[RFC] AI review prompt updates
From: Chris Mason <hidden>
Date: 2026-01-30 19:29:19
Also in:
bpf, linux-mm, lkml
Hi everyone, If you haven't been playing with my AI review prompts locally, this probably isn't relevant. The prompts are: https://github.com/masoncl/review-prompts For anyone that is using the prompts, I'm hoping to get some feedback on changes I pushed today that break the review up into individual tasks. The previous prompts are all still there, so we can directly compare the two in terms of time, token cost, and effectiveness. Using tasks allows us to break up large diffs into smaller chunks, and review each chunk individually. This ends up using fewer tokens a lot of the time, because we're not sending context back and forth for the entire diff with every turn. It also catches more bugs all around. I'm using a python script to break the changes up, and do bulk processing to pull out modified functions, types, and call graphs. This also helps reduce token usage, we're just telling AI to load the processed results in bulk instead of making it discover the same information on its own. It's probably buggy, I'm sure I'll have to refine the python from here. All those tokens saved hopefully helps make up for extra tokens spent. Each task has its own context window, so research done while processing one file in the diff has to be redone if another file in the diff needs the same functions loaded. AI providers cache tokens so it kind of works out, but I'm looking for feedback on this part especially. The new setup has tasks for: - Reviewing chunks of code - Checking past lore threads (if semcode is available) - Checking Fixes: tags - Deep dive into syzkaller fixes (more on that below) - Making the final report To use the old prompts: cd some_linux_dir claude> read the prompt <path to review-prompts>/kernel/review-core.md and run it on the HEAD commit To use the new prompts cp kernel/scripts/create_changes.py somewhere in your PATH, or run it by hand: cd some_linux_dir # the prompts will run create_changes.py if you don't kernel/scripts/create_changes.py HEAD claude> read the prompt <path to review-prompts>/kernel/agent/orc.md and run it on the HEAD commit I'm sure proper gemini support will need more changes in the prompts, please feel free to send fixes/improvements. re: syzkaller, the prompts focus on finding bugs in proposed changes, but they don't try to decide if the thesis behind a patch is correct. With syzkaller, it helps to have some extra rigor around making sure the bug described is real. So, any time a commit message mentions syzbot/syzkaller, it gets turn through extra validation. I'm sure this will need a lot of fine tuning, but it does catch some good issues. (thanks to Johannes Weiner for the suggestion!) -chris