Tehon-Mihon (thmh)

English | 日本語

Story-less UI component catalog for the AI era — auto-generated from your code, served by a Vite plugin, exposed to agents via MCP

Overview

thmh reads your components directly: static analysis of their types and variant definitions generates every combination of their variants, so you never write a Story file. It runs inside your app's own Vite dev server — one line in vite.config.ts — and inherits the aliases, Tailwind setup, and environment variables you already have, so there is no second build config to keep in sync.

Everything it knows is written to catalog.json, the single source of truth from which the human-facing UI, the agent-facing MCP server, and CI checks are all derived.

That MCP server exposes tools such as search_components and get_component_detail, letting coding agents find and reuse the components you already have instead of inventing near-duplicates. The catalog UI is served at /__thmh/; repositories with no host app, such as standalone design systems, can use the thmh CLI instead.

The name

Tehon-Mihon is two Japanese words that both end in 本 (hon) — a book, and the original a thing is copied from.

手本 (てほん, [tehoɴ]) is a model to copy: the sheet of calligraphy a student sets beside their own paper and reproduces stroke for stroke. This is what an agent needs — the exact shape of a component, its props and its variants, ready to be followed.

見本 (みほん, [mihoɴ]) is a sample to look at: the swatch, the specimen, the one you examine before you choose. This is what a person needs — the component rendered, every variant on screen.

From one manifest, two books are born at once.

Getting Started (Prototype)

This section walks through the current prototype. The thmh CLI only implements build; dev, init, and mcp print a "not implemented" message for now.

Prerequisites: Node.js 24+ and pnpm 11 (see packageManager in package.json).

git clone <this repo> && cd thmh
pnpm install
pnpm build
pnpm dev:example

dev:example builds every package, then starts the Vite dev server for examples/react-app. Open:

• http://localhost:5173/ — the example app itself
• http://localhost:5173/__thmh/ — the catalog, with every variant of the example Button rendered
• http://localhost:5173/__thmh/api/catalog.json — the same data as a manifest

Edit examples/react-app/src/components/ui/button.tsx and save — the catalog re-analyzes and refreshes within a couple of seconds, no restart needed.

To generate a manifest without a dev server, run the CLI against a built app:

node packages/thmh/dist/cli.js build --root examples/react-app --out catalog.json

To run the test suite:

pnpm test