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

[Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org>]

On Wed, Oct 08, 2025 at 01:20:21PM -0400, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:
>On Wed, Oct 08, 2025 at 01:04:54PM -0400, Chris Mason wrote:
>> My goal for KS/MS is to discuss how to enable maintainers to use review
>> automation tools to lower their workload.  I don't want to build new CI
>> here, so the goal would be enabling integration with existing CI.
>>
>> My question for everyone is what would it take to make all of this
>> useful?
>
>I am generally of the opinion that it's more useful to talk about it than to
>ignore it. Clearly, this is a controversial subject -- many will liken
>introducing proprietary AI tooling to what happened with bitkeeper.
>
>I've been working on incorporating series summarization with b4, but I'm
>trying to make it work with ollama/gemma3 so as not to introduce a proprietary
>dependency. My results are probably a lot more hit-and-miss than with Claude
>4.5 Sonnet -- but I find it hard to judge because the summaries *look*
>reasonably good to someone who is not a maintainer of that particular
>subsystem.

The approach I've been trying to take with my tools is that instead of
embedding the AI API calling logic into the tool itself (like I did initially
with the AUTOSEL rewrite), I just provided a "hook" in the form of a script
that takes the prompt as input and outputs the respose from whatever LLM was
used behind the scenes.

It make it easier both in the sense that I can easily switch between providers
just by calling a different script, and also I don't get locked into any single
provider and can decide if I want to use one of the open models or a
proprietary one.

We can provide a library of these scripts to make it easy for users and give
them the freedom to choose which model they want to be using.

-- 
Thanks,
Sasha