ChatGPT desktop app quietly bundles 1.7GB including full LibreOffice and Node.js
Simon Willison · rss · 2026-09-02
While cleaning up his cache with OmniDiskSweeper, Simon Willison found that the OpenAI Codex desktop app (since rebranded to ChatGPT) stores 1.7GB under /.cache/codex-runtimes/codex-primary-runtime, including:
- A full Python installation
- A full Node.js installation
- Native binaries for Poppler and git
- The complete LibreOffice office suite (forked from OpenOffice.org in 2010)
These binaries live in the documents plugin folder, with accompanying skills teaching Codex how to find and use them — meaning the desktop coding agent has quietly shipped an entire local runtime and document-processing toolchain.
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