To understand what changed between kernel versions, you have to dig through the git repository yourself. Commit messages rarely tell you the real-world impact on your systems — you need to analyze the actual diffs with knowledge of kernel internals. For engineers who use Linux — directly or indirectly — but aren't kernel developers, that barrier is pretty high.

I kept finding out about relevant changes only after an issue had already hit, and it was most frustrating when the version was too new to find similar cases online. I built lexplain with the idea that it would be nice to quickly scan through kernel changes the way you'd skim the morning news.

It reads diffs, analyzes the code, and generates two types of documents:

- Commit analyses: context, code breakdown, behavioral impact, risks, references

- Release notes: per-version highlights, functional classification, subsystem breakdown, impact analysis

Documents build on each other — individual commits first, then merge commits using child analyses, then release notes using all analyses for that version. Claims based on inference are explicitly labeled.

Work in progress. Feedback welcome.