Codex bundles LibreOffice
Simon Willison’s Weblog
Subscribe
1st September 2026
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.
Recent articles
Understanding ChatGPT Work - 30th August 2026
Conceptual integrity and counting lines of code - 19th August 2026
Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things - 16th August 2026
This is a note by Simon Willison, posted on 1st September 2026.
openoffice 3
open-source 318
ai 2,209
openai 452
generative-ai 1,957
llms 1,924
codex 56
Monthly briefing
Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.
Pay me to send you less!
Sponsor & subscribe
Disclosures
Colophon
©
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
2026