Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] The role of AI and LLMs in the kernel process

[Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>]

On Tue, 05 Aug 2025 14:34:40 -0400
James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com> wrote:

> > Sure - Steven encountered this in [1].
> > 
> > As he says there:
> > 
> > "If I had known, I would have examined the patch a little more
> > thoroughly,  and would have discovered a very minor mistake in the
> > patch."  
> 
> Heh, well now you make me look it seems that the minor mistake is
> adding at tail instead of head?  That seems to be because the hash list
> API doesn't have a head add ...
> 
> I wouldn't really call that a subtle problem because the LLM would have
> picked up the head to tail conversion if we'd had an at head API for it
> to learn from.

That wasn't the minor mistake I was referring to. The mistake was that it
dropped a __read_mostly annotation. Which after further review, was
actually OK and something that should have been done in a separate patch. I
have other tags that are required for alignment and such otherwise things
may break mysteriously. It could easily have dropped a different tag that
would have made a difference.

The point here is that it most definitely will introduce very subtle
mistakes. More subtle than what a human may produce and much harder to spot.

-- Steve