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

[Chris Mason <clm@meta.com>]

On 10/8/25 1:20 PM, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 08, 2025 at 01:04:54PM -0400, Chris Mason wrote:
>> My goal for KS/MS is to discuss how to enable maintainers to use review
>> automation tools to lower their workload.  I don't want to build new CI
>> here, so the goal would be enabling integration with existing CI.
>>
>> My question for everyone is what would it take to make all of this
>> useful? 
> 
> I am generally of the opinion that it's more useful to talk about it than to
> ignore it. Clearly, this is a controversial subject -- many will liken
> introducing proprietary AI tooling to what happened with bitkeeper.
> 

Yeah, I understand this concern.

> I've been working on incorporating series summarization with b4, but I'm
> trying to make it work with ollama/gemma3 so as not to introduce a proprietary
> dependency. My results are probably a lot more hit-and-miss than with Claude
> 4.5 Sonnet -- but I find it hard to judge because the summaries *look*
> reasonably good to someone who is not a maintainer of that particular
> subsystem.
> 

You know way more about the variety of kernel developer workflows than
me, but since everyone will want something different, I think any
reasonable and open default, along with a way people can plug in their
own API and prompt is fantastic.

For the code reviews, I don't want to exclude someone using an open
tool, and I'm actually really curious how close they can get.  At some
point I'm going to collect example bugs of the major categories and add
them to an automated test setup for the prompts, and we can also use
that against alternative AIs.

> Maybe it's more of a BoF session material?
> 
I'm up for anything.

-chris