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

[Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org>]

On Wed, Oct 08, 2025 at 07:50:32PM +0000, Bird, Tim wrote:
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com>
>> On Wed, Oct 08, 2025 at 09:08:33PM +0200, Andrew Lunn wrote:
>> > > My goal for KS/MS is to discuss how to enable maintainers to use review
>> > > automation tools to lower their workload.
>> >
>> > Maintainers will want to use these tools, if they prove to be
>> > useful. But ideally, we want the developers to use these tools and fix
>> > the issues before they post code for review. That reduces the
>> > maintainers workload even more. So Maintainers just need to run the
>> > tools to prove that the developers have run the tools and have already
>> > fixed the problems.
>> >
>> > So i'm not sure your goal is the correct long term goal. It should be
>> > a tool for everybody, not just maintainers.
>>
>> This raises the interesting and important question of how to get patch
>> submitters to follow a recommended workflow. We routinely get patches
>> that produce checkpatch errors that are clearly not false positives.
>> Rob Herring implemented a bot to run checks on device tree bindings and
>> device tree sources because lots of patches fail those checks. I'm sure
>> there are lots of other examples that have led maintainers to automate
>> checks on the receiver's side, through various types of standard CIs or
>> hand-made solutions. Submitters should run more tests, how to get them
>> to do so is a broader question.
>
>Maybe it would be worthwhile to annotate patch submissions with tags
>indicating what tools have been run on them.  I know we're trying to avoid
>overuse of commit tags, but maybe we could automate this a bit, and/or'
>reuse the 'Reviewed-by:' tag in the commit message.  I could envision, in some
>future workflow utopia, where a missing 'Reviewed-by: checkpatch.pl AND claude AI review'
>would be grounds for requesting these before human review.

This is similar to what was proposed in the last round[1] of discussions around
disclosing (AI) tool usage.

 From the cover letter:

	Assisted-by: Claude-claude-3-opus-20240229 checkpatch

At which point maintainers can set their own policies for their subsystem and
automate workflows based on those policies.



[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20250809234008.1540324-1-sashal@kernel.org/

-- 
Thanks,
Sasha