Hello,
In 2026, what do you use to write OCaml software:
I am especially interested if some are using an open-source LLM that can be run locally:
allowing a company to witness software under development can be considered very intrusive.
Regards,
Francois.
Full disclosure:
I still do 1) sometimes. I do 2) often and I am even considering giving a try at 3).
I do 1 to 3.
Currently, not directly letting it edit source files but asking it to make isolated suggestions which I manually apply by copy and paste and tag as AI generated. That way I’m sure what part of the code came from AI. I don’t use a local LLM as I’m not sure which one would be manageable and good enough for productive work?
Might be worth distinguishing between different categories of OCaml progammer:
(1) for money
(2) for hobby projects
Also might be worth asking about which generation the respondent classes themselves in: Boomer, X, Millennial, Z, Alpha.
E.g., I’m X, only hack OCaml for hobby projects, and would never use AI. But if I were still a pro (and had the enormous fortune of being hired to hack OCaml?) I’m sure I’d feel constrained to use AI, yeah.
In my current day job, since about six months ago, software engineering has been fully integrated with a variety of LLM-powered coding assistants for over two years. It’s not an experiment, and hasn’t been for some time. My team has been using Claude Code mainly since Opus 3. We have an all-you-can-eat enterprise plan, and we are using it extensively and systematically, mostly with Scala, Rust and some Python here and there.
We are not an OCaml shop.
Around the time I was getting ready to leave my previous employers a few months ago, I signed up for a one-year subscription to Claude Pro for use with CC on my unpublished hobby projects. I wanted to see how well I could get it to drive the OCaml toolchain. On the plan I purchased, I have to be a bit parsimonious with my token spend, or I’ll blow the week’s budget in a few hours, and it’s also quite a bit slower than it is on the enterprise all-you-can-eat buffet plan. So, I’m unable to find as much use for it, but it’s still useful more than occasionally. It can often turn a 30-minute troubleshooting exercise into a 3-minute pull-the-lever and watch-the-wheels spin lootbox game, and I am old and tired and unwilling to sweat the tedious puzzles when I can skip them and work on more fun problems.
My personal setup needs more customized skills installed before it would be as useful in my hobby projects as it is in my day job. With the level of customization I have now, it can make quick work of diagnosing compile errors and test case failures when I’m struggling to get something to work. It’s not so good at turning a design spec into usable implementation plan, and it’s even less capable in going from brainstorming to design spec. Installing better skills might be an improvement.
If I were still trying to release my hobby projects as open source (I do not do that anymore), then I would think twice about using a license like MIT or BSD. The license files in my templates all now call for CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0 at this point.