Sashiko shows AI code review works by doing less, not more

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you want LLMs in production software workflows, Sashiko, makes the argument that review is the place to start, not generation. An engineer at Google is putting that theory to the test on the Linux kernel. The early numbers are interesting. Whether they hold up under scrutiny is less clear.

Roman Gushchin’s headline stat: Sashiko caught 53% of bugs in an unfiltered set of 1,000 recent upstream kernel issues (identified by Fixes: tags), all of which had been missed by human reviewers. That’s not a claim of superhuman code understanding. It’s a claim about coverage, specifically incremental coverage on the failure mode kernel maintainers care about most: regressions that make it into mainline.

Linux on aeshift

Sashiko shows AI code review works by doing less, not more