Cursor Bugbot effort levels as review policy

Pick the Bugbot effort level by the risk of the diff, not by how close the deadline is. A Bugbot effort level is the depth of automated review that Bugbot, the PR-review bot in Cursor (Anysphere's AI code editor), applies before a human decides what merges. Treat it as written policy and the calendar stops casting a vote on review depth.

Most teams do the opposite without meaning to. Effort drops to low across the board the week a release ships, then jumps to high the week after someone gets burned. The dial moves with mood. That is the thing to fix.

Map the effort level to the risk lane

Decide the effort level once, per risk lane, and write it in your repo docs. Then nobody re-argues it on every pull request.

A lane is a category of change with its own risk profile and its own human rule. The diff tells you which lane it sits in, and the lane tells you the effort level. Here is a starting table you can paste and adjust.

The value here is consistency. A team that cannot name the lane a PR sits in cannot really defend the merge either.

Write an escalation list reviewers can read

When two reviewers disagree about which lane a PR belongs to, the rule is still too fuzzy to be policy. Move the decision out of memory and into the PR template, so the checklist answers instead of the loudest voice.

# Cursor Bugbot escalation

Use high effort when the PR touches:
- auth, payments, data export, webhooks, middleware;
- MCP configuration or external tool access;
- generated diffs above 500 changed lines;
- files without a clear owner;
- code where the verification command is missing.

Use low effort only when:
- paths are low risk;
- tests already cover the behavior;
- the PR body names scope and verification.

The point of the list is that it is boring and fixed. Bugbot stops being one more subjective ritual and starts being a setting you can explain.

Turn raw findings into a triage table

Bugbot output pasted as a wall of comments gets skimmed once and forgotten. Give each finding a decision, an owner, and a piece of evidence, and the review becomes something you can audit later.

The reviewer still decides, not the tool. The table just makes that decision visible to the next person who opens the PR.

One ordering rule keeps this honest: run Bugbot after the PR body carries scope and a verification command, never before. Run it too early and the tool quietly fills in for context the author has not supplied yet.

Common questions

• How should teams set Cursor Bugbot effort levels?

  Set them by risk lane and record the mapping in your repo docs. Low effort goes on routine diffs with clear tests, medium on product logic, and high on security, auth, billing, new permissions, MCP changes, and generated large diffs. Once the lane decides the level, the deadline no longer gets to.

• When does a PR need high Bugbot effort?

  Use high effort when the PR touches auth, payments, data export, webhooks, or middleware, changes MCP configuration or external tool access, exceeds 500 generated changed lines, hits files with no clear owner, or lacks a verification command. Every high lane also names the human who approves the merge, so coverage and accountability move together.

• Should Bugbot run before or after the PR body is written?

  After. Run Bugbot once the PR body names scope and verification, because running it earlier makes the tool compensate for context the author has not written down yet. Findings then land in a triage table with a decision, an owner, and evidence, which keeps the reviewer as the decision-maker and keeps the record inspectable.

• Where does this fit alongside rules and subagents?

  It sits next to your other Cursor team conventions. The same instinct that produces a shared .mdc rule or a subagent receipt produces a shared effort-level policy: write the convention down once so the team applies it the same way every time. You can read more in Cursor subagents and skills.

Start with one repo

Pick your highest-risk repo, paste the lane table and escalation list into its docs, and try it on your next three Cursor-assisted PRs. If you want a hand mapping the lanes to your own connectors, book a 15-minute sync.

Further reading

• Cursor agent
• Cursor rules
• Cursor skills
• Cursor MCP
• Cursor changelog
• Model Context Protocol specification