Version snapshots
When a Buildprint agent works on your app, it operates on a snapshot — a point-in-time view of your app’s logic. Understanding how snapshots work helps you avoid surprises when collaborating with agents. In Buildprint, we call these versions.
How snapshots work
When an agent starts a conversation or syncs your app, it takes a snapshot of your Bubble app’s current state. This snapshot includes your database schema, workflows, pages, and settings at that exact moment.
From that point on, the agent works from this snapshot. It tracks every edit it makes on top of it, so it always knows the current state of the app — as long as the changes came from the agent itself.
Snapshots do not include private API connector values or plugin secrets. Buildprint may hallucinate when responding to questions that ask about these.
What the agent can and cannot see
The agent sees:
The initial state of your app when it last synced
Every change it has made since that sync
Every change other agents have made on that branch since that sync
The agent does not see:
Changes you make directly in the Bubble editor
Changes made by other collaborators or agents on the same branch
This means if you edit something in Bubble while an agent is working, the agent won’t know about it. It will continue working from its own snapshot, which could lead to conflicts or overwritten changes.
Agents are always aware of each other's edits. This means you can have two agents developing on the same branch without the need to resync (though they may run into each other if working on the same feature, so make sure they're focused on different places, just as two Bubble developers would).
Keeping the agent in sync
If you make changes outside of the agent and want it to see them, ask the agent to sync. This refreshes its snapshot so it picks up your manual edits.
You should sync whenever you:
Make changes directly in the Bubble editor on the same branch
Have another collaborator push changes to the branch
Want the agent to work with the latest version of your app
Get into the habit of asking the agent to sync before starting new work if you’ve been editing in Bubble between conversations.
We automatically sync the live version once a week. This is to support future features like automated changelogs.
In addition, we automatically sync versions when you merge branches into them.
Known issues
On large apps, syncing a version for the first time can take a long time or fail entirely. For context, we do not use the native .bubble export provided by Bubble as this times out on large apps and is generally slow. Instead, we use a much faster method, but are battling rate limits from Bubble that prevent us running this as fast as we could do. Large apps could take a couple of minutes to sync, though a sync should only be necessary when first loading a branch or creating a new one. We have optimisations in place to make this export as fast as possible after the initial sync.
Version syncing requires your Bubble app to be on the Starter plan or above. The Starter free trial is supported too. If version syncing fails with 401 Unauthorized and the collaborator is set up correctly, this is likely the reason. Please upgrade to Starter trial or a paid plan.