Monkdev is a toolkit and methodology for coding with LLMs

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Monkdev is a toolkit and methodology for coding with LLMs

I'm sure many people have some solutions similar to this but I've been using some variation of this since roughly the release of Opus 3 to get higher quality results. Like, significantly higher. So I decided to make it into a more structured package. Problem: bad decisions and short sighted solutions due to the LLM not having enough context before acting. They'd read one file, or a few segments of a set of files using a super conservative offset and limit, guess about the rest, apply a patch, run a unit test and then tell you with its entire chest that the code is production-ready. Those bandaids over time became debt, drift, complexity. Unnecessary LOC in a codebase where I find myself wondering is this thing even making me more efficient or should I be in VIM more often and just save myself the API costs (I use OpenCode + OpenRouter and have been known to blast through hundreds of dollars a day in spend using Frontier models). I found that, for whatever reason, LLMs respond to role-play strongly vs just repeating rules using increasingly alarming markdown context decorators. And so I created a persona for it that is pretty funny when I explain it to someone else but has been really effective. `monkdev` gives the LLM tools to get enough context before writing any code, it helps you to front-load the context window. This is a more expensive approach, on paper, but the money saved through efficient workflow has definitely worked out for me so I figured I would share it with others. The main workflow after installing the MCP is just to type `meditate` in a fresh session. If you want to ingest a certain area of the code specifically, `meditate on <x>` and it will use the tooling provided to aggressively read files. It will confirm the token count and confirm with you before it starts just aggressively `cat`ing your entire project. It's quite opinionated in terms of structure with Bun and Rust mono-repo projects so if you find it useful fork it and plug in your own preferences. I wanted to avoid making the system prompt too long since I've found that it loses significance in the behavior of the agent if it is over a certain size. I'm also interested to know if anyone is using something similar or if it can be made to be more efficient.