Past, Present, and Future of Bug Tracking in the Generative AI Era

Traditional bug-tracking systems rely heavily on manual reporting, reproduction, classification, and resolution, involving multiple stakeholders such as end users, customer support, developers, and testers. This division of responsibilities requires substantial coordination and human effort, widens the communication gap between non-technical users and developers, and significantly slows the process from bug discovery to deployment. Moreover, current solutions are highly asynchronous, often leaving users waiting long periods before receiving any feedback. In this paper, we examine the evolution of bug-tracking practices, from early paper-based methods to today's web-based platforms, and present a forward-looking vision of an AI-powered bug tracking framework. The framework augments existing systems with large language model (LLM) and agent-driven automation, and we report early adaptations of its key components, providing initial empirical grounding for its feasibility. The proposed framework aims to reduce time to resolution and coordination overhead by enabling end users to report bugs in natural language while AI agents refine reports, attempt reproduction, classify bugs, validate reports, suggest no-code fixes, generate patches, and support continuous integration and deployment. We discuss the challenges and opportunities of integrating LLMs into bug tracking and show how intelligent automation can transform software maintenance into a more efficient, collaborative, and user-centric process.