Deliberate preparation is the missing discipline in agentic development

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Dev Interrupted

Borrowing the culinary concept of 'mise en place' (everything in its place), this piece argues that deliberate upfront preparation is the missing discipline in agentic coding workflows. The author shares a hackathon case study where spending the first 2 of 5 hours creating contextual briefing documents, a detailed product specification, and a structured task breakdown (42 beads) — before writing a single line of code — enabled four parallel AI agents to scaffold a functional application in roughly five minutes. The core thesis: the primary bottleneck in agentic development is not code generation but alignment, and rich context created before agents start working compresses implementation time and reduces costly debugging cycles. The author introduces 'context fluency' as an emerging developer skill encompassing decomposition, specification, constraint definition, and domain encoding.

Mise en place for agentic coding