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

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Thu, 9 Oct 2025 at 11:43, Chris Mason <clm@meta.com> wrote:
>
> I think it's also important to remember that AI is sometimes wildly
> wrong.  Having the reviews show up on a list where more established
> developers can call bullshit definitely helps protect against wasting
> people's time.

I really want any AI effort to be primarily geared towards
maintainers, not end developers.

And this is a large part of the reason. I think we've all seen the
garbage end of AI, and how it can generate more work rather than less.

We see the downsides on the security list where people use AI to
generate questionable reports, we see it in various general bug
handling, and we've seen it on the infrastructure where the AI tools
cause huge issues.

Fairly recently Jens gave up maintaining his own git server just
because of the horror that is AI scraping tools.

Yes, that scraping issue a "secondary" kind of "more work rather than
less", but it's very much a real issue nonetheless. Just the
infrastructure load is a real thing.

Some long term goal may well be to help end developers, but I really
think it should not be seen as any kind of primary goal for now and
shouldn't even be on anybody's radar as a design issue.

Exactly because I think we need that "established developers can call
bullshit" without being overwhelmed by said BS from external sources.

So I think that only once any AI tools are actively helping
maintainers in a day-to-day workflow should people even *look* at
having non-maintainers use them.

And I say that as somebody who does think it's going to be a big help.
I know there are lots of less optimistic people around.

             Linus