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Welcome to Hephaestus

Feedback on how you work. Hephaestus gives developers feedback on the engineering practices they use in software projects. It draws on evidence from connected tools to explain what worked, what could improve, and what to try next. The feedback is advisory: you decide what to use, question, or skip.

This guide is for developers who use Hephaestus and workspace admins who set it up. Deployment and development documentation lives in the Admin Guide and Contributor Guide.

What Hephaestus offers​

Practice feedback​

  • Uses AI to review pull requests, merge requests, and issues against the practices configured for your workspace.
  • Points to evidence in your work rather than giving generic advice.
  • Posts a comment with an explanation and a practical next step.

Heph, the AI mentor​

  • Can use recent project activity, feedback you have received, and selected Slack messages or Outline documents as context.
  • Helps you talk through feedback, reflect on a recent change, or decide what to try next.
  • Is available in the web app and, when connected, in a Slack direct message.

Project context​

  • GitHub and GitLab supply activity from the repositories connected to your workspace.
  • Workspace admins can add selected, visibly monitored Slack channels and selected Outline collections.
  • Outline documents are used as context only. Hephaestus does not write to Outline.

Workspace management​

  • Connect GitHub or GitLab repositories and keep each team's data separate.
  • Choose the practice catalog and AI model, and set a monthly spending cap.
  • Manage members, teams, integrations, and optional features.

Optional recognition features​

Workspace admins can enable achievements, leagues, and a weekly leaderboard of review activity. A weekly Slack digest can also be configured. These features are separate from practice feedback. See Leaderboard for details.

Terms used in this guide​

  • Engineering practice: an observable way of working, such as keeping a change reviewable or explaining why it is needed.
  • Practice feedback: feedback about one or more engineering practices, tied to evidence from software project work.
  • Heph: the conversational AI mentor in the web app and Slack. Heph is one part of the Hephaestus platform.
  • Workspace: the repositories, members, teams, practice catalog, and settings for one group.
  • Workspace admin: a member who configures a workspace. An instance admin operates the whole deployment.

Technical documentation also uses observation for the evidence-backed assessment produced before feedback is composed. Developers normally see the resulting practice feedback, not the internal observation.

Quick start​

  1. Sign in with one of the providers offered by your deployment.
  2. Choose a workspace you belong to.
  3. Open Heph to start a conversation, if the mentor is enabled.
  4. Watch for practice feedback on your next pull request, merge request, or issue, if practice reviews are enabled.

Continue with Getting started for a tour of the current navigation.