The five AI assistance modes

On any task's detail screen, AI assistance shows up as up to five distinct modes — not one generic chat. Each one has a narrow, specific job, and each one is switched on or off independently by that task's AI policy. This page covers what each mode actually does; see Using AI assistance for how the AI tab, providers, and privacy work in general.

Explain

Prompt: "Explain this task." Explains the concepts behind the task without writing the solution for you. This is the closest thing to a starting point — reach for it when the instructions make sense but the underlying idea doesn't yet.

Hint

Prompt: "Give me a hint for this task." Gives a progressive hint and deliberately stops short of solving the assignment. Use it when you know roughly what to do but are stuck on the next step, not when you want the answer.

Quiz

Prompt: "Quiz me on this task." Asks one Socratic question about the task. Answer it in the same thread and the next reply evaluates what you said — what was right, what to revisit — and asks a follow-up question, the same way a real back-and-forth quiz would. It never writes the assignment for you along the way.

Coach

Prompt: "Help me reflect on this task." Coaches a short reflection rather than doing the reflecting for you — useful right before you write your own reflection for submission, to think through what you actually learned instead of staring at a blank field.

Coach is off by default. If it's not showing up on a task, that's very likely deliberate — ask your mentor or the curriculum author if you think it should be available.

Solution

Prompt: "Write the full solution for this task." The one mode that can actually produce a complete, finished solution. It's the exception, not the rule — Explain, Hint, Quiz, and Coach are all built to deliberately stop short of this.

Solution is off by default, controlled by its own separate policy setting (not the same list that turns on Explain/Hint/Quiz/Coach), and only ever available once you've scoped a conversation to a specific task — never in the general, curriculum-wide AI tab chat. Even there, if your message reads like a request for a full solution (things like "give me the full answer" or "write all the code"), the assistant proactively declines and offers a hint or an explanation instead, unless this task has explicitly turned Solution on.

What's on by default

Unless a task says otherwise: Explain, Hint, and Quiz are on. Coach and Solution are off. A mode that's off shows as disabled rather than disappearing, so you can always tell it was a deliberate choice by whoever set up the task — not a bug.

Mentor-side assistance isn't one of these

Mentors have their own AI assist — a pre-review summary and a mentor-packet assistant — always available to them regardless of a task's policy, since it's a tool for the mentor's own judgment, not something apprentices invoke. It never approves or rejects anything on its own; the mentor remains the authority either way.