Mise en Place · mep
Tell Mise en Place what you're about to build or work on. It does the research, makes the assets, gathers your references and lays it all out in a prep folder with an index, so you or your agents can get straight to the work.
Prep skills for any project, code or not. Not a template or starter kit: everything is made fresh for your task.
In buildIn development. The skills are just starting. Follow along.
Every new task starts with the same scramble: research, hunting for references, making placeholder assets, writing down context. It gets done in a hurry by you or your agent, and half of it gets lost.
Research, images, diagrams, sample data and first drafts, each made for the task in front of it. Nothing is premade or generic.
ExampleA landing page task gets a keyword study and hero image drafts made for that page, not a stock set.
An index lists each item, its source and what's still open.
ExampleOpen index.md and see that the competitor table came from a web search and the hero drafts were generated on your machine.
A landing page launch, a data analysis, a research paper, a design system: the same prep steps apply.
ExampleThe steps stay the same, and what gets researched and made changes with the task.
Say it in your own words. Point mep at your repo or notes if there are any.
They research, generate assets and gather context with the tools on your machine. Works with Claude Code and bonfire; in development.
Read the index, then hand the folder to whoever does the work: you, Claude Code, bonfire or another agent.
You give your agent a task and the prep skills:
prep this task: "launch a landing page for a small open-source library"
When it finishes, the prep folder holds a keyword study and a competitor table, three hero image drafts made locally, references pulled from your own inspiration library, and a context.md that says what the repo does, written from reading it. index.md lists every item with its source, plus the open questions.
A second, unlike task uses the same steps. Give it “analyse a year of my bank exports” and you get research on categorisation approaches, sample data, context about the file formats and an index.md. Then you or your agent start on the work.
# example layout prep/ ├── research/ keyword study, competitor table ├── assets/ three hero drafts, made locally ├── references/ from your inspiration library ├── context.md what the repo does └── index.md every item, its source, open questions
We will publish two real prep folders, each with its index, so you can read exactly what the prep produced. None exist yet.
One prep folder for a task that isn't code, such as a landing page launch. Not published yet.
One prep folder for a task in a code project. Not published yet.
Other tools cover one slice of the prep. Mise en Place is meant to do the whole bundle, for any task.
Claude Code skills for project kickoff or competitor research each do one job, mostly for software projects. They don't make assets or gather your references.
Command-line tools that write down context for an agent. That is one part of the prep: no research, no generated assets, no references.
Research, generated assets, your references and an organized folder with an index, for any task, code or not.
The gapIn our search on 2026-10-19 we found no tool that does all four.
Mise en Place is the prep step in a set of five tools David Hatley is building for making things with AI agents.
No. Not a template or starter kit: everything is made fresh for your task. It ships no premade assets, templates or code.
No. It is a set of prep skills. The work is yours or your agents'. It preps coding tasks and tasks that aren't code.
Research, generated assets (images, diagrams, sample data, first drafts), references from your own libraries, and context from your project, in a prep folder with an index. Prep skills are added one at a time.
Claude Code and bonfire. The skills are in development and just starting.
Single-purpose Claude Code skills and context-pack tools each do one slice. Mise en Place aims to do the whole bundle for any task: research, generated assets, your references and an organized folder.
mise tool?No. That's jdx/mise, a separate tool. We use mep as the short name to keep them apart.
No. Nothing has shipped. Read the plan, and watch it get built.