Exelbierd: What's actually in a Sashiko review?

Date:
Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:27:33 +0000

Description:
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.

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Link to news story:
https://lwn.net/Articles/1065971/


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