Support Bugbot as a native GitHub requested reviewer

Ideas Feature Requests
,
1

Feature request for product/service

BugBot

Describe the request

Please allow Bugbot to be requested from GitHub’s native Reviewers sidebar (gear icon), similar to human reviewers/Copilot.

Today, Bugbot is manually triggered by PR comments (bugbot run / cursor review). In practice:

  1. Triggering works only from a new top-level comment (not thread replies).
  2. Re-running requires posting another new command comment.

This adds manual overhead for teams and doesn’t match GitHub’s native review mechanics.

Why this matters:

  • Aligns Bugbot with existing PR reviewer workflows
  • Reduces confusion around where triggers are valid
  • Makes re-runs simpler via standard reviewer actions
  • Improves adoption by removing command-memory dependency

Proposed behavior:
If Cursor/Bugbot is selected in Reviewers:

  • Queue a Bugbot review
  • Post findings/checks as usual
  • Support re-request/re-run through sidebar reviewer actions

Current workaround:

  • Post a top-level PR comment: bugbot run
  • Or post a top-level PR comment: cursor review

Screenshot / Screen Recording

bugbot-reviewer-sidebar-feature-request-cva.png
bugbot-reviewer-sidebar-feature-request-cva.png1600×920 99.4 KB

5

Hey, thanks for the detailed feature request. The mockup with Current friction vs Proposed flow explains the idea really well.

Right now, Bugbot can only be triggered via top-level comment commands bugbot run or cursor review, which you already described as a workaround. Requesting it from the native GitHub Reviewers sidebar isn’t supported at the moment.

I’ve logged the idea and I’ll keep this thread open in Feature Requests so the community can vote and add their use cases. That helps with prioritization. I won’t promise a timeline or confirm we’ll ship this, since I don’t want to mislead anyone. Also, GitHub’s native reviewer picker is usually limited by GitHub itself users, teams, plus some first-party integrations, so part of this might be constrained by the platform, not just on our side.

If you have more details on the re-request behavior you want, drop them here and I’ll keep everything in this one thread.