AI Assistant
Meno Studio includes a built-in AI assistant, powered by Claude, that lives in a chat panel in the editor. You describe what you want in plain language, and the assistant reads your project and makes the change — creating or modifying pages and components, writing styles, and editing content. Because a Meno project is a normal Astro codebase, every edit lands as an ordinary change to your .astro files or content collections, which you can review and undo like any other.
What it can see and do
The assistant works directly on your project files. It can read src/pages/, src/components/, your content collections under src/content/, and configuration like project.config.json, colors.json, and variables.json — so it answers with knowledge of your actual structure, components, and design tokens.
It writes back to those same files in the meno-astro dialect, so its output round-trips cleanly through the visual editor. Typical tasks it handles well:
Create a new page and wire it into the route tree under
src/pages/.Build a reusable component in
src/components/, including itsresolveProps(Astro, {…})interface.Apply styles through
style({…})and prop-bound style mappings — no rawclass="…"strings.Edit copy, including
i18n({…})values and CMS content undersrc/content/.Add or adjust a CMS collection schema in a
[slug].astrotemplate page.
Because it edits the same .astro files you edit by hand, anything it produces stays inside the dialect grammar and shows up immediately in both the canvas and the file tree. See Hand-editing for the rules those files follow.
How to prompt it
Open the AI panel, type a prompt, and press Enter. The assistant inspects the relevant files, plans the change, and applies it. When it finishes, review the result and Accept to keep it — the update appears at once in the canvas and in the files. From there you can keep editing visually in Studio or continue the conversation to refine the change.
The assistant automatically receives the current selection as context. When you have an element selected on the canvas, it knows which file and node you mean, so prompts like "make this heading larger on mobile" or "give this section a dark background" resolve to the right place without you spelling out the path.
A few tips for good results:
Be specific about the target ("the hero on
index.astro") and the outcome you want.Reference design tokens by name (for example
var(--primary)) rather than raw hex values.Make one change at a time when the edit is large; review, then continue.
If a result drifts, undo it and re-prompt with tighter wording.
Reviewing and undoing edits
Every assistant edit is a normal file change. After you Accept, the modified .astro or content file is what changed on disk — there is nothing special about an AI-authored edit versus a hand-authored one. You can undo in the editor, revert the file, or inspect the diff in version control. This is the key safety property: the assistant has no private state and leaves a plain, reviewable trail in your project.
When to use Claude Code instead
The built-in assistant is the fastest path for in-editor changes. For deeper, repo-wide work — refactors across many files, running build or test commands, or scripted multi-step tasks — you may prefer an external AI coding agent such as Claude Code running against the repository in your terminal. It operates on the same .astro files, so the two approaches stay compatible, and the project ships with a CLAUDE.md and a .claude folder so the agent understands the Meno format out of the box.
One difference matters in practice: the built-in assistant gets your canvas selection automatically, but an external terminal tool does not. To hand it the same context, select an element, open the three-dot menu in the top-right of Studio, and choose Copy selected path — this copies the file and the location of the selected node so you can paste it into your prompt.
See Claude Code for the full terminal workflow.
For more on the surfaces these edits touch, see Editor Overview, Building Components, and CMS.