Linux Kernel Developer Chris Mason's New Initiative: AI Prompts for Code Reviews
1 47Phoronix reports: Chris Mason, the longtime Linux kernel developer most known for being the creator of Btrfs, has been working on a Git repository with AI review prompts he has been working on for LLM-assisted code review of Linux kernel patches. This initiative has been happening for some weeks now while the latest work was posted today for comments... The Meta engineer has been investing a lot of effort into making this AI/LLM-assisted code review accurate and useful to upstream Linux kernel stakeholders. It's already shown positive results and with the current pace it looks like it could play a helpful part in Linux kernel code review moving forward.
"I'm hoping to get some feedback on changes I pushed today that break the review up into individual tasks..." Mason wrote on the Linux kernel mailing list. "Using tasks allows us to break up large diffs into smaller chunks, and review each chunk individually. This ends up using fewer tokens a lot of the time, because we're not sending context back and forth for the entire diff with every turn. It also catches more bugs all around."
1 comments
Re:Don't be stupid, people (Score: 5, Insightful)
by rocket rancher ( 447670 ) on <themovingfinger@gmail.com> on Monday February 02, 2026 @09:26AM (#65964062)
First, LLM-type AI may not actually be around in any suitable way in a few years. The business numbers are catastrophic.
That’s not an argument, it’s astrology with a spreadsheet. Even if Vendor X faceplants into a crater, the workflow Chris is talking about doesn’t evaporate. These are prompts and scripts that turn “big diff, big context” into small, reviewable chunks. Swap the engine, keep the tooling. The kernel has outlived entire tech empires, compilers, VCSes, “next big things,” and at least three “Linux is doomed” decades. Tools that reduce reviewer fatigue stick around because reviewers keep using them, not because a quarterly earnings call went well.
Also: the LKML thread is about making AI review less magical by structuring it, scoping it, and forcing it to show its work. That’s basically the opposite of “bet the farm on a single vendor’s hype cycle.”
Second, LLM-type AI misses what is really important, namely quality of architecture and interfaces
Correct in the most trivial way possible: lint won’t design your subsystem either -- and nobody claimed it would. This isn’t “let the chatbot be a maintainer,” it’s “use a tool to catch more bugs while humans stay responsible for architecture and interfaces.”
Kernel review is layered. Humans do the high-level “does this belong, does it fit, is the interface sane, does it age well?” work. Tools do the tireless “did you miss a refcount, a NULL check, a lock ordering hazard, a surprising call path” work. Chris is explicitly carving the diff into tasks, extracting call graphs, and even cross-checking lore and Fixes tags. That’s a checklist machine, not an architect. Complaining it’s not an architect is like complaining grep can’t write a better filesystem -- which Chris *obviously* can do... :)
and is[t] bad at finding security problems outside of toy examples.
If your model is “AI must find every non-toy security bug or it’s worthless,” then congrats, you’ve also just declared static analyzers, fuzzers, and humans worthless, because none of them are complete. In reality, we stack imperfect tools and get better outcomes. Syzkaller doesn’t understand architecture either, yet it finds terrifyingly real bugs. Sparse doesn’t grok interfaces, yet it saves us from type and annotation shooting us in the foot. Smatch doesn’t have to grok the dev's intent to catch patterns reviewers miss at 2AM.
AI review is the same category: a probabilistic pattern spotter that can flag suspicious deltas fast, especially when you constrain context, force targeted questions, and make it operate on extracted facts instead of vibes. That’s exactly what this informal RFC is doing, including extra rigor around syzbot reports.
if you don’t want to use the prompts, don’t. But don’t pretend “VC math scary” and “AI isn’t a maintainer” are substantive rebuttals to an RFC, even an informal one, about reducing token waste and catching more bugs with a structured, auditable review pipeline.