Google Engineers Launch “Sashiko” For Agentic AI Code Review Of The Linux Kernel
March 19, 2026
Google engineers have been spending the past number of months developing Sashiko as an agentic AI code review system for the Linux kernel. It’s now open-source and publicly available and will continue to do upstream Linux kernel code review thanks to funding from Google.
Roman Gushchin of Google’s Linux kernel team announced yesterday as this new agentic AI code review system. They have been using it internally at Google for some time to uncover issues and it’s now publicly available and covering all submissions to the Linux kernel mailing list. Roman reports that Sashiko was able to find around 53% of bugs based on an unfiltered set of 1,000 recent upstream Linux kernel issues with “Fixes: ”
>”In my measurement, Sashiko was able to find 53% of bugs based on a completely unfiltered set of 1000 recent upstream issues based on “Fixes:” tags (using Gemini 3.1 Pro). Some might say that 53% is not that impressive, but 100% of these issues were missed by human reviewers.”
One frequent observation about software engineering and AI is that writing the code has traditionally not been the bottleneck in software production and is only one small part of the responsibilities of software engineers.
Verifying the correctness, quality assurance, and debugging is clearly another significant part of the process. And here is the system that Google has been developing for reviewing some incredibly complex code–Linux kernel.
