Mentoring & communication
Today, mentoring conversation happens through the review cycle itself, not through a separate messaging feature. This page covers what that actually looks like now, and — clearly separated — a fuller communication layer that's proposed but not yet built.
How you talk to your apprentice today
When you request a revision on a submission, your comment is required and attaches to that task — your apprentice sees it, makes the change, and resubmits. That round trip, and its full history, is the whole communication channel the app provides today. See Reviewing submissions for the mentor side of that, and Submitting evidence for review for the apprentice side.
There's no free-standing thread, chat, or help-request button yet — if you and your apprentice need to talk about something that isn't tied to a specific submission, that conversation happens wherever you already talk outside the app. Nothing here is encrypted beyond whatever protection your Git host and its transport already provide.
Formal code review stays where it belongs
This part is unrelated to the proposal below and isn't changing: apprenti.dev doesn't reinvent Pull Requests or Merge Requests. If you want a real code review, open one directly on GitHub or GitLab the way you always would — the app's review flow is about checking evidence against a task's acceptance criteria, not about replacing your Git host's own review tools.
Proposed: a fuller mentoring & communication layer
A richer, Git-native communication layer has a written design — encrypted messages committed as immutable objects on a dedicated branch, gated so nothing syncs unless the repository's privacy is actually verified (not just assumed) — but it isn't scheduled into the app's build roadmap yet and none of it exists in the app today. Worth knowing the direction anyway:
- •Threads — grouped conversations tied to a task, commit, branch, or file, open to either of you.
- •Structured feedback — mentor-authored, with a category (architecture, correctness, readability, testing, performance, security, learning) and a severity, separate from a formal review decision.
- •Help requests — apprentice-initiated, a free-text "I need help" that auto-attaches the current task, branch, and commit so you get context without them retyping it.
- •"Ask Mentor about…" — apprentice-initiated questions surfaced with context already attached, from wherever they come up in the app.
Treat all of this as a proposal, not a preview — there's no committed date, and it could still change significantly before (or if) it's built.