Re: [MAINTAINERS / KERNEL SUMMIT] AI patch review tools

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

On Fri, 2025-10-10 at 10:54 +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 09, 2025 at 06:03:45AM -0400, Chris Mason wrote:
[...]
> I'm not that concerned about being locked to a specific vendor, but
> more about being locked to a proprietory technology. Today I'm sure
> that we could get sponsorship from different LLM vendors. They're
> competing to attract more users, so it would be in their interest.
> Tomorrow, when the market will calm down, the story will be
> different.
> 
> I liken this to building a dam to contain the patch flood. It could
> give us some room to breathe, and we may then decide to ignore that
> the water rises behind the flood gates. When that happens, we won't
> be able to go back to where we were before if we later realize we
> can't have FOSS-compatible flood gates.

This is pre-supposing that AI will always be proprietary.  Given the
vast expansion of open source over the last couple of decades I
wouldn't take that bet.

> If we were to push the burden of running LLM-based review to
> contributors this wouldn't affect us that much, but if we run it on
> the maintainers' side (be it on the server side with bots that get
> patches from mailing lists, CI systems that feed from patchwork, or
> on the client side) the risk of vendor lock-in is higher.

Pushing the burden on to contributors always causes more friction than
building it into the CI.  Plus if there's a cost involved you're making
contribution pay for play which really doesn't work out well.

>  Maybe proprietary technology lock-in would be a better description
> as this isn't about a single vendor.

Well, firstly we've had this before: us with bitkeeper and most
recently Kubernetes with Slack and everyone has survived. But secondly
the far more likely scenario is that the AI stock bubble bursts and the
investment dries up changing the way AI is done (definitely killing the
who can by powerstations and huge hardware installations model of
today) and who the players are (probably the point at which open source
becomes more prevalent).

However, regardless of what happens in future, it will be way easier to
cope with if we've got AI in the CI rather than trying to push it into
contributor tooling.

Regards,

James