Postman’s desktop app installed its AI plugins into Claude Code and Codex when they opened it, two users report on Postman’s GitHub issue tracker, quoting lines from Postman’s own log. A reply on the issue written in the company’s voice says Postman bundles the plugins “because many users had trouble installing and wiring them up separately” and will “make the opt-in clearer, especially for existing users”.
That reply came 10.6 days after the first install logged in the report, and about six hours after the story reached Hacker News, by our arithmetic. GitHub does not mark the account that posted it as a Postman member, and we could not confirm that it speaks for the company.
Business Pill · Least Privilege
An evergreen Business Engineer explainer on least privilege, giving each user or system only the access it needs. It explains the general idea only and does not discuss Postman or this report.
The key insight: Two users report, quoting Postman’s own log, that the desktop app installed AI plugins into Claude Code and Codex on launch. A reply written in Postman’s voice says the plugins are bundled for easier setup and that the opt-in will be made clearer; it came 10.6 days after the first logged install, by our arithmetic.
The issue was opened on 25 October under the title “[SEVERE] Desktop auto-installs Codex/Claude plugins; installer attempts to trust its own startup hook”. The reporter, running Postman desktop 12.33.4 on a Mac, quotes Postman’s log from 24 October with the source “auto-existing-upgrade” and the results “claude-code:installed” and “codex:installed”.
The report lists what changed: a user-wide Postman plugin in Codex’s configuration, a startup instruction hook, a remote MCP connection to Postman’s server, a Claude Code plugin enabled in the user’s settings, and a Postman command-line tool in the user’s home folder.
A second user wrote on 3 November that the app updated from 12.31.3 to 12.35.1 on launch and then installed the command-line tool and the Claude Code and Codex plugins; Cursor already had the plugin. The posted log lines run from 22:58:31 to 22:59:29 UTC, or 58 seconds, by our arithmetic.
A third commenter reported Postman entries in GitHub Copilot’s settings file, and wrote that the uninstall option inside Postman did not remove them from Copilot.
Days from the first automatic install recorded in Postman’s own log (24 October, 09:34 UTC, as posted by a user on GitHub issue #14370) to later events: the issue opening, the 26 October archive copy of the download page without the bundling sentence, the Hacker News story, a second user’s logged install on build 12.35.1, and a reply written in Postman’s voice by an account GitHub does not mark as a Postman member. Log lines are user reports, not independently verified. Elapsed times are our arithmetic.
What the Plugin Tells the Agent
The startup text in Postman’s public plugin repository tells the coding agent: “Before responding to any non-trivial API engineering task”, load Postman’s api-engineer skill and follow it. The same text says user instructions such as AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md files “take precedence over this mandate”.
Postman’s installer source contains a function headed “Approves only Postman’s current hook after installation”, which writes a trusted record for that hook into Codex’s settings. The function was still on the repository’s main branch when we read it at 05:49 UTC on 4 November.
The original reporter wrote that the trust record on the reporter’s Mac “does not prove who created that specific record”. The second user found no such trust record in that user’s Codex settings.
What Postman Says
The reply on the issue, posted at 23:36 UTC on 3 November, reads: “we bundle the Postman CLI and the agent plugins with the desktop app”. It adds: “We mention this on the download page and in the app update flow, and you can uninstall any of these components from inside the app.”
It also says Postman is “reviewing the hook approval and session-start behavior you flagged” and will post an update in the thread as changes land.
Postman’s download page, as we read it on 4 November, says: “The Postman app includes Postman CLI & Postman plugins, so you can use Postman from your terminal.” That sentence does not appear in the Internet Archive copy of the page dated 26 October, two days after the first logged install.
Postman’s homepage says the company is “Trusted by over 50 million developers and 500,000 companies”. The reports do not say how many of those users received the automatic install.
As we read the reports, the change did not stay inside Postman: it reached the settings of other tools on the same machine, the coding agents that developers now use to write and test code.
As we read Postman’s own plugin text, the startup instruction is written to make Postman the agent’s first stop for API work, while also saying the user’s instruction files take precedence.
The original reporter, GitHub issue #14370
“An API client should not make itself the default workflow in other tools simply because I opened it.”
Three Implications
FOR DEVELOPERS The reports name user-wide changes in Claude Code, Codex and, per one commenter, GitHub Copilot settings. One commenter wrote that Postman’s in-app uninstall did not remove the Copilot entries.
FOR COMPANY IT AND SECURITY TEAMS Postman’s homepage says it is trusted by over 50 million developers and 500,000 companies. The reports do not say how many received the automatic install.
FOR POSTMAN The reply in Postman’s voice says the company is reviewing the hook approval and session-start behaviour. The approval function was still on the plugin repository’s main branch at 05:49 UTC on 4 November, when we read it.
The framework puts it this way: “Pricing power leaves the model and lands on whoever controls the surface and its reusable workflows.”
As we read it, Postman’s plugin works at that surface: it loads Postman’s skills into the coding agent at startup. The framework does not discuss Postman.
The Hacker News headline says Postman “attempts to share all API data”. The original report says it “does not claim to establish data exfiltration”, and the second user wrote: “I do not have evidence that data was uploaded.”
The reporter wrote that the sequence was “not yet reproduced on a clean Mac”. We have not run the installer ourselves. The reports do not establish which builds or how many users were affected.
The Postman blog feed we read at 05:47 UTC on 4 November had no post on the installation, and we found no separate company statement at that time.
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Two users report, from Postman’s own logs, that the desktop app installed AI plugins into Claude Code and Codex on launch. A reply in Postman’s voice says the plugins are bundled for easier setup and that the opt-in will be made clearer; it came 10.6 days after the first logged install, by our arithmetic.
A note on sourcing. The installation accounts are user reports on Postman’s public GitHub issue tracker, quoting Postman’s log; we have not verified them independently or run the installer. The reply in Postman’s voice comes from an account GitHub does not mark as a Postman member. Website and source-code lines are from postman.com, the Internet Archive and Postman’s public plugin repository, read on 4 November 2026. The elapsed times are our arithmetic.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
