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Google Engineers Launch "Sashiko" for Agentic AI Code Review of the Linux Kernel
- Heer_J 8mo ago[dead]
- 4fterd4rk 8mo agooh god can we not
- smlacy 8mo agoWhat's your concern?
- htx80nerd 8mo agoHave 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 8mo agoi think it's a skill.
- lame-robot-hoax 8mo agoCan you clarify how, at all, that’s relevant to the article?
- ablob 8mo agoBoth 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 8mo agoThis 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 8mo agoWell, if it doesn't find anything it's just a waste of time at best.
- danielbln 8mo agoPrevention paradox.
- __tidu 8mo agowell 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 8mo agoI 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-erdemhuseyincan09%40gmail.com https://sashiko.dev/#/message/20260318170604.10254-1-erdemhu...
- rwmj 8mo agoNo, 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 https://lkml.org/lkml/2026/3/9/1631
- bjackman 8mo agoStyle 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 8mo agoBetter 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-andriy.shevchenko%40linux.intel.com https://sashiko.dev/#/patchset/20260318151256.2590375-1-andr... The original patch series corresponding to that is: https://lkml.org/lkml/2026/3/18/1600 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-lijun01%40kylinos.cn https://sashiko.dev/#/patchset/20260318110848.2779003-1-liju... I'm very glad they're not spamming the mailing list.
- jeffbee 8mo agoThat 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 8mo agoMust we do this on every thread about the Linux kernel?
- shevy-java 8mo agoNow 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 8mo agoIt's not forced upon anyone, it's a tool that patch authors or reviewers can use if they want to.
- KurSix 8mo agoThose incidents with curl and sqlite were caused by a mob of script kiddies dumping source code into ChatGPT and spamming bug bounties for quick cash. This tool is built by actual Google devs who are active on the kernel mailing list. They know perfectly well that if they start spamming LKML with hallucinations, they'll get patch acceptance blocked for their entire corporation
- ChrisArchitect 8mo agohttps://github.com/sashiko-dev/sashiko https://github.com/sashiko-dev/sashiko (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427996)
- ratrace 8mo ago[dead]
- takahitoyoneda 8mo ago[dead]
- quantium1628 8mo ago[flagged]
- withinrafael 8mo agoLooks 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.
- qainsights 8mo agoThey would have completely redesigned Google Gerrit.
- kleiba 8mo ago> 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 8mo agoThey 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.
- kleiba 8mo agoHard to measure, how? Either something is a bug or not - otherwise how would you be able to count anything at all?
- lstodd 8mo agoAssign each line of code a bugginess factor then count those exceeding an arbitrary threshold obviously.
- riteshkew1001 8mo ago[flagged]
- mika-el 8mo ago[flagged]
- throwa356262 8mo agoI find it interesting that this is written in Rust (not golang) and co-authored with Claude (not gemini)
- dgacmu 8mo agoIt's written in rust, but why do you believe it was co-authored with Claude? The README in github specifically says: > This project was built using Gemini CLI https://github.com/sashiko-dev/sashiko https://github.com/sashiko-dev/sashiko
- michaelchen58 8mo ago[flagged]
- goatyishere25 8mo ago[flagged]
- TacticalCoder 8mo agoLooks 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.
- spwa4 8mo agoLet's get real ... Looks like a new tool to transfer people's skill - which have to be paid - into Google's models - which they can sell.
- simianwords 8mo ago> 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 What does this mean?
- spiderfarmer 8mo ago47% of recent bugs would go unnoticed if we relied solely on this tool. But we might find more, and faster.
- balinha_8864 8mo ago[dead]
- whiteclawonso36 8mo ago[dead]
- Havoc 8mo agoHow do the kernel devs feel about this? Cause that seems to be the sticking point for external AI “help” - the open source devs hate it Seems to be a well funded effort though so maybe it’s better?
- bmd1905 8mo ago[dead]
- KurSix 8mo agoWritten in Rust, tests a C kernel, using the Google Gemini API... classic 2026. I'd bet 90% of the actual useful work this agent does is just dumb pattern-matching for typical vulnerabilities (use-after-free, uninitialized vars) that the model memorized straight out of the CVE database
- nasretdinov 8mo agoArguably that's still very useful :)
- bmd1905 8mo ago[dead]
- bmd1905 8mo ago[dead]