posted in Technology
The ChatGPT desktop app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice
simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/1/codex-libreoffice/
Replying to @inari@piefed.zip
Looks like it’s some kind of dependency… seems very odd though, why is this included? Are they using it to handle .docx, .xlsx, etc files? I remember being tempted to do that once years ago when I ran into one of those Really Hard Problems that would take weeks to solve. I spent the weeks instead
I think they’re used so agents can make changes to Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. It seems to be using the headless version of LibreOffice.
Replying to @inari@piefed.zip
Yeah… I didn’t want to include 430MB of bloat in my bundle to each end user though for one feature, so I did it the hard way instead: Manually editing document files using XPATH. Maybe I’m too old school, if everyone’s shipping 1GB+ apps like it’s nothing nowadays.