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

[Alexei Starovoitov <alexei.starovoitov@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Oct 9, 2025 at 10:24 AM Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo
<acme@kernel.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Oct 09, 2025 at 02:19:58PM -0300, Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 09, 2025 at 12:31:48PM -0400, Chris Mason wrote:
> > > On 10/9/25 10:30 AM, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> > > > One way I see this working is to attach it to patchwork. Sending a patch to
> > > > the BPF mailing list has their patchwork trigger a bunch of tests and it
> > > > will tell you if it passed or failed. I'm assuming if it failed, it doesn't
> > > > add it to patchwork and the maintainers will ignore it.
>
> > > > Attaching AI to patchwork could be useful as well. But this would run on
> > > > some server that someone will have to pay for. But it will not be the
> > > > submitter.
>
> > > Just to clarify, that's what already happens with BPF today.
>
> > > Ex: https://github.com/kernel-patches/bpf/pull/9962 are all from the
> > > review prompts.
>
> > This almost relieves me from the guilt not to have reviewed that series
> > from Alan ;-\
>
> But this goes back to "developers should run these tools before
> submitting upstream", which would provide them with reviewing comments
> that would improve the quality of their pull requests by using all the
> money that is being dreamed into AI and would saved all of us from
> looking at github, etc, before AI is satisfied with the quality of the
> submitters work?
>
> Its all about what should distract maintainers (humans?), no?

Our next step is to send them as plain text emails, so that reviews
will blend in into natural kernel development process:
submitter send patches, AI and/or human replies, submitter replies
and insists that their code is correct and AI/human is wrong,
or admits the bug and fixes it in the next respin. And so on.

Chris did a tremendous job in reducing false positives.
These reviews were proven to be quite accurate and spotted
bugs that maintainers didn't. In a few cases the maintainer
found a bug and pointed it out, but AI explained the bug better.