• Exelbierd: What's actually in a Sashiko review?

    From LWN.net@86:200/23 to All on Sat Apr 4 06:40:10 2026


    Brian "bex" Exelbierd has published
    a blog
    post exploring follow-up questions raised by
    the recent debate about the use of the LLM-based review
    tool Sashiko
    in the memory-management subsystem. His main finding is that Sashiko reviews are
    bi-modal with regards to whether they contain reports about code not directly changed by the patch set - most do not, but the ones that do often have several such comments.

    Hypothesis 1: Reviewers are getting told about bugs they didn't create. Sashiko's review protocol explicitly instructs the LLM to read surrounding code,
    not just the diff. That's good review practice - but it means the tool might flag pre-existing bugs in code the patch author merely touched, putting those problems in their inbox.

    Hypothesis 2: The same pre-existing bugs surface repeatedly. If a known
    issue in a subsystem doesn't get fixed between review runs, every patch touching
    nearby code could trigger the same finding. That would create a steady drip of duplicate noise across the mailing list.

    I pulled data from Sashiko's public API and tested both.

    https://lwn.net/Articles/1065971/
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