monkey-cli

🐒 monkey

Your monkey in the terminal. No browser, no copy-pasting — just ask and get things done.

Monkey is an agentic AI assistant that lives where you work. It reads your code, edits files, runs commands, and searches the web. You stay in the terminal; monkey does the rest.

Why monkey?

• No context switching — ask Monkey to fix a bug and it edits the file, right there
• Fully agentic — Monkey can read, write, run commands, and browse the web on your behalf; you approve each action
• Works the way you do — interactive TUI for exploration, one-shot CLI for scripting and pipes
• Project-aware — drop a MONKEY.md in any repo to give Monkey permanent context about your codebase

Get started

curl -fsSL https://monkeycli.com/install.sh | sh

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="your-api-key"
monkey

That's it. Monkey picks the latest Claude model automatically.

What it can do

• Edits your files — Monkey reads your code, makes targeted changes, and shows you a diff before applying
• Runs commands — execute shell commands with your approval; ideal for build errors, test failures, or quick scripts
• Searches the web — fetch pages and search DuckDuckGo without leaving your session
• Remembers conversations — resume any session with --continue; never lose a thread
• Switches models on the fly — jump between Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku mid-conversation with /model
• Handles long conversations — /compact summarizes and compresses history so you never hit context limits

Common workflows

# Fix a bug — monkey reads the file, proposes a fix, applies it
monkey -p "nil pointer panic in api/client.go line 83, fix it"

# Summarize a diff for a PR description
git diff main | monkey -p "write a pull request description for these changes"

# Research and write
monkey -p "find the top Go HTTP routers and write a comparison to docs/routers.md"

# Quick question while staying in flow
monkey -p "what does SIGTERM do vs SIGKILL"

# Pick up where you left off
monkey --continue

Installation

One-liner (recommended)

curl -fsSL https://monkeycli.com/install.sh | sh

go install

go install github.com/juanhuttemann/monkey-cli@latest

From source

git clone https://github.com/juanhuttemann/monkey-cli.git
cd monkey-cli
go build -o monkey .

Requires Go 1.25 or later.

Updating

monkey update

Checks GitHub for the latest release and replaces the current binary in-place if a newer version is available.

Setup

The only required variable is your API key:

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="your-api-key"

Monkey defaults to the latest Claude model automatically. You can pin specific models if needed:

The active model defaults to the first one set, in order: Opus → Sonnet → Haiku.

monkey also works with any Anthropic-compatible provider — Kimi, MiniMax, GLM, and others. Just point it at your provider's endpoint, set your API key, and map the model slots to that provider's model IDs.

You can also configure monkey via ~/.config/monkey/config.toml.

Usage

Interactive TUI

monkey

One-shot CLI

monkey -p "Why do monkeys make the best programmers?"

# Pipe input
monkey -p "summarise this" < file.txt

# Unquoted prompts work too
monkey -p Write a haiku about bananas

# Resume the last session
monkey --continue

Custom system prompt

Create a MONKEY.md in your project root and monkey will load it as the system prompt for every conversation in that directory. Use it to give Claude context about your stack, conventions, or anything else it should always know.

A global default lives at ~/.config/monkey/MONKEY.md.

Agentic tools

When Monkey needs to take action, it calls one of these built-in tools. Each call shows a confirmation prompt — or use /ape to auto-approve everything.

Running tests

go test ./...

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Open an issue first to discuss what you'd like to change. See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

License

MIT © Juan Huttemann