[gdal-dev] Integrating AI assisted code review for PR in OSGeo/GDAL?

[Even Rouault]

Hi,

I think it could be worth to have the *possibility* of requiring an AI 
assisted review for pull requests, directly available from our canonical 
repo. I've been occasionaly experimenting Gemini Code Assist and Copilot 
in my personal fork. Copilot had repeated failures a few weeks ago but 
seems to have been fixed recently, so I've more experience with /gemini 
review. I find it useful and it has spotted real issues, some of them 
would have probably went unnoticed during classic human review, and with 
an acceptable rate of false positives or debatable remarks.

So my proposal would be to have the tool(s)  enabled in OSGeo/GDAL repo, 
*on demand* (not sure if that's possible for Copilot. Is that a setting? 
Although I'm not trusting github enough to be sure if we want to 
increase our use of it.  Gemini review is definitely on demand and an 
external github app we can disable in one click) for developers or 
reviewers that want to trigger them. I don't think having them to run 
systematically is a good idea, because some PRs are too trivial to get 
any benefit from them, and having them enabled systematically lead to 
noise as PR comments and notifications.

I definitely don't think those tools should replace human review. AI 
tools are instructed to flatter your ego and will never say your PR is a 
bad idea, which a human reviewer will occasionally say. Or they lack the 
global picture, etc. I see them as additional tools on top of our CI 
instrumentation and human review.

Anyone with experience in that area and thoughts?

Even

-- 
http://www.spatialys.com
My software is free, but my time generally not.