# Mise en Place for Agentic Coding: Deliberate Preparation as Context Engineering Methodology

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05400 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05400/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 2 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 May 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Software engineering coding agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/software-engineering-coding-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [The Impact of AI on Developer Productivity: Evidence from GitHub Copilot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06590/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid adoption of AI coding agents has produced a dominant workflow pattern -- often called "vibe coding" -- that prioritizes speed of implementation over deliberate preparation. We argue that this approach creates a systematic alignment problem: agents that lack sufficient context produce code requiring extensive debugging and refactoring, consuming substantial development time. Drawing on the culinary concept of mise en place (everything in its place; abbreviated MEP), we propose a three-phase preparation methodology for agentic coding: (1) contextual grounding, where domain expertise and tacit knowledge are externalized into structured documents; (2) collaborative specification, where human-agent dialogue produces detailed design artifacts; and (3) task decomposition, where specifications are converted into structured, dependency-aware task records. We report on the application of MEP during a competitive hackathon, where roughly two hours of preparation enabled a rapid parallel implementation of a full-stack educational platform by concurrent AI agents. We introduce the concept of context fluency as an emerging developer skill -- the ability to create rich, structured context that agents can act on -- and connect it to established frameworks in backward design and tacit knowledge externalization. We conclude with a research agenda for empirically validating preparation-phase methodologies in AI-assisted software development.