If your Mac keeps running low on space and you use the Codex desktop app, one folder is worth a look. A GitHub issue on OpenAI's Codex repository, open since June, collects reports from Mac users whose Codex install kept writing crash dumps into a Crashpad folder until they took up tens, and in some cases hundreds, of gigabytes. The issue was posted to Hacker News at 01:45 Beijing time on October 18 and had 118 points by the afternoon, and new reports were still arriving in the thread the same day.
What users are seeing
GitHub user Jolg42 opened the issue at 03:09 Beijing time on June 3. They wrote that the folder at ~/Library/Application Support/com.openai.codex/web/Crashpad/pending had grown to 4.9 GB and 54,504 files in one day, all paired .dmp and _sidecar.json files, and that the count kept climbing while they looked into it. The app kept working the whole time, which is a big part of why this is easy to miss. Jolg42 later added that deleting the files brought the folder down to a few megabytes, but new pairs started appearing right away.
Others have since reported far bigger numbers. One user on macOS 15.6 said the folder had reached about 137 GiB; another measured 174.6 GB. At 01:37 Beijing time on October 18, a user on macOS 15.7.4 said Codex's two Crashpad folders together held about 323 GB, roughly 35% of a 926 GB disk, and that free space had fallen to 1.4 GB before they found it. "Nothing in the app warned me," they wrote. Several commenters running newer builds, where Codex comes as part of the ChatGPT desktop app, found the same buildup in a different place: ~/Library/Application Support/Codex/Crashpad/pending. The issue is labeled bug, app and performance, and it is still open.
What seems to be behind it
OpenAI hasn't explained the cause. Users who looked inside the dumps say they are crash reports of Crashpad's own handler process, browser_crashpad_handler, which fails a check when it starts, gets relaunched, fails again and writes a new dump each time. One commenter measured exactly one dump per second. Others note that nothing ever prunes the pending folder, so even a slower rate of crashes piles up over months.
Which macOS versions are affected
This is the least settled part. At 01:50 Beijing time on June 15, GitHub user dnakov, whom GitHub marks as a contributor to the Codex repository, wrote: "I think this is fixed with later macos versions. at least in 26.5 it is." In August another user asked whether that pointed to a known macOS fix and whether a Codex update was also needed, and nobody in the thread has answered. At 13:18 Beijing time on October 18, user nathanvy said they appeared to be unaffected running Codex 26.1013.40934 on macOS 26.6.2, and suggested that moving up from macOS Sequoia might help. The affected reports in the thread that list a macOS version are all on macOS 15 or on macOS 26 releases before 26.5, but that's a small set of self-reports rather than a test. OpenAI hasn't responded in the issue, and the Codex changelog doesn't mention the problem or a fix.
Checking the folder and clearing it
You can see how big the folder is from Finder by choosing Go to Folder from the Go menu, pasting the path and using Get Info on the pending folder. In Terminal, du -sh "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Codex/Crashpad/pending" gives the same answer, and you can swap in the older com.openai.codex/web path to check that one too. If the folder holds hundreds of thousands of files, either way can take a while.
If it turns out to be large, quit Codex first, or the ChatGPT app if that's where you run Codex, and then delete the files inside the pending folder and nothing else. These are crash reports Crashpad has queued up and not sent, and commenters who removed them got their space back with the app still working afterward. Leave everything else alone, including the rest of the Crashpad folder and the wider Application Support/Codex folder, which holds the app's own data. Commenters also chose not to post their dump files publicly, since they may contain process memory, local paths or other private data.
Clearing the folder only frees the space; it doesn't stop whatever is producing the dumps. It's worth opening Codex again and checking the folder after a while to see whether it's refilling. Some commenters have gone further and made the pending folder read-only, though another warned that this is an emergency brake that also blocks genuine crash reports. We'll update this article if OpenAI responds or ships a fix.
