agent loop: requested review, dismissed it, requested review again

TL;DR: The loop happens because the agent fires "request review" without checking whether a request is already pending or a review was already submitted, then dismisses its own request, then starts over. Persist review state per PR (requested / submitted / dismissed, with timestamps), check the live PR state before every review action, and add a repeat-action guard that halts after the same action fires twice with no intervening change. That breaks the cycle and leaves exactly one review request per PR.

agent loop: requested review, dismissed it, requested review again

1. Read the PR's live review state first. List the PR's reviews and its requested reviewers through the API before taking any action. Expected: you see the pending request plus the review the agent already submitted or dismissed - proof the loop is recreating state that already exists.

2. Keep a small state record keyed by PR number that the agent loads at the start of every run. Store reviewrequestedat, reviewsubmittedat, and dismissed_at timestamps in it. Expected: later runs know what already happened without guessing from the API alone.

3. Gate the request-review action. Before calling it, check both the state record and the live API; if a request is pending or a review is already submitted, skip the call and log that a review was already requested. Expected: the second loop iteration logs the skip instead of firing another API call.

4. Separate dismissal from requesting. Only dismiss a review when a new commit or an explicit instruction requires it; never auto-dismiss a review the agent itself requested in the same run. Expected: dismissals stop appearing in the same action sequence as requests.

5. Add a repeat-action guard. If the last two actions on the same PR are an identical request/dismiss pair with no new commit or state change between them, halt the review task and report the loop instead of acting. Expected: the agent stops after the guard trips instead of cycling forever.

6. Re-run the review task on a test PR and inspect the action log. Expected: at most one request-review call per PR, no self-dismissal, no repeats.

Use this when

• Request-review, dismiss-review, request-review appears for the same PR in the action log
• The agent's actions repeat with no new commits between them
• Review requests pile up on a PR the agent already reviewed
• The agent dismisses reviews it created itself

Not for this skill when

• A human reviewer manually dismissed the review (check the dismissing actor first)
• The PR genuinely needs re-review after new commits were pushed (that is new state, not a loop)
• Review calls are failing with 403 or 404 (that is a permissions or existence problem)
• The agent is stuck waiting on API rate limits rather than repeating actions

Variant phrasings

• "review bot keeps requesting review after dismissing it"
• "agent stuck requesting and dismissing PR reviews in a loop"
• "duplicate review requests on the same pull request"
• "agent dismisses its own review then requests a new one"

Why it happens

Most review agents treat "make sure a review is requested" as an unconditional step with no memory of what already happened. Each run sees no review attached (because it just dismissed its own), so it requests again; then a cleanup step sees a stale pending request and dismisses it. Without persistent per-PR state and a live check before each action, request and dismiss chase each other forever.

Edge cases

• The state record goes stale if a human merges or closes the PR. Refresh from the API at the start of every run instead of trusting the file alone.
• Multiple agent instances on the same PR need a shared state store, not a local file, or each one loops independently.
• If dismissals come from the repo's "dismiss stale reviews on push" branch-protection setting, that is repository config, not an agent loop. Check repo settings before changing agent behavior.
• Guard halts should notify a human instead of silently dropping the review, or PRs will sit unreviewed.

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_S000wVg5KwH9B38tevBHkA

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_S000wVg5KwH9B38tevBHkA

Thread query: agent loop: requested review, dismissed it, requested review again

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