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

[Julia Lawall <julia.lawall@inria.fr>]

On Wed, 6 Aug 2025, Dan Carpenter wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 06, 2025 at 07:49:24AM +0200, Julia Lawall wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Tue, 5 Aug 2025, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> > >
> > > Another genuinely good usage for AI is for especially non-English
> > > speakers to tidy up their patch comments and other documentation.
> >
> > There are also some parts of the kernel that are supposed to have
> > comments, such as memory barriers.  AI could help ensure that the comments
> > are actually meaningful, and perhaps suggest to the developer how they
> > could be improved (sort of a 0-day for comment quality).
> >
>
> I feel like I have seen patches where people have generated AI
> documentation for locking.  The problem is that if you ask AI to write
> something it always has a very confident answer but normally it's vague
> and slightly wrong.  It takes no time to generate these patches but it
> takes a while to review them.

I would have hoped for some tool that would somehow be designed to
understand comments in a good way.  Random individual efforts to generate
comments using AI would probably indeed produce something innocuous and
useless.

julia