Summary

Cron-scheduled deliveries to Telegram were sending raw MEDIA:/path/to/file text instead of native image attachments. This fix routes cron delivery through the same media extraction path used by live chat responses.

Root Cause

_deliver_result() in cron/scheduler.py (line 209) passed delivery_content directly to _send_to_platform() without extracting MEDIA: tags first. The live chat path handles this via BasePlatformAdapter.extract_media(), but the cron delivery path bypassed it entirely — so Telegram users received the literal tag string instead of an attached image.

Evidence from gateway.error.log:

WARNING gateway.platforms.base: [Telegram] Failed to send media (.png\nmedi): File not found: /tmp/analyst/charts/oil_30min.png\nMEDI

The error log shows the path was mangled into one long string with embedded newlines, proving the raw content was sent instead of extracting individual MEDIA lines.

Investigation

The 2026-04-03 Argus morning scan (job d7d7376d595b) ran at 10:06 AM and produced a valid report with 4 charts generated in /tmp/analyst/charts/:

• oil_30min.png
• near_7d.png
• grass_7d.png
• silver_30min.png

The response saved to cron/output/d7d7376d595b/2026-04-03_10-06-05.md shows proper MEDIA tags in the output (lines 386-389). The agent did its part perfectly — the failure was entirely in the delivery plumbing.

Fix

• Import BasePlatformAdapter.extract_media in _deliver_result() and call it on delivery_content after optional wrapping.
• Pass cleaned_content (tags stripped) and media_files (extracted paths) into _send_to_platform() for both the normal asyncio.run path and the ThreadPoolExecutor fallback.

Testing

• Added test_delivery_extracts_media_before_sending in tests/cron/test_scheduler.py to verify MEDIA: tags are stripped from sent text and forwarded as media_files.
• Extended the clean-output wrapping test to assert media_files == [] when no tags are present.
• Verified locally with focused tests:
  • source venv/bin/activate && python -m pytest tests/cron/test_scheduler.py -q -n0 -k \"TestDeliverResultWrapping\"
  • Result: 6 passed, 34 deselected

Notes

• This is a targeted fix for the cron delivery path only.
• Broader scheduler test failures observed locally were pre-existing and unrelated to this change.
• Requires gateway restart after patching (the delivery logic runs in the gateway process).
• One-shot cron jobs with deliver: "telegram" (no chat ID) are silently skipped when TELEGRAM_HOME_CHANNEL env var is not set — use deliver: "origin" or deliver: "telegram:<chat_id>" for explicit targeting.