mise en place

[ MEEZ ahn PLAHS ]noun

Getting all your notes, rules and reference material together before you type the first prompt.

Explanation

Borrowed from restaurant kitchens, where it means everything is on the board before the burner goes on. The disaster it prevents is the same in both jobs: making it up halfway through because you did not prep.

Related words

• context engineering — Deciding on purpose what goes in front of the AI: the instructions, the files, the notes, the tools, the earlier conversation.
• spec-driven development — Writing the plan down properly first and treating it as the real thing, with the code as something generated from it and checked against it.

Prompts that deal with it

• Write the Rules File — The standing rules, taken from your actual project