Review Linux kernel patches

Community report: roman Gushchin's team at Google spent several months building Sashiko, an agentic code review system, and Leaned on it internally before release. It is now open source and covers every submission to the Linux kernel mailing list. On 1,000 recent upstream issues with Fixes: tags, it located about 53% of the bugs, and human reviewers had missed all of them.

Agent or tool

Custom agent

Topic

Software Development

Reported on

Hacker News

Added

2026-10-15

Why it matters

Coding agents are moving from autocomplete to doing whole tasks: reading a codebase, making a plan and changing many files. This case is a concrete example of where that works in practice. It is one of 106 sightings filed under Software Development on Agent Sightings (number 59 by interest), and one of 182 involving Custom agent.

How you could try it

Here is a reusable prompt, written by us in our own words, that captures the task. Paste it into your own agent or any similar agent and adjust the details to your situation.

In this repo, review Linux kernel patches. Read relevant code, apply a minimal patch, run available checks, and summarize the diff. Stop before merge or deploy.

Copy prompt

The prompt breaks down into 3 steps you can check as the agent works:

1. In this repo, review Linux kernel patches.
2. Read relevant code, apply a minimal patch, run available checks, and summarize the diff.
3. Stop before merge or deploy.

Source

Read the original first-hand account on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427647. Our summary is a paraphrase; details are in the source.

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