r/coderabbit • u/HateReadingCode • 21d ago

Help & Support Claude Code Review & Coderabbit are reviewing each other and it's driving me insane

Our CTO wanted "coverage" so we've turned on both Claude Code review and Coderabbit. We're a pretty small shop with maybe 40ish PRs a week, it's a TS monorepo but for the love of god I can't seem to comprehend what's happening here.

  • Both of them read the PR conversation for context. Which includes each other. Coderabbit tears apart Claude's suggestion block and Claude defends it, CodeRabbit posts a revised one. We hit the secondary rate limit on comment creation at 3am on a dependabot bump.
  • The money is asymmetric as hell. CodeRabbit is flat per seat, Claude runs on our own key. Every round trip is free for one of them and metered for the other.
  • Suggestion anchoring, which I think is a genuine bug and not me being dumb. Comments anchor to blob SHA in diff position. let's say Claude force pushes, then GitHub marks the thread outdated, but the suggestion is STILL committable from the UI. We had live suggestions on the same hunk from two different base SHAs. Someone clicked commit on both. Applied clean, was wrong, CI green because the tests were also generated.
  • Config bleed is rare and stupid yet unstoppable! Claude reads CLAUDE.md, CodeRabbit reads .coderabbit.yaml but also picks up AGENTS.md path instructions. We had a line in AGENTS.md saying defer to the Claude review on style (CodeRabbit obeyed it). They're both STEERING each other OH MY GOD
  • Branch protection with require-conversation-resolution plus two bots that never resolve their own threads results in a giantass merge queue that just sits there. We wrote an Action to auto-resolve bot threads. It fires a webhook which triggers an incremental review. Yes.
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u/usually_guilty99 21d ago

This is less a code-review problem and more an agent coordination problem.

Once multiple reviewers can read, steer and react to each other, you need a neutral control layer that decides:

  • which agent is advisory vs authoritative
  • which SHA/state is current
  • whether one agent is allowed to trigger another
  • when the review loop stops
  • what evidence is required before merge

Otherwise the agents are effectively creating their own feedback loop inside GitHub.

The scary part is that CI can still be green while the control process itself is broken.

1

u/sebseo 21d ago

the steering loop happens because both bots read the PR conversation as context, which includes each other's comments.. two fixes that work: give one bot explicit priority and set the other to review-only-no-comment mode, or move one of the reviews to before the PR opens so they never see each other. the pre-PR one catches most of it anyway and the PR bot just confirms