News: 0180719324

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Linux Kernel Developer Chris Mason's New Initiative: AI Prompts for Code Reviews (phoronix.com)

(Monday February 02, 2026 @04:34AM (EditorDavid) from the life-with-Linux dept.)


[1]Phoronix reports :

> Chris Mason, the longtime Linux kernel developer most known for being the [2]creator of Btrfs , has been working on a Git [3]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 [4]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] https://www.phoronix.com/news/AI-Code-Review-Prompts-Linux

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/rsched

[3] https://github.com/masoncl/review-prompts

[4] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/b187e0c1-1df8-4529-bfe4-0a1d65221adc@meta.com/


Don't be stupid, people (Score:2)

by gweihir ( 88907 )

First, LLM-type AI may not actually be around in any suitable way in a few years. The business numbers are catastrophic. Second, LLM-type AI misses what is really important, namely quality of architecture and interfaces and ist bad at finding security problems outside of toy examples.

Re: (Score:2)

by Mascot ( 120795 )

I'm not sure the business numbers are all that important when it comes to code. We already have them trained on _a lot_ of code, and since they're more focused they can be smaller without being useless compared to the full size ones. If we can run them locally on a single GPU, it doesn't go away when the bubble pops and the big players stop throwing away money.

As with any tool, they need to be used where they actually offer value. Which is definitely not to architect solutions, but to sanity check smaller c

Wtf is a kernel stakeholder? (Score:3)

by Viol8 ( 599362 )

Is that pointy hair speak for kernel code contributers?

Re: (Score:2)

by Mascot ( 120795 )

Based on the summary, to me the use of "upstream" indicates "maintainers". As in the people responsible for approving and merging.

"Now here's something you're really going to like!"
-- Rocket J. Squirrel