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

["Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@kernel.org>]

On Wed, Oct 08, 2025 at 01:04:54PM -0400, Chris Mason wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> Depending on how you look at things, this is potentially a topic for
> either MS or KS.
> 
> One way to lower the load on maintainers is to make it easier for
> contributors to send higher quality patches, and to catch errors before
> they land in various git trees.
> 
> Along those lines, when the AI code submission thread started over the
> summer, I decided to see if it was possible to get reasonable code
> reviews out of AI.
> 
> There are certainly false positives, but Alexei and the BPF developers
> wired up my prompts into the BPF CI, and you can find the results in
> their github CI.  Everything in red is a bug the AI review found:
> 
> https://github.com/kernel-patches/bpf/actions/workflows/ai-code-review.yml
> 
> 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'm working on funding for API access, so hopefully that part
> won't be a problem.
> 
> There's definitely overlap between the bugs I'm finding and the bugs Dan
> Carpenter finds, so I'm hoping he and I can team up as well.

Using AI to analyze code and patches seems much safer than using it
to generate actual code.  I asked this AI a couple of RCU questions,
and although the answers were not perfect, they were not half bad.
Especially not at all bad compared to what you would likely get out of
human beings on their first trawl through that code.  ;-)

							Thanx, Paul