Roman Gushchin of the Linux kernel team at Google announced the creation of a new code review system using large language models. The development has been underway for the last few months and is called Sashiko, after the traditional Japanese weaving, consisting of small straight stitches that form different patterns.
The project has been used by Google for some time to identify problems, and is now available to everyone and set to automatically review all patches sent to the Linux kernel developer mailing list.
Sashiko’s code is written in Rust and is open source under the Apache 2.0 license. The system is self-contained and can be used on your own hardware.
Sashiko was designed to work with Google’s Gemini Pro 3.1 model, but has been partially tested with Claude and will likely work with other modern large language models. The review prompts used are based on the review-prompts set created by Chris Mason, creator of the Btrfs file system. The token budget and infrastructure of Sashiko is funded by Google. The rights to the project have been transferred to the Linux Foundation.
Based on tests performed, using the Gemini 3.1 Pro model, Sashiko’s tools were able to detect 53% of the bugs from an unfiltered set of 1,000 recent kernel issues tagged “Fixes:”. At first glance, 53% does not seem very impressive, but keep in mind that all of the identified problems were not initially noticed by human reviewers.