AI-assisted review

[Simon Glass]

Hi Tom,

On Mon, 18 May 2026 at 09:58, Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, May 18, 2026 at 10:55:40AM +0200, Michal Simek wrote:
> >
> >
> > On 5/16/26 00:07, Tom Rini wrote:
> > > On Fri, May 15, 2026 at 03:03:21PM -0600, Simon Glass wrote:
> > >
> > > > Hi,
> > > >
> > > > There was a query on the call this week about whether I am doing
> > > > AI-assisted code review. As I said on the call: yes. Here is a brief
> > > > description of how it works.
> > > >
> > > > It is built into Patman (on the Concept tree) with a new 'patman
> > > > review' command. You give it the series name / number, or perhaps a
> > > > patch name/number and it applies the patches to a new branch, does a
> > > > review then adds its comments to its database.
> > > >
> > > > A '-d' flag can be used to create draft emails in Gmail (sorry, it
> > > > doesn't support other email programs yet). You then check and update
> > > > the emails and send them (or delete them). I am not an expert in
> > > > handling the 'user voice' part of AI, but have made an attempt to make
> > > > it follow any provided configuration, as well as to scan recent
> > > > reviews to actually create to create a voice.
> > > >
> > > > Obviously this is very rudimentary and could be expanded considerably.
> > > > But the mere fact that it creates draft emails is a win for me, even
> > > > if I ultimately delete or rewrite most of the comments. I can imagine
> > > > 10 different ways to improve it to be more useful.
> > > >
> > > > I wrote a blog post about it if you want more details, or you can ask me here.
> > > >
> > > > I am very interested in hearing how others are using these new tools
> > > > for code review.
> > >
> > > And the big thing for now is that since we as a project do not yet have
> > > an AI policy aside from "please don't". One of the points I was making
> > > on the call is that there's a difference in value between "Human
> > > reviewed it, looks fine" and "Human spent some tokens, agent didn't see
> > > any problems".
> > >
> > > And I know several other people have been doing at least first pass
> > > reviews with various agent-tools, it's just no one else has been posting
> > > reviews at your scale. And lessons learned from other projects is that
> > > the prompts are more important than whatever wrapper around the agent
> > > one is using.
> > >
> >
> > Don't think scale is the problem. Tool and integration is another topic.
>
> Simon posted approximately 100 reviews in about 24 hours. That scale is
> a problem, when most of them are just reviewed-by tags, from someone
> that has a history of doing human reviews. Reputation is a factor here
> I'm trying to figure out how best to articulate.
>
> I have thoughts on the rest that I want to get back to later, thanks.

I should point out that I tend to do reviews locally bit by bit and
then recheck and send out in batches later, particularly when I need
to dig into the code and check things. I suspect a lot of the
'reviewed-by' ones are on revised series where I already reviewed v1,
etc. For better or worse, patman tends to have something to say on
most patches (too picky for my style so I often delete comments).

Re the AI policy, I suggest adding it in the project docs (even if it
is very brief), rather than referencing a URL from another project.

Regards,
Simon