Google Engineers Launch "Sashiko" for Agentic AI Code Review of the Linux Kernel

56 pointsposted 3 hours ago
by speckx
(phoronix.com)

23 Comments

rwmj

2 hours ago

Better to link to the site itself, or one of the reviews?

For an example of a review (picked pretty much at random) see: https://sashiko.dev/#/patchset/20260318151256.2590375-1-andr...

The original patch series corresponding to that is: https://lkml.org/lkml/2026/3/18/1600

Edit: Here's a simpler and better example of a review: https://sashiko.dev/#/patchset/20260318110848.2779003-1-liju...

I'm very glad they're not spamming the mailing list.

jeffbee

2 hours ago

That is both really useful and a great example of why they should have stopped writing code in C decades ago. So many kernel bugs have arisen from people adding early returns without thinking about the cleanup functions, a problem that many other language platforms handle automatically on scope exit.

overfeed

an hour ago

Must we do this on every thread about the Linux kernel?

qainsights

4 minutes ago

They would have completely redesigned Google Gerrit.

withinrafael

35 minutes ago

Looks cool, but this site is a bit difficult for me to grok.

I think the table might be slightly inside-out? The Status column appears to show internal pipeline states ("Pending", "In Review") that really only matter to the system, while Findings are buried in the column on the far right. For example, one reviewed patchset with a critical and a high finding is just causally hanging out below the fold. I couldn't immediately find a way to filter or search for severe findings.

It might help to separate unreviewed patches from reviewed ones, and somehow wire the findings into the visual hierarchy better. Or perhaps I'm just off base and this is targeting a very specific Linux kernel community workflow/mindset.

Just my 1c.

tonfa

19 minutes ago

I think it's just a dashboard, not meant to be used as is.

Reviewers are more likely to instead subscribe to get the review inline, and then potentially incorporate that with their feedback.

monksy

2 hours ago

I think this is a great and interesting project. However, I hope that they're not doing this to submit patches to the kernel. It would be much better to layer in additional tests to exploit bugs and defects for verification of existance/fixes.

(Also tests can be focused per defect.. which prevents overload)

From some of the changes I'm seeing: This looks like it's doing style and structure changes, which for a codebase this size is going to add drag to existing development. (I'm supportive of cleanups.. but done on an automated basis is a bad idea)

I.e. https://sashiko.dev/#/message/20260318170604.10254-1-erdemhu...

bjackman

2 hours ago

Style and structure is not the goal here, the reason people are interested in it is to find bugs.

Having said that, if it can save maintainers time it could be useful. It's worth slowing contribution down if it lets maintainers get more reviews done, since the kernel is bottlenecked much more on maintainer time than on contributor energy.

My experience with using the prototype is that it very rarely comments with "opinions" it only identifies functional issues. So when you get false positives it's usually of the form "the model doesn't understand the code" or "the model doesn't understand the context" rather than "I'm getting spammed with pointless advice about C programming preferences". This may be a subsystem-specific thing, as different areas of the codebase have different prompts. (May also be that my coding style happens to align with its "preferences").

rwmj

2 hours ago

No, it's reviewing patches posted on LKML and offering suggestions. The original patch posted corresponding to your link was this, which was (presumably!) written by a human:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2026/3/9/1631

4fterd4rk

2 hours ago

oh god can we not

smlacy

2 hours ago

What's your concern?

htx80nerd

2 hours ago

Have you ever programmed with AI? It needs a lot of hand holding for even simple things sometimes. Forgets basic input, does all kinds of brain dead stuff it should know not to do.

>"good catch - thanks for pointing that out"

lame-robot-hoax

2 hours ago

Can you clarify how, at all, that’s relevant to the article?

ablob

an hour ago

Both the curl and the SQLite project have been overburdened by AI bug reports. Unless the Google engineers take great care to review each potential bug for validity the same fate might apply here. There have been a lot of news regarding open source projects being stuffed to the brim with low effort and high cost merge requests or issues. You just don't see all the work that is caused unless you have to deal with the fallout...

tonfa

17 minutes ago

This project has nothing to do with bug reports... it's an opt-in tool for reviewing proposed changes that kernel developers can decide to use (if they find it useful).

jamesnorden

2 hours ago

Well, if it doesn't find anything it's just a waste of time at best.

asadm

2 hours ago

i think it's a skill.

__tidu

2 hours ago

well tbf code review is probably the most useful part of "AI coding", if it catches even a single bug you missed its worth it, plus false positives would waste dev time but not pollute the kernel

shevy-java

2 hours ago

Now they want to kill the Linux kernel. :(

We've already seen how bug bounty projects were closed by AI spam; I think it was curl? Or some other project I don't remember right now.

I think AI tools should be required, by law, to verify that what they report is actually a true bug rather than some hypothetical, hallucinated context-dependent not-quite-a-real-bug bug.

tonfa

18 minutes ago

It's not forced upon anyone, it's a tool that patch authors or reviewers can use if they want to.

quantium1628

an hour ago

b2b or b2c? feels like it could go either way