Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Other LLM-related topics - tags, newcomers, etc

["Theodore Tso" <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2026 at 12:36:53PM -0500, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> The related discussions have featured a number of maintainers talking
> about how much time Sashiko has saved them.  I believe them.  How long
> will it take until nobody does that level of patch review anymore?  What
> will we do when the current round of corporate generosity ends and that
> tool goes away?  Maybe I'm worrying too much, but this does seem, to me,
> like a possibility we should keep in mind.

Sashiko finds issues that human reviewers wouldn't necessarily notice.
Before Sashiko, at least for ext4, I'd find those sorts of issues by
running 24 VM hours worth of fstests, and rely on that testing to find
problems that I might miss when doing the initial patch review.  Could
I have found it by spending 3 times as much time looking at each
commit, and thinking deeply?  Sure.  But I don't have the time for
that, so I've *already* relied on Google contributing roughly two
dollars of VM time for each 24 hour regression test run.  Sashiko
might be a bit more expensive on a per-patch basis, but just as I
never viewed fstests as a replacement for human-level review, I don't
think Sashiko is complete substitute human review.

We still need experienced human reviewers to ask whether the fix is
being done in the right place, or whether the right solution is to
*remove* code as opposed to *adding* code, etc.  This is critical if
we want the code to be maintainable in the long-term.  I agree that if
reviewers stop doing this, we would be in a world of hurt --- but that
can happen if people were to start relying on kunit tests passing as a
substitute for code review.

						- Ted