenshot paste, and even images added through the existing file picker are dropped by agent.send before reaching the agent. Users can now paste a screenshot with Cmd+V / Ctrl+V, preview or remove it, and send it to the model, including an image-only message. Ordinary text paste remains unchanged.

Implementation

• Share the existing image compression path between file selection and paste. Disable sending while preparation is pending; prevent a removed or older image read from restoring a stale attachment.
• Validate one inline PNG/JPEG/WebP/GIF up to 4 MB at the serve boundary. Reject filesystem paths, remote URLs, malformed base64 and mismatched image signatures without invoking a model.
• Carry typed image blocks alongside text through the input queue and agent history; preserve images on /retry, recognize vision input during routing, and use a default prompt for image-only messages.
• Live testing exposed a related grounding failure: the text-only evaluator did not know the user supplied an image, and forced unnecessary Read calls after a correct visual response. Pass image provenance to that check, retain external/live-data grounding requirements, and stop the tool summary at structured user-message boundaries. The text-only evaluator does not claim to verify visual accuracy.

Validation

• Reproduced missing native screenshot paste on the public macOS beta.9 app.
• Local native Electron 44 + this checkout's actual backend + real paid Claude Haiku 4.5 via Solana; no mocked model or socket responses. Wrote a rendered screenshot to the OS clipboard, pasted using Cmd+V, preserved the text draft, removed/re-pasted the image, and submitted through chat. The model read the unpredictable image-only label ORBIT-970862 and correctly identified the blue rectangle and red circle.
• File-picker/image-only submission also reached the paid model and returned the same label. Plain-text native paste still works; paste does not send automatically.
• All 937 backend regression tests pass. Complete Desktop test command passes (108 unit tests plus native security, cloud and team-proxy checks); lint and both builds pass.
• New integration tests cover the real serve queue/agent loop up to a fixture gateway, image-only input, /retry, ordinary follow-up text, and rejection before model invocation. These automated fixture tests are separate from the paid native verification above.
• Native runtime tested locally on macOS. Windows packaging/checks run in CI; Windows native Ctrl+V has not been locally exercised.

Independent of #233 and based directly on the current Desktop beta.9 release branch. This PR does not publish an installer.