Get Started with Octopus
AI-powered code reviews that understand your codebase. Connect your repo and get your first review in minutes.
What is Octopus?
Octopus is an AI-powered code review tool that indexes your entire codebase, learns your patterns and architecture, and reviews every pull request with deep context awareness. It catches real bugs, security issues, and code quality problems before they reach production.
Codebase-Aware
Indexes your code and understands your architecture, not just the diff.
Automatic Reviews
Every PR gets reviewed instantly with severity-rated inline comments.
Works With Your Tools
GitHub, Bitbucket, Slack, Linear. Fits into your existing workflow.
1. Connect Your Repository
Start by connecting your GitHub or Bitbucket account from the dashboard. Octopus will install as a GitHub App or set up Bitbucket OAuth to receive webhook events from your repositories.
GitHub
Install the GitHub App, select repositories, and you're ready to go.
Bitbucket
Connect via OAuth and Octopus automatically manages webhooks.
Once connected, Octopus indexes your codebase. It chunks your code, creates embeddings, and builds a searchable representation of your entire project. This is what makes reviews context-aware.
2. Your First Review
Open a pull request on any connected repository. Octopus automatically picks it up via webhook, analyzes the diff against your full codebase, and posts its findings as inline review comments within minutes.
What happens behind the scenes
- 1Webhook event arrives from GitHub/Bitbucket
- 2Octopus fetches the diff and searches your indexed codebase for relevant context
- 3AI reviews the changes with full codebase context and your organization's knowledge base
- 4Findings are posted as inline comments on the PR with severity levels
3. Understanding Findings
Every finding includes a severity level so you can prioritize what matters most. Critical issues block the PR with a REQUEST_CHANGES review, while suggestions are informational.
Bugs, security vulnerabilities, data loss risks. Blocks merge.
Logic errors, performance issues, potential edge cases.
Code quality, maintainability, and best practice concerns.
Informational notes about the code, documentation, or conventions.
Optional improvements, alternative approaches, and ideas.
4. Use the CLI as an AI-Powered Dev Tool
The Octopus CLI is more than a command-line interface. It gives AI coding tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot direct access to your codebase context. Use it to review PRs, index repos, chat with your code, and manage your knowledge base from the terminal or from inside any AI-powered editor.
octopus repo chatStart an interactive chat session about your codebase. Ask questions, explore architecture.
octopus pr review 42Trigger an AI review on any pull request by number or URL.
octopus repo indexIndex your repository for code search and review context.
octopus knowledge add docs/api.mdAdd custom documents to your org's knowledge base for richer reviews.
You can also run a local agent on your machine to supercharge Octopus Chat with real-time code search. The agent searches your actual source code when someone asks a question in chat — giving much more precise answers than embeddings alone.
octopus agent watchAdd the current repo to the agent's watch list. Detects the repo from the git remote URL.
octopus agent startStart the local agent. Listens for search requests from Octopus Chat and responds with real-time code results.
Install with npm install -g @octp/cli and run octopus login to get started. See the full CLI reference for all commands.
5. Customize Your Setup
Fine-tune how Octopus works for your team from the organization settings page.
Choose between Claude and OpenAI, or bring your own API keys.
Upload architecture docs, coding guidelines, and API references so reviews understand your conventions.
Exclude generated files, test fixtures, and vendor code from reviews and indexing.
Set monthly token budgets and monitor usage per repository.
Configure Slack notifications for review completions, indexing, and more.