Cresting the OCaml AI humps / Jul 2025

I've been hacking with Sadiq Jaffer (^), Jon Ludlam (^) and Ryan Gibb (^) on various approaches to improving the agentic coding experience for OCaml.

We jotted down our notes in a draft paper to keep track of everything going on, including summarising previous experiments with Qwen3 for FoCS. Since then, there's been a flurry of extra activity from others which we need to integrate!

• Marcello Seri started pushing to my vibe coded OCaml MCP library, making him user number 2 of that!
• Then Thibaut Mattio announced a bunch of software, starting with a collection of libraries and tools for numerical computing and machine learning and also another MCP server. I haven't had a chance to try the MCP server yet, but I hope I can retire mine...
• Thomas Gazagnaire started hacking on an agent-friendly merlint tool that spots common problems in style and choices and gives CLI feedback in a style easily consumed by claude. I've started using it despite its pre-alpha status.
• Jon Ludlam's been getting the opam embeddings into shape to be suitable as an MCP server that can search the entire opam ecosystem. odoc v3 has also gone live after lots of work, and David Sancho's support for Markdown odoc output on which makes this process easier.

This is all fairly straightforward MCP work that improves the short-term experience. We'll get to the RL-VR ideas later... If anyone else is hacking on something agent related do post on OCaml Discuss and let us know! I'm hoping to update the paper later in August to roundup the efforts above.