Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] The role of AI and LLMs in the kernel process

[Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org>]

On Tue, Aug 05, 2025 at 01:23:18PM -0400, James Bottomley wrote:
>On Tue, 2025-08-05 at 18:11 +0100, Mark Brown wrote:
>> On Tue, Aug 05, 2025 at 12:43:38PM -0400, James Bottomley wrote:
>> > On Tue, 2025-08-05 at 17:03 +0100, Lorenzo Stoakes wrote:
>>
>> > > * On the other hand, there are use cases which are useful - test
>> > > data/code generation, summarisation, smart auto-complete - so
>> > > it'd perhaps be foolish to entirely dismiss AI.
>>
>> > Patch backporting is another such nice use.
>>
>> Patch backporting sounds pretty scary to me, it's the sort of thing
>> where extra context that needs to be accounted for is very likely to
>> come up (eg, assumptions you can make about existing state or
>> santisation).
>
>If you think about it, the git history contains the exact patch path
>between where the patch was applied and where you want to apply it.
>That's a finite data set which LLMs can be trained to work nicely with.

Most of the patches that fail to backport and get a "FAILED:" mail as a
result are really just either a trivial context conflict ar a missing
dependency.

Resolving those is within the realm of a "junior engineer" which I
suspect AI would tackle fairly well.

The other ~10-20% are indeed something more complex due to things like a
major rewrite/refactor/etc of a subsystem, where I wouldn't trust the
current state of the art AI to tackle. But mayble a few years from now?

-- 
Thanks,
Sasha