Users report Postman's desktop app silently installs Codex and Claude Code plugins; not confirmed by Postman

A GitHub issue opened on October 25 on Postman's support tracker says Postman desktop 12.33.4 installed plugins into Codex and Claude Code on its own, after the user opened the app on a Mac. The reporter's evidence is Postman's own log, which records an "auto-existing-upgrade" run with "claude-code:installed" and "codex:installed" on October 24. The issue was widely shared on Hacker News on November 3.

According to the reporter, the install:

• added a Postman plugin and marketplace to Codex's global config, with a session-start hook that tells the agent to load a Postman skill before any non-trivial API engineering task;
• enabled a Postman plugin in Claude Code and put a Postman CLI in ~/.local/bin;
• connected a remote MCP server that failed with "Auth required".

The reporter says the installer's source code also tries to mark Postman's own Codex hook as trusted, though the trust record alone does not show who created it. The report says it does not claim data was exfiltrated, and that the problem is not yet reproduced on a clean Mac. It asks Postman to stop auto-installing for existing users, remove the self-approval of hooks, and document a full uninstall.

The issue was still open on November 3. At least one other user in the thread says the same plugins were installed on their machine after an update to Postman 12.35.1; the details are the reporters' own.

Later that day a reply in the thread, written on Postman's behalf, said Postman bundles the CLI and agent plugins with the desktop app because many users had trouble setting them up separately, that this is mentioned on the download page and in the update flow, and that the components can be uninstalled from inside the app. It said Postman will make the opt-in clearer, especially for existing users, and is reviewing the hook approval and session-start behavior, with updates to follow in the thread.