Direct answer: Trigger Bugbot on pull-request open and on new commits, treat its findings as advisory for senior engineers, and require the PR author to resolve or dismiss each comment before merge.

When Should Bugbot Run?

Not on every push to every branch. Reviewing draft PRs and work-in-progress branches produces comments on code that is about to change anyway. Configure it to skip drafts and run on ready-for-review plus subsequent commits.

On high-traffic repos, also exclude generated files and lock files. Reviewing a 5,000-line lock diff wastes credits and returns nothing useful.

How Should the Team Handle Its Comments?

Set a rule from day one: every Bugbot comment gets resolved, either by fixing it or by replying with a reason it is intentional. This does two things. It stops comment pileup, and it builds a record of which patterns Bugbot misreads on your codebase — useful when tuning expectations.

A common failure is treating the comments as optional. After two weeks of unresolved suggestions, nobody reads them.

Should It Block Merges?

Do not make Bugbot a hard merge gate outright. It cannot see runtime behavior, so a blocking rule will eventually stall a PR over a false positive at a bad moment. Advisory with a resolution requirement is the balance that works.

How Do You Combine It With Existing Checks?

Order matters for developer patience. Fast, deterministic checks should finish first: lint, type check, unit tests. Bugbot runs after, so a broken build does not trigger a five-minute AI review that then goes stale.

Keep human review as the final gate. The pipeline becomes: lint, test, Bugbot, human. Each layer catches a different class of problem, and later layers assume earlier ones passed.

What Metrics Are Worth Tracking?

Three, and they are simple to count. Findings per PR — if it climbs, your team got sloppy or Bugbot got noisier. Dismissal rate — a high dismiss rate means the comments are mostly noise. False-positive themes — recurring flagged patterns you should document so reviewers stop arguing each time.

You do not need a dashboard. A quick monthly skim of resolved versus dismissed comments tells you whether the tool is earning its per-seat cost.

When Bugbot Is the Wrong Layer

If your bugs mostly come from integration, race conditions, or data migration, a diff reviewer will not catch them. Those need staging environments and integration tests. Bugbot is a static reader — do not ask it to substitute for observability.

Quick Summary

• Run Bugbot on ready-for-review PRs and new commits, not on drafts.
• Require every comment to be resolved or dismissed with a reason.
• Keep it advisory, not a hard merge gate.
• Sequence checks lint, test, Bugbot, human — in that order.
• Track findings per PR and dismissal rate to judge value.

Direct answer: Install the Bugbot GitHub app, authorize the repos you want reviewed, and it will post review comments on every new pull request automatically.

What Does Bugbot Actually Look For?

It reasons about the diff, not just lint rules. Typical catches include null dereferences, off-by-one errors, unhandled promise rejections, mutated state in React components, and logic that contradicts a nearby comment. It also flags missed edge cases, like a function that handles the empty array but not the missing key.

It is not a formatter or a type checker. Those run separately with faster, cheaper tools.

How Do You Set It Up?

1. Sign in to the Cursor dashboard with your GitHub account.
2. Install the Bugbot GitHub App and choose repository access — all repos or a selected list.
3. Open a test pull request to confirm a review appears.
4. Adjust per-repo settings for comment verbosity.

Setup takes about five minutes. The important decision is scope: start with one active repository rather than enabling everything, or you will drown in comments on code nobody is changing.

How Does It Behave on a Real PR?

Bugbot posts inline comments attached to specific lines, plus a short summary. Each finding includes a description of the problem and a suggested change you can apply. If it finds nothing serious, it says so rather than inventing problems — which matters, because noisy reviewers get muted.

Re-runs happen when you push new commits, so pushing a fix and waiting for a fresh review is the normal loop.

Bugbot vs Human Review

It is a first pass, not a replacement. The value is catching mechanical bugs so your senior engineer spends review time on design.

How Much Does Bugbot Cost?

Bugbot is a paid add-on to Cursor, billed separately from the editor’s subscription, with pricing tied to usage and team seats. There is no free tier that covers production repos, so budget for it per developer. If your team already pays for Cursor, it is an incremental line item rather than a new platform.

Where It Falls Short

It cannot see your runtime. A bug that only appears with specific database state or a race condition across services is invisible to a diff reader. It also over-weights changed lines — a lurking problem in untouched code stays hidden.

And it occasionally flags intentional patterns as bugs, which means your team needs a shared habit of resolving comments rather than letting them pile up.

Who Should Use It

Good fit for small teams where no one has time for thorough review, and for open-source maintainers facing a backlog. Poor fit for codebases where the real risk is architectural — Bugbot will not tell you the whole approach is wrong.

Quick Summary

• Bugbot is a paid Cursor add-on that reviews GitHub pull requests automatically.
• Install the GitHub App and scope it to one repo to start.
• It posts inline comments with suggested fixes and re-runs on new commits.
• It catches mechanical bugs, not runtime or architectural issues.
• Best used as a first pass before human review.