[App regression] PDF and document annotations submit immediately instead of batching

What version of the Codex App are you using?

26.803.41515 (build 6321)

What subscription do you have?

ChatGPT Pro

What platform is your computer?

Darwin 25.6.0 arm64 arm

What issue are you seeing?

Document-review annotations are now submitted to the conversation individually. Every time I add one annotation, Codex immediately starts working on it before I have finished reviewing the document.

Previously, annotations could be saved as pending comments, reviewed together, and deliberately submitted as one batch. That is the correct workflow for reviewing a document, PDF, spreadsheet, or slide deck.

A document review is a collection task, not a sequence of unrelated prompts. Comments about formatting, wording, structure, consistency, and related passages frequently need to be assembled as one coherent set before Codex begins making changes.

The current behaviour causes several concrete problems:

• Codex starts editing while the reviewer is still collecting feedback.
• Connected comments are fragmented across separate turns.
• The user cannot review, edit, or remove the complete comment set before submission.
• Multiple unnecessary agent runs are triggered.
• The document may change before the reviewer has finished commenting on the original version.
• Review time, compute, and context are wasted.

Immediate submission may make sense as an optional one-comment workflow. It does not make sense as the only or silently selected behaviour for document review.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

1. Open a document or PDF artifact in Codex Desktop.
2. Begin reviewing it through the annotation interface.
3. Select a passage or location and add an annotation.
4. Confirm that annotation.
5. Observe that it is immediately sent to the conversation and Codex starts a turn.
6. Attempt to continue adding related annotations before Codex begins working.

There is no visible batch of pending annotations and no opportunity to submit the complete review deliberately.

What is the expected behavior?

Annotations should be saved as pending review comments by default.

The user should be able to:

1. Add multiple annotations throughout the artifact.
2. See how many annotations are pending.
3. Review, edit, or remove them.
4. Choose Send once to submit the complete set.
5. Trigger only one coherent Codex turn.

If immediate submission is retained, Codex should expose an explicit preference:

• Batch annotations until Send
• Send each annotation immediately

This preference should be consistent across PDFs, documents, spreadsheets, slides, and browser annotations. An established review workflow should not change silently through a remote experiment.

Additional information

Inspection of the installed production client shows that Codex still contains both direct and saved annotation submission modes.

The artifact preview passes an annotationBatchingEnabled value into the PDF, DOCX, spreadsheet, and slide preview components. That value is controlled by feature gate 2581467225.

When the gate is enabled, Codex retains pending annotations and displays batch controls. When it is disabled, annotations are directly submitted. On the affected installation, this gate had become disabled despite no user preference change.

This suggests that the batching capability was not removed technically; access to it was remotely changed without giving the user a setting.

This is related to, but not duplicated by:

• #22719 — browser annotations and the intentional immediate-send change.
• #37208 — adding multi-annotation review for existing Markdown files.
• #30761 — unsent PDF annotations being lost after reload.

Please restore batched artifact annotations as the default, or at minimum expose the existing submission mode as a user-controlled setting.