Re: AI-assisted review

[Tom Rini <trini@konsulko.com>]

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On Fri, May 15, 2026 at 03:03:21PM -0600, Simon Glass wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> There was a query on the call this week about whether I am doing
> AI-assisted code review. As I said on the call: yes. Here is a brief
> description of how it works.
> 
> It is built into Patman (on the Concept tree) with a new 'patman
> review' command. You give it the series name / number, or perhaps a
> patch name/number and it applies the patches to a new branch, does a
> review then adds its comments to its database.
> 
> A '-d' flag can be used to create draft emails in Gmail (sorry, it
> doesn't support other email programs yet). You then check and update
> the emails and send them (or delete them). I am not an expert in
> handling the 'user voice' part of AI, but have made an attempt to make
> it follow any provided configuration, as well as to scan recent
> reviews to actually create to create a voice.
> 
> Obviously this is very rudimentary and could be expanded considerably.
> But the mere fact that it creates draft emails is a win for me, even
> if I ultimately delete or rewrite most of the comments. I can imagine
> 10 different ways to improve it to be more useful.
> 
> I wrote a blog post about it if you want more details, or you can ask me here.
> 
> I am very interested in hearing how others are using these new tools
> for code review.

And the big thing for now is that since we as a project do not yet have
an AI policy aside from "please don't". One of the points I was making
on the call is that there's a difference in value between "Human
reviewed it, looks fine" and "Human spent some tokens, agent didn't see
any problems".

And I know several other people have been doing at least first pass
reviews with various agent-tools, it's just no one else has been posting
reviews at your scale. And lessons learned from other projects is that
the prompts are more important than whatever wrapper around the agent
one is using.

-- 
Tom

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