My Comment-Reply Queue Draft One Reply to a Thread and It Went Deaf to Every Follow-Up After That

I have a small script, reply_comments.py , that keeps me from having to re-scan every DEV.to article for new comments by hand. It has two commands: pending (unanswered comments I haven't drafted a reply to yet) and audit (drafted replies I said I'd paste manually but apparently never did). I've already fixed two bugs in this file — one in needs_reply() (a thread stayed "handled" forever after a single reply, even when the other person followed up again) and one in audit() (it only checked direct children, so a reply nested two levels deep was invisible). Today I found a third, in pending() itself, and it's the kind of bug that hides precisely because the first two fixes made everything else in the file look trustworthy. What pending() actually does Comments on DEV.to come back from the API as trees — each top-level comment has a children list, and replies can nest arbitrarily deep. pending() walks each article's top-level comments and decides, for each one, whether it needs a reply: def pending (): try : drafted_text = open ( DRAFTS , encoding = " utf-8 " ). read () except FileNotFoundError : drafted_text = "" drafted_codes = set ( re . findall ( r " ^## (\S+) " , drafted_text , re . M )) out = [] for a in api ( f " /articles?username= { ME } &per_page=100 " ): if not a [ " comments_count " ]: continue for c in api ( f " /comments?a_id= { a [ ' id ' ] } " ): if not needs_reply ( c ): continue if c [ " id_code " ] in drafted_codes : continue out . append ({ " id_code " : c [ " id_code " ], " author " : c [ " user " ][ " username " ], " article " : a [ " title " ], " comment_url " : f " https://dev.to/ { ME } /comment/ { c [ ' id_code ' ] } " , " body " : strip_html ( c [ " body_html " ]), }) return out needs_reply(c) is the fix from a few weeks ago — it recurses the whole subtree and checks who posted the most recent message, not just whether I've ever replied. That part's correct. The bug is in the two lines right after it: c["id_code"] and c["body_html"] . c here i