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Codex bundles LibreOffice

Blog · Watch/Read · (gathered 2026-09-03)

  • Simon Willison discovered that the OpenAI Codex desktop app (now ChatGPT) is a surprisingly large and self-contained bundle, including a full LibreOffice suite.
  • The app’s ~/.cache/codex-primary-runtime folder contains 1.7GB of data, bundling full Python and Node.js installations, along with native binaries for Poppler, git, and LibreOffice.
  • The app uses “skills” located in plugins/documents to enable Codex to find and utilize these bundled binaries.
  • This highlights how modern AI desktop applications can be massive, integrating entire software suites to extend their capabilities, which has implications for disk space and understanding application architecture.