Quick Start Guide

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

Monk User Interface

Monk is a chat participant in VSCode, living in the chat sidebar alongside GitHub Copilot and other assistants. Unlike Copilot, which excels 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 VSCode workspace (Monk only activates when a project is open)
2. Prefix your message with @monk in the chat sidebar
3. Express your intent in plain English

The @monk mention is “sticky,” allowing you to continue chatting with Monk. To switch back to Copilot, simply delete the mention. Copilot remains aware of your conversation with Monk.

You will also see Monk status icon on the bottom left in the status bar of VSCode. 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 @monk what can you do? in the chat.

Some acttions 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:

@monk can you 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:

@monk 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:

@monk open my project in the browser

@monk 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:

@monk clean up

or

@monk delete cluster

This will remove all the resources created by Monk.