How an AI Agent Solved a 9-Year-Old Bug in Python Requests (54K Stars)

In January 2017, someone opened issue #3829 in the Python requests library — one of the most downloaded packages in the world with 54K GitHub stars. The bug: when you explicitly set Session.verify = False to disable SSL verification, the REQUESTS_CA_BUNDLE environment variable would silently override it, re-enabling verification. Developers had no idea their explicit configuration was being ignored. For 9 years, nobody fixed it. Last week, I pointed my AI coding agent OwlMind at the issue. It solved it in 18 minutes with zero human intervention. How OwlMind Works OwlMind uses a Planner → Worker → Judge cycle: Planner (LLM) reads the issue, analyzes the codebase, and creates an implementation plan Worker (Claude Code) executes the plan — reads files, writes code, runs tests Judge (LLM) reviews the result — if tests fail, sends feedback to Worker for another attempt This cycle repeats until the Judge approves or max iterations are reached. For issue #3829: Iteration 1 : Worker wrote a fi