"Code review failed" on most of PR review attempts

Antun Modrušan_zi4agf

We have configured Rovo Dev to review our Bitbucket PRs upon creation. Sometimes this works, but most of the times it fails with the message:

Code review failed

Something went wrong and Rovo Dev couldn't review this pull request. Troubleshoot code review errors.

 

Sometimes it works automatically on a new PR and other times it works when manually run on a new commit, but mostly we keep getting this message.

 

Recently we added a .review-agent.md file. It was recognized in one of the successful reviews and now reviews are better.

 

We've reviewed the suggestions from the troubleshooting guide, but:

- pull requests are not too large

- we aren't crossing the rate limit

- we aren't over the credit limit

- there are no billing or subscription issues

 

We really hoped this would help our review process, but is proving to be pretty unreliable and rather annoying.

 

Is there anything else we might try to get this to work reliably?

Arkadiusz Wroblewski

Hello @Antun Modrušan 

Since your setup works occasionally but fails most of the time, this feels less like a configuration error in your .review-agent.md and more like a backend hiccup or a specific entitlement edge case. If the instructions were truly broken, it would likely fail 100% of the time.

One sneaky thing to check is who is actually opening these PRs. Rovo Dev credits are often tied to the specific PR author's allocation, so you might see it work for one dev and fail for another depending on their individual credit status or Jira site permissions.

I'd also suggest a "soft reset": try toggling Rovo Dev code reviews off and back on in that specific repository's settings, then fire off a tiny, one-line PR to see if it triggers. This can sometimes clear out "ghost" configuration issues that happen during the initial workspace sync.

Another good test is to temporarily disable the acceptance criteria check for one repo. If Rovo starts working again, you'll know the issue is actually with how it's trying to fetch context from your Jira work items rather than a problem with the code review itself.

Since you've already ruled out the usual suspects like PR size and rate limits, you’re likely hitting a generic error that the UI just isn't descriptive enough to explain. Honestly, if a fresh one-line PR still fails after a settings toggle, I wouldn’t spend too much more time guessing. It’s worth opening a ticket with Atlassian Support so they can pull the backend logs for those specific PR timestamps and see exactly why the review job is crashing out.