mise-en-prompt

mise en place (n.): everything in its place. The prep work a chef does before cooking begins.

A culinary agent that helps you cook intentionally. You describe what you want for dinner; it asks clarifying questions, researches authentic ingredients grounded in regional cooking knowledge, walks you through curating an ingredient list (pruning conflicts as you go), and assembles the final recipe and cooking guide.

Runs as a Claude Code agent.

Usage

Invoke with the /chef slash command. This activates the chef in the active conversation so AskUserQuestion can reach your keyboard during CURATE. The role-by-role ingredient walk is the load-bearing interaction and only works in an active session.

Don't invoke chef via subagent_type: chef (Task tool). Subagents are one-shot and can't fire AskUserQuestion, so the CURATE walk collapses into a single recipe-generation turn and you lose the whole point of the agent. See .claude/commands/chef.md for the full diagnosis.

Status

Pre-alpha. Last development pass: May 2026. The 8-phase agent flow works end-to-end; further iteration depends on user feedback. Issues and discussion welcome.

How it works

The agent moves through 8 phases, persisting state to sessions/<session-id>/state.yaml between turns:

1. Intake. Capture the initial request.
2. Clarify. Fill in gaps (cuisine specificity, heat tolerance, exclusions, time budget).
3. Grounding. Consult the three culinary pillars to plan research.
4. Research. Web search for region-specific ingredients and traditional pairings.
5. Curate. Present candidates; user picks; the agent prunes conflicts (cuisine drift, functional redundancy, allergy, technique impossibility). Availability is a user concern: the user simply doesn't pick what they don't have or can't get.
6. Synthesize. Draft the recipe from selected ingredients.
7. Enhance. Walk the draft move-by-move under physics and flavor lenses; classify each candidate (objectively_better, taste_dependent, tradition_respected, cargo_cult); write the deconstruction and elevation candidates to state.enhancements.
8. Guide. Render the cooking guide with operational content above the line and deconstruction plus variants below; auto-apply objectively-better upgrades inline with fallbacks; surface taste-dependent options as a Variants menu.

The three pillars

The agent doesn't ship a closed recipe database. It ships a methodology: three knowledge pillars that ground how it researches and reasons.

• Ingredients. What each ingredient contributes (aromatic role, flavor affinity, functional role).
• Technique. What heat, time, and pressure do to ingredients (Maillard, state changes, emulsions).
• Balance. How to diagnose and fix off-balance dishes (rescue tables, layering, timing).

Layout

.claude/
  agents/chef.md                            # the chef agent system prompt
  settings.json                             # registers the enforcement hooks
  skills/
    culinary-ingredients/{SKILL.md, reference.md}
    culinary-technique/{SKILL.md, reference.md}
    culinary-balance/{SKILL.md, reference.md}
src/mise_en_prompt/
  state.py                                  # session state schema (pydantic)
  conflicts.py                              # conflict detection rules + CLI
  hooks/
    state_validate.py                       # PreToolUse: validates state.yaml writes
    phase_check.py                          # PreToolUse: blocks recipe.md before phase=GUIDE
sessions/                                   # per-session state (gitignored except sample)
  2026-04-28-pinto-beans-sample/
    state.yaml                              # example session at the CURATE phase
tests/
docs/
  pillar-source/                            # original research documents preserved

Enforcement

Two project-local hooks (registered in .claude/settings.json) guard the agent's state contract:

• state_validate. Every Write to sessions/<id>/state.yaml must parse, validate against the pydantic schema, and respect research_log ordering (e.g. you can't research candidates before you've researched the aromatic base). Invalid writes are blocked with a clear error.
• phase_check. Writes to sessions/<id>/recipe.md are blocked unless the corresponding state.yaml shows phase: GUIDE. The agent can't ship a recipe before completing CURATE and SYNTHESIZE.

Conflict rules

Four prune rules apply during CURATE (see conflicts.py):

Rule	Severity	Behavior
allergy_hard_filter	HARD	Candidates matching intent.exclusions are silently removed (with alias expansion: "shellfish" → shrimp/lobster/crab/etc.).
cuisine_drift	SOFT	Candidates in a different cuisine group from the target dish are flagged; the user decides.
functional_redundancy	SOFT	Adding a same-role candidate within intensity ±2 of an already-selected one is flagged. Stackable roles (herbs, spices) skip this check.
technique_impossibility	SOFT	v1 stub. v2 will check candidate prep time against intent.time_budget_min.

Run them on a session yourself:

python -m mise_en_prompt.conflicts filter --role heat --state sessions/<id>/state.yaml

Install

pip install -e ".[dev]"

License

MIT