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Chat with Heph

Heph is the conversational AI mentor in Hephaestus. It can use your recent work and the practice feedback you received as context, so you do not need to recap everything before asking a question.

Heph is one part of the Hephaestus platform. Automated practice feedback on pull requests, merge requests, and issues is described separately in Practice feedback.

Start a chat​

  1. Open Heph in the sidebar.
  2. Enter a question or describe what you want to reflect on.
  3. Continue the conversation, or select New chat when you want a separate thread.

Previous chats appear in the Heph sidebar. Select a thread to continue it.

What Heph can use as context​

Depending on your workspace configuration, Heph can use:

  • your recent pull requests, merge requests, issues, commits, and reviews
  • practice feedback that was delivered to you
  • the engineering practices configured for your workspace
  • messages from Slack channels that the workspace monitors and you have allowed Hephaestus to use
  • selected team documents from a connected Outline workspace

Heph uses this context to answer your question. It does not have an unrestricted checkout of every connected repository, and it may ask for a specific snippet when the available context is not enough.

Questions to try​

  • "What feedback did I get on my latest pull request?"
  • "I disagree with this comment. Can we work through it?"
  • "Which recent change would be useful to reflect on?"
  • "What could I try differently on my next review?"
  • "Summarise what we decided in this conversation."

You do not need to use a template or follow a fixed session. Ask one concrete question and take the conversation where it is useful.

Check the answer​

Heph can misunderstand your work or repeat a mistaken practice finding. Treat its answers as suggestions, not decisions.

If an answer does not match the work:

  1. say what looks wrong
  2. point Heph to the relevant comment, line, or explanation
  3. ask it to reconsider using that evidence

The developer and human reviewers remain responsible for decisions about the work.

Use Heph in Slack​

When a workspace admin connects Slack, you can message Heph in a direct message. Slack direct messages and web-app chats have separate conversation histories.

Workspace admins can separately enable monitored channels as context. Monitoring starts only after Hephaestus posts a visible announcement, and individual privacy controls apply. See your account settings or the Slack App Home for the controls available to you.