Feature: Update PR comments rather than continuously adding

[ruchernchong]

The current implementation caused Claude bot to keep adding more comments to the PR rather than editing the original comment if there is already one. This resulted in a very long PR page.

The proposed implementation is to edit the comment that the Claude bot has already created.

[swarajban]

+1

[ashwin-ant]

Can you clarify what you mean here? The current behavior is set up to have Claude edit its own comment in place. What do you expect to be different?

[robert-dean]

We setup a PR summarizer workflow and it also adds rather than updating the original comment. Here's our simple workflow:

name: Pull Request Summary
on:
  pull_request:
    types: [opened, synchronize]

jobs:
  code-review:
    permissions:
      contents: read
      pull-requests: read
      issues: read
      id-token: write
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      # Check out the code to allow git diff operations
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0 # Fetch full history for accurate diffs

      - name: Run Code Review with Claude
        id: code-review
        uses: anthropics/claude-code-action@main
        with:
          # Define the review focus areas
          direct_prompt: 'Summarize the changes in this pull request. Focus on the most important changes and the impact of the changes.'
          anthropic_api_key: ${{ secrets.ANTHROPIC_API_KEY }}
          timeout_minutes: '5'

Note we're using @main instead of @beta if that makes a difference

[jazmine-payscore]

We are seeing the same issue (but using @beta, not @main). The documentation says that Claude updates it's own comments but that has not been the case, it adds a new comment every time. Would love to know how to get it to update the original comment instead if that's possible.

[Shinyaigeek]

Can you clarify what you mean here? The current behavior is set up to have Claude edit its own comment in place. What do you expect to be different?

In our usecase, we let claude-code-actions to comment PR's feedback and walkthrough, and we invoke it's workflow when PR is opend and syncronized(=pushed new commit).

In our case, claude-code-actions will create new comment on each syncronized, and this behavior causes too many comments and a bit noisy...

Perhaps, I need some parameter to let claude-code-actions to handle it's job with the existing comment instead of creating new comment.

[ericmatte]

While waiting for a fix, I've added a simple job that run before Claude to remove old comments:

jobs:
  delete-old-claude-comments:
    # Currently, the claude-code-action does not support updating its own comments.
    # https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code-action/issues/37
    name: Delete old Claude comments
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      pull-requests: write

    steps:
      - name: Clean up old comments
        uses: actions/github-script@v7
        with:
          script: |
            const params = { issue_number: context.issue.number, owner: context.repo.owner, repo: context.repo.repo }
            const comments = await github.rest.issues.listComments(params);

            for (const comment of comments.data) {
              if (comment.user.login === 'claude[bot]') {
                await github.rest.issues.deleteComment({ ...params, comment_id: comment.id });
              }
            }

  claude-review:
    needs: delete-old-claude-comments
    name: Run anthropics/claude-code-action@beta
    # ...

[tokudu]

@ericmatte great suggestion! Ended up doing the same.

[ashwin-ant]

@Shinyaigeek thanks, I didn't realize this was regarding the code review flow in particular. I think that makes this a bit more sensible.

If we had Claude post an actual PR review instead of just a comment, would you also feel like it's too noisy?

[dereklucas]

Ran a company-wide beta of the PR review workflow last week and it got noisy fast.

Posting an actual PR review would be great, (especially with true line comments!) because github takes care of marking old reviews outdated. Cursor's bug bot posts multiple comments, but marks the old comments outdated. This feels like a good middle ground: GH's comment edit history isn't made for looking at drastically different versions.

[Shinyaigeek]

@ashwin-ant Sorry for late reply 🙇 As @dereklucas said, I feel it is a good middle ground to add PR review instead of comment!

More ideally, I believe the following would be beneficial:

• The ability to execute commands by editing existing comprehensive comments.
• Comments would only be made on the diff of newly added commits, taking into account previous Claude code comments (or reviews).
  • Perhaps this could be resolved at the user-level prompt.

[ericmatte]

Update : For my use case, use_sticky_comment: true option works perfectly! Claude code is now able to update its own PR comment without needing me to setup anything else.

[cansin]

Ditto to @ericmatte . use_sticky_comment: true works for me to resolve this issue as well.