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How Reviews Work

Buzzbin can run several capabilities on a repository. They all start with the same shared flow: GitLab sends an event, Buzzbin decides whether the event is reviewable, a Review Job is queued, and the result later appears in GitLab and in the dashboard.

What triggers a review​

For merge requests, reviews are only useful when code changes actually matter. In practice, these events usually trigger work:

  • opening an MR
  • reopening an MR
  • moving an MR from draft to ready
  • pushing new commits to a non-draft MR

For comment replies, Buzzbin only acts when you explicitly call the bot inside an MR discussion.

Buzzbin capabilities​

Buzzbin can produce these outputs:

  • Code Review: analyze the diff and post findings
  • Comment Answers: answer questions or continue a thread when the bot is mentioned
  • Reviewer Suggestion: suggest relevant reviewers
  • Title & Description: suggest or apply MR title and description changes
  • Related MRs: surface related open merge requests

You can also inject custom review instructions for the Code Review capability.

When an event is skipped​

Not every GitLab event becomes a review. These are common skip cases:

  • the MR is still draft
  • only metadata changed and no new commit exists
  • the relevant feature is disabled in review config
  • the repository is inactive
  • the organization wallet does not have enough credit
  • the repository already hit its daily run cap
  • for comment answers, the bot was not mentioned

Where you see the output​

Buzzbin results show up in two places:

  • in GitLab, as comments or MR updates
  • in the Buzzbin console, especially Review Jobs, run detail pages, and webhook delivery logs

Review Jobs is the right place to understand queue and run history. If you want to know why a delivery was not reviewed, the repository's Webhook Deliveries page is usually the first place to check.

How comment answers are triggered​

In the current product, comment answers are mention-gated. You need to call the Buzzbin bot in the text of the comment to enqueue an answer. This keeps cost more predictable and prevents every thread from turning into bot traffic.

Next step​

To tune these behaviors, continue to Configure reviews.