When BugBot analyzes a PR, it sometimes doesn’t catch all issues in the first pass. This results in multiple review cycles where new comments appear on the same files or other files for bugs that were present in the original code, not just in recent changes.
This creates a frustrating workflow where I have to push changes multiple times to address issues that should have been caught in the initial analysis.
Steps to Reproduce
Create a PR with a file that has multiple bugs/issues
Wait for BugBot to analyze the PR
BugBot comments on one issue
Fix and push the changes
BugBot then comments on another issue in the same file or a different file that was present in the original code
Repeat steps 4-5 multiple times
Expected Behavior
BugBot should analyze all files in the PR comprehensively on the first pass and provide all comments for existing issues at once, rather than discovering them incrementally across multiple pushes.
Possible configuration: If multiple bugs are found in one file, send all comments in the first analysis rather than spacing them out across subsequent reviews.
Hey, thanks for the report. This is a known issue. We’ve already seen cases where BugBot only finds some issues in a single run instead of flagging everything at once.
A couple things that can help for now:
You can manually trigger a re-check by leaving a cursor review comment on the PR. This can surface more findings without new commits.
You can turn off the “Run only once per PR” setting in your personal BugBot dashboard settings, so future pushes keep triggering checks.
To help the team investigate, could you share a link to the specific PR where this happened? Seeing the actual check history will make it much easier to understand what’s going on.
We have “run only once per PR configured“! I don’t have a PR at hand with these issues, but I will keep an eye on it and share it! My colleagues also noticed these issues!
My team also occasionally suffer from this. Any improvements here would be very useful. We’re trying to speed up our review cycles so it would be very beneficial if we could rely on bugbot to handle all these simple cases for us so we can worry about harder issues. Here is an example of something caught by claude using our bugbot.md file but not by bugbot itself. The repository is here but private: https://github.com/trabapro/traba-server-node/pull/12004.
I merged develop into the branch and pushed the changes, nothing change in the original branch
I got two new suggestions (one refactor and one suggestion)
The thing was the first time I publish the PR, the isValidImageType function was already in the code, inside the new component and existing component. Is a minor, but is something that cursor could found in first iteration.
I am seeing the same behavior when trying Bugbot with our team. Each review surfaces different bugs. The preferred behavior would be to check for all of the bugs, and report all of them at the same time on the first pass so they can be addressed with fewer round-trip passes. Essentially, “find all issues”, not “find first issue then stop”.
The goal is to increase development efficiency by reducing feedback loops. My initial response to the first issue was very positive. I could see how this could be beneficial to our team. But after three rounds of fixing different issues that all existed in the original commit, the positive feelings are waning. 45 minutes later, It now feels like this is getting very tedious, and actually slowing down our workflow. Perhaps we are better off taking other approaches to review our code changes.
The core issue is that the Bugbot agent should identify all of the issues on the first pass. The only issues that should come up in the second pass are issues that were introduced by fixing the first set of issues.
I hope this can be improved soon, as I think it would be a valuable feature to teams like ours if it saved work instead of slowing us down.
