My AI Coding Agent Couldn't Read Bitbucket PRs, So I Fixed That

Paul van der lei — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 13:00:45 +0000

Here's a frustrating thing I ran into.

I'm using Claude Code (Anthropic's terminal-based coding agent) and it's genuinely helpful. It can run commands, read files, and help me work through problems. When I was on a GitHub project, it could even check PR status and help with reviews using gh pr view and friends.

Then I switched to a Bitbucket project.

And suddenly my AI assistant was blind. "Sorry, I can't access that" over and over. No CLI tool meant no way to get PR diffs, check statuses, or do any of the Git platform stuff that makes AI-assisted development actually flow.

So I built one.

What it is

A gh-style CLI for Bitbucket Cloud. Nothing fancy, just the thing that was missing:

# authenticate once
bb auth login

# now your terminal (and any AI agent) can interact with Bitbucket
bb pr list
bb pr view 42
bb pr diff 42
bb repo list

Now when I ask Claude Code "can you check the open PRs and summarize them", it actually can. It runs bb pr list --json, parses the output, and gives me what I need. Same with "review the diff on PR #15" - it runs bb pr diff 15 and we're in business.

The stuff that matters

Context detection - if you're in a git repo with a Bitbucket remote, it figures out the workspace and repo automatically:

cd my-bitbucket-project
bb pr list  # just works, no flags needed

JSON output everywhere - critical for both scripting and AI agents:

bb pr list --json | jq '.[] | select(.state == "OPEN")'

Standard npm install:

npm install -g @pilatos/bitbucket-cli

What it covers

The daily stuff: authentication, repositories (clone, create, list, view, delete), and pull requests (create, list, view, edit, diff, merge, approve, decline, checkout).

What it doesn't have yet: pipelines, no issue tracker integration, no code search. The 80% use case, basically.

Why I'm sharing this

If you're using AI coding tools on Bitbucket projects and hitting the same wall I did, this exists now.

And if you want to contribute - it's open source, TypeScript, clean architecture. Adding new commands is pretty straightforward. Pipeline support would be cool if anyone wants to tackle it.

GitHub: github.com/0pilatos0/bitbucket-cli
Docs: bitbucket-cli.paulvanderlei.com

Not affiliated with Atlassian. Just a dev who wanted his AI tools to actually work.

DEV Community: Paul van der lei

My AI Coding Agent Couldn't Read Bitbucket PRs, So I Fixed That

What it is

The stuff that matters

What it covers

Why I'm sharing this