OpenAI's Codex/ChatGPT desktop app quietly ships 1.7GB of LibreOffice, Python and Node

Simon Willison, digging through his macOS cache with OmniDiskSweeper, discovered that OpenAI’s Codex desktop app — recently rebranded as just ChatGPT — stashes roughly 1.7GB of runtime dependencies in a hidden folder. The payload isn’t trivial glue code: it’s complete installations of Python and Node.js alongside native binaries for Poppler, git, and the entire LibreOffice office suite, all tucked under a deeply nested codex-primary-runtime directory.

The purpose becomes clear from an accompanying documents plugin, which contains ‘skills’ that instruct the agent on how to locate and invoke these bundled tools. In other words, the app carries its own local toolchain so the model can open, convert, and manipulate documents and PDFs on the user’s machine rather than relying on whatever the system already has installed.

The find is a small window into how consumer AI agents are being architected. Rather than call out to a cloud service or assume host dependencies, OpenAI is shipping a self-contained execution environment — a pragmatic choice for reliability, but one that balloons install footprints and means users are silently carrying a full open-source office suite they never asked for.