On Wed, 18 Feb 2026 09:59:21 -0500 Aaron Conole <[email protected]> wrote:
> Much of the following sections can be written as part of checkpatch, > which means we don't need to spend compute resources with the AI on it. > For example, telling the AI that source files need to begin with SPDX > identifiers, line lenghts, tag format order, tag parsing, etc. The > downside is that if we ask the AI to *generate* code, then it won't > follow these rules; but when we ask AI to *review* the code, it takes > fewer tokens to submit and we can let the AI do the thing it really > shines at - recognizing subtle patterns, rather than stuff we can write > a python script to do. Well, checkpatch is slow, misses somethings and doesn't provide any good rationale back to developer. My experience is that the cost of AI is per-input token. And AGENTS.md is also integrated into IDE's like Visual Studio so it will get coverage there where checkpatch will not. > > I'm approaching this from the perspective of running CI using this > AGENTS.md file - but I might be wrong on the scope of this one, as it > may be intended for something else (like using some IDE integrated > extensions where that stuff can make sense to guide generation). I was starting look at kernel review-prompts then making sure other anti-patterns in DPDK got covered. > > As for the CI reviewing part, napkin math for Anthropic API shows this > takes up about .30c / patch (~17k tok) we would submit, and that doesn't > include whatever the patch context is - so I think we would exhaust any > budget dedicated to this really early (probably within a few dozen > patches). For any reasonable size patchset I end up splitting. For me having more through review is higher priority than keeping cost down (at this point). > > Maybe it's possible to split up the AGENTS.md file into stuff that's > good for review and stuff that's good for generation. WDYT? Yes and no. Yes it could be split, but I use it for patch and existing code review already. This is a bigger question, what do other projects do? Being a "trail blazer" in this area is just extra wasted effort.
