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Monk Docs

Quick Start Guide

This guide will help you get up and running with Monk in just a few minutes.

Monk User Interface

Monk opens in its own chat window (Cmd+Shift+M) in your editor (VS Code, Cursor, or Windsurf). Unlike coding agents that excel at generating and editing code, Monk specializes in building, configuring, and running your code.

How to Interact with Monk

To interact with Monk:

  1. Open a project in your editor workspace (Monk only activates when a project is open)
  2. Open Monk chat with Cmd+Shift+M
  3. Express your intent in plain English as prompts

You can continue chatting with Monk in its chat window as you iterate.

You will also see the Monk status icon in the status bar of your editor. When Monk is ready it will be a checkmark, otherwise it will show a warning icon. You can click on it to get more information about the status of Monk and resolve any issues.

Basic Usage

The most effective way to use Monk is to clearly express your intent in natural language. If you don’t understand the output or actions taken by Monk you can simply ask for clarification at any time. If you don’t specify enough information, Monk will ask you for more details.

For example, you can ask Monk what it can do by typing what can you do? in the chat.

Some actions like building and running your project take a while to complete. Monk reports the status of the action in the chat and clearly indicates when it’s finished.

Run a project locally

To run your project locally, simply ask:

run this project locally

Monk will check if your project is containerized and ready to run. If not, it will build it for you, including all dependencies such as databases, before running it locally.

Run a project in the cloud

Deploying your project to the cloud is just as straightforward:

now run this on DigitalOcean

Monk is smart enough to gather all necessary information and might ask for credentials if you haven’t provided them previously. Once complete, it will report the results.

You can also ask Monk for specific actions:

open my project in the browser
show me the logs

For more example prompts to try, see our collection of useful prompts.

For advanced techniques to get the most out of Monk, check out our prompting techniques guide.

Cleaning up

When you’re done, you can ask Monk to clean up the project if you don’t wish to keep it running:

clean up

or

delete cluster

This will remove all the resources created by Monk.