Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] The place of AI code review in the Linux Kernel process

On Wed, Jul 15, 2026 at 6:55=E2=80=AFPM Roman Gushchin <roman.gushchin@linu=
x.dev> wrote:
>
> * Review of LTS patches and kernel releases.

For the backporting case, I think this could help, and there are
certain things we could ask for, i.e. custom prompts.

It may also have less noise, in the sense that the AI has the original
commit in mainline as a baseline, i.e. it is not a completely new
patch of unknown quality.

I imagine Sasha et al. have experience with this.

> * How to maintain the long-term stability of Sashiko?

How hard do you think it would be to get at least one more AI company
to donate some tokens (for their own model)? Could that be a simple
start to begin reducing the single-provider issue?

> * Handling of pre-existing bugs.

Do you mean the AI would be able to query that database? Or directly
being part of the prompt for that subsystem/file if it is not too big?

Ideally some of those cases would just be a comment in the source code
(like we already do) -- local and in-band, and it may help other
readers too.

> * Prompt development and testing.

Yeah, it is pretty much a black box at the moment, especially since a
maintainer doesn't control the runs, i.e. even worse than a local LLM
that one can do several quick tries etc.

Regarding putting the prompts into the tree, that sounds similar to
the in-tree CI files. That could help, but I wonder if it should be as
general, shared guidelines for a subsystem (i.e. useful for humans
too) or truly LLM-only notes (i.e. to overcome certain weaknesses of
the AI etc.).

> * Interactive mode.

Could this access be restricted to, say, people with Gitolite access
or similar, and rate limited somehow?

I am pretty sure you already thought of this, but I wonder how feasible it =
is.

Thanks!

Cheers,
Miguel