Codex bundles LibreOffice
Simon Willison’s Weblog Simon Willison
The OpenAI Codex desktop app caches a large runtime bundle that includes a full Python install, a full Node.js install, and native binaries for Poppler, git, and LibreOffice. The cache folder contains 1.7GB of files under codex-primary-runtime. This means the app can run document-related and office-processing capabilities locally via bundled LibreOffice and supporting binaries instead of fetching everything on demand.
Why it matters
I was poking around in my ~/.cache/ folder using OmniDiskSweeper when I spotted something interesting. The OpenAI Codex desktop app (since rebranded to just ChatGPT) has 1.7GB of stuff in there in a folder called codex-primary-runtime, including a full Python installation, a full Node.js installation, and native binaries for Poppler, git, and the LibreOffice open source office suite (which forked from OpenOffice.org in 2010): The ~/.cache/codex-runtimes/codex-primary-runtime/plugins/openai-primary-runtime/plugins/documents folder includes skills which tell Codex how to find and use those binaries. Tags: codex, generative-ai, openai, ai, llms, openoffice, open-source