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

[Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@kernel.org>]

On Wed, Oct 08, 2025 at 04:30:32PM -0400, Sasha Levin wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 08, 2025 at 07:50:32PM +0000, Bird, Tim wrote:
> > > 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.

But this is just a disclosure about tools supposedly used. What about
the version, specific model, checkpatch version, etc?

Its good info, that can help understand why some parts of a patch came
into being, but shouldn't preclude the maintainer from using his best
judgement and extra tooling.

- Arnaldo