The maintainers of OCaml, an open-source functional programming language, rejected an AI-generated pull request (PR) with more than 13,000 lines of code, citing copyright concerns, lack of review resources, and that it did not align with the maintenance practices of the project – raising key issues about the future interaction between AI and open source.

OCaml has several compilers, including ocamlc which emits bytecode and ocamlopt which builds standalone native executables. Typically, OCaml developers use the bytecode compiler for developing and testing their code, but may use the native compiler for production. There are built-in tools for debugging OCaml bytecode but debugging with the native compiler is more limited.

Developer Joel Reymont was frustrated by the lack of DWARF debugging information when using the native compiler and turned to Claude Code to add this feature, DWARF being a standard format used by many debuggers including lldb (the LLVM debugger) and gdb (GNU debugger). Reymont described on his blog how he used Anthropic’s Claude Code to add the feature to the OCaml native compiler, and said “I did not write a single line of code but carefully shepherded AI over the course of several days … my work was just directing, shaping, cajoling and reviewing.” Reymont submitted the code as a pull request to the OCaml GitHub repository.

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