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"
asadm•Mar 18, 2026
i think it's a skill.
lame-robot-hoax•Mar 18, 2026
Can you clarify how, at all, that’s relevant to the article?
ablob•Mar 18, 2026
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•Mar 18, 2026
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•Mar 18, 2026
Well, if it doesn't find anything it's just a waste of time at best.
danielbln•Mar 18, 2026
Prevention paradox.
__tidu•Mar 18, 2026
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
monksy•Mar 18, 2026
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)
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:
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•Mar 18, 2026
Better to link to the site itself, or one of the reviews?
I'm very glad they're not spamming the mailing list.
jeffbee•Mar 18, 2026
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•Mar 18, 2026
Must we do this on every thread about the Linux kernel?
RobRivera•Mar 18, 2026
The beatings will continue until morale improves
vpShane•Mar 18, 2026
yeah but Linux is love, linux is life. if you really want to get the beatings going:
Of course I specifically avoided invoking that language's name within the context of kernel programming in fear of summoning a Linus.
And he's so right. I didn't think like that back then, but new/delete (which have to be overloaded for kernel) behind allocators behind containers, vtables, =0, uninitialized members, unhandled ctor errors, template magic, "sometimes rvo", compiler hints, "sometimes reinterpret cast", 3rd party libraries, it would have been a disaster 20 years ago. Now he's being nice to Rust partially to spite that lang I love some more.
shevy-java•Mar 18, 2026
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•Mar 18, 2026
It's not forced upon anyone, it's a tool that patch authors or reviewers can use if they want to.
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•Mar 18, 2026
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.
qainsights•Mar 18, 2026
They would have completely redesigned Google Gerrit.
kleiba•Mar 18, 2026
> Sashiko was able to find around 53% of bugs
That's cool. Another interesting metric, however, would be the false positive ratio: like, I could just build a bogus system that simply marks everything as a bug and then claim "my system found 100% of all bugs!"
In practice, not just the recall of a bug finding system is important but also its precision: if human reviewers get spammed with piles of alleged bug reports by something like Sashiko, most of which turn out not to be bugs at all, that noise binds resources and could undermine trust in the usefulness of the system.
i_cannot_hack•Mar 18, 2026
They mention false positives as well on github: The rate of false positives is harder to measure, but based on limited manual reviews it's well within 20% range and the majority of it is a gray zone.
mika-el•Mar 18, 2026
the separation between who writes and who reviews is the whole thing. I do same at smaller scale — one model writes code, different model reviews it. self-review misses things, same reason you don't review your own PRs
throwa356262•Mar 18, 2026
I find it interesting that this is written in Rust (not golang) and co-authored with Claude (not gemini)
dgacmu•Mar 18, 2026
It's written in rust, but why do you believe it was co-authored with Claude? The README in github specifically says:
Claude snitches on you in your commits. You can just look at the history.
michaelchen58•Mar 18, 2026
nice execution. the demo video sold me more than the text
goatyishere25•Mar 18, 2026
cool idea. curious how you're handling the cold start problem
TacticalCoder•Mar 18, 2026
Looks like a great new tool to help ship less bugs!
Nitpicking on this though:
> "In my measurement, Sashiko was able to find 53% of bugs based on a completely unfiltered set of 1000 recent upstream issues based on "Fixes:" tags (using Gemini 3.1 Pro). Some might say that 53% is not that impressive, but 100% of these issues were missed by human reviewers."
That'd assume 100% of the issues that were fixed and used for training were not fixed following a human review. I don't buy it: it's extremely common to have a dev notice a bug in the code, without a user having ever reported the bug.
I think the wording meant to say: "... but 100% of these issues were first missed by humans".
My point being: the original code review by a human ain't the only code review by a human. Or put it this way: it's not as if we were writing code, shipping it, then never ever looking at that line of code again unless a bug report were to come out. It's not how development works.
simianwords•Mar 18, 2026
> Roman reports that Sashiko was able to find around 53% of bugs based on an unfiltered set of 1,000 recent upstream Linux kernel issues with "Fixes: " tag
15 Comments
>"good catch - thanks for pointing that out"
(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...
https://lkml.org/lkml/2026/3/9/1631
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").
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.
Rust > C and GNU/Linux should be Rust.
And what were they supposed to use in 2006? Free Pascal? Ada?
https://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus
And he's so right. I didn't think like that back then, but new/delete (which have to be overloaded for kernel) behind allocators behind containers, vtables, =0, uninitialized members, unhandled ctor errors, template magic, "sometimes rvo", compiler hints, "sometimes reinterpret cast", 3rd party libraries, it would have been a disaster 20 years ago. Now he's being nice to Rust partially to spite that lang I love some more.
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.
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.
Reviewers are more likely to instead subscribe to get the review inline, and then potentially incorporate that with their feedback.
That's cool. Another interesting metric, however, would be the false positive ratio: like, I could just build a bogus system that simply marks everything as a bug and then claim "my system found 100% of all bugs!"
In practice, not just the recall of a bug finding system is important but also its precision: if human reviewers get spammed with piles of alleged bug reports by something like Sashiko, most of which turn out not to be bugs at all, that noise binds resources and could undermine trust in the usefulness of the system.
> This project was built using Gemini CLI
https://github.com/sashiko-dev/sashiko
Nitpicking on this though:
> "In my measurement, Sashiko was able to find 53% of bugs based on a completely unfiltered set of 1000 recent upstream issues based on "Fixes:" tags (using Gemini 3.1 Pro). Some might say that 53% is not that impressive, but 100% of these issues were missed by human reviewers."
That'd assume 100% of the issues that were fixed and used for training were not fixed following a human review. I don't buy it: it's extremely common to have a dev notice a bug in the code, without a user having ever reported the bug.
I think the wording meant to say: "... but 100% of these issues were first missed by humans".
My point being: the original code review by a human ain't the only code review by a human. Or put it this way: it's not as if we were writing code, shipping it, then never ever looking at that line of code again unless a bug report were to come out. It's not how development works.
What does this mean?