monk-ai 0.4.3

Find hidden cost leaks and blind spots in your agentic AI workflows

🕵️ monk

Find the money your AI agents are silently burning.

monk analyzes trace logs from any AI agent — LangGraph, smolagents, MemGPT, custom — and surfaces the cost leaks and behavioral failures that dashboards miss.

$ monk run ./traces/

  🕵️  monk — Agentic Workflow Blind Spot Detector
  Source: ./traces/   |   Calls analysed: 4,610

  ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │  12 blind spots found  ·  ~$118.61/day estimated waste  ·  ~$3,558/month  │
  └────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

  🔴 [1] Retry loop: 'calculator_tool' called 5x in a row across 38 sessions
  Fix: Add a result-cache keyed on (tool, args). Eliminate re-computation.

  🔴 [2] Error cascade: tool failure ignored → 8 downstream LLM calls wasted
  Fix: Guard every tool call — if status=error, short-circuit before next LLM call.

  🔴 [3] Token spike: single web_search injected 583K tokens (26× session median)
  Fix: Truncate tool outputs to 1,000 tokens before injecting into context.

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Install

pip install monk-ai

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Benchmark results

Evaluated on 8 real-world agentic trace datasets — including PatronusAI's TRAIL benchmark with human-labeled ground truth across 20 error categories.

Dataset	Records	Findings	Est. waste/day
taubench (banking / e-commerce agents)	17,932 calls	7,864	$68.49
Finance / 10-K ReAct (LangGraph)	4,610 calls	558	$118.61
GAIA smolagents	1,253 spans	296	$0.74
TRAIL — GAIA + SWE-bench (ground truth)	879 spans	137	$13.48
MemGPT (multi-turn)	500 calls	22	$0.41
Nvidia Nemotron (customer service)	413 calls	14	—
WildClaw (Claude Opus 4.6)	288 calls	1	—
Total	25,875	8,892	~$201/day

~$6,000/month in avoidable agent costs identified across 8 datasets.

WildClaw — a well-tuned production Claude agent — produced exactly 1 finding. monk correctly fires rarely on clean traces.

TRAIL precision / recall (ground truth benchmark)

Version	Precision	Recall	F1	Detectors
v0.1	84.85%	84.85%	84.85%	5
v0.3 (current)	100%	100%	100%	14

Zero false positives. All 33 error-containing TRAIL traces caught.
Full methodology: BENCHMARK.md

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What monk detects

14 detectors across two levels. All deterministic — no LLM-as-judge, no external API calls.

Trace detectors — work on OpenAI, Anthropic, LangSmith, or raw JSONL:

Detector	What it finds
retry_loop	Same tool called 3+ consecutive times
empty_return	Tool returns null, agent retries anyway
model_overkill	Expensive model doing formatting or classification
context_bloat	System prompt >55% of budget, or unbounded history growth
agent_loop	Agent cycling A→B→A→B without progress
text_io	Low output compression, truncated responses, unbounded input growth

Span detectors — require OpenTelemetry traces:

Detector	What it finds
error_cascade	Tool fails silently → 6–8 more LLM calls wasted on poisoned context
token_bloat	Token spikes (worst seen: 583K — 26× the session median)
latency_spike	Single-call outlier latency vs. session median
cross_turn_memory	Same tool + args re-fetched across turns
tool_dependency	Cycles and deep chains in the tool call graph
output_format	Model violates its own system prompt's format rules
plan_execution	Model writes a plan, then never executes it
span_consistency	Model asserts facts with no supporting tool call

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Usage

# Analyse a trace file or folder
monk run agent_traces.jsonl
monk run ./traces/

# Run specific detectors
monk run traces/ --detectors retry_loop,error_cascade,token_bloat

# Export findings as JSON for CI
monk run traces/ --json findings.json

# Only surface high-severity findings
monk run traces/ --min-severity high

# Save labeled text samples for LLM judge training
monk run traces/ --samples samples.jsonl

CI integration — monk exits 1 if high-severity findings exist:

- name: monk trace audit
  run: monk run ./traces/ --min-severity high

Real-time instrumentation — catch issues as they happen, not after:

import monk
monk.instrument()  # patches openai + anthropic automatically

# monk prints findings live as your agent runs

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Trace format

monk auto-detects OpenAI, Anthropic, LangSmith, and OpenTelemetry formats. For custom logs, any JSONL with these fields works:

{"session_id": "abc123", "model": "gpt-4o", "input_tokens": 1200, "output_tokens": 80, "tool_name": "web_search", "tool_result": "..."}

For full span-level analysis, export OpenTelemetry traces — monk parses both OTLP proto-JSON and flat JSONL span formats.

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Why we built this

Most observability tools show you what happened. monk finds what's costing you.

The patterns here — retry loops, silent tool failures, token spikes, agents re-fetching the same data — don't show up as errors. They don't trigger alerts. They just quietly multiply your inference bill.

87% of the GAIA and SWE-bench agent runs we analyzed had at least one unhandled tool error that caused downstream LLM calls to be wasted. The worst token spike: 583,787 tokens from a single unfiltered web page, 26× the session median. These are solvable problems. monk finds them.

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Datasets

All benchmark fixtures are public:

• PatronusAI/TRAIL — github.com/patronus-ai/trail-benchmark
• monk benchmark fixtures (TRAIL, MemGPT, Nemotron, Finance, WildClaw, GAIA, taubench) — huggingface.co/datasets/Blueconomy/monk-benchmarks

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Roadmap

• Real-time instrumentation (monk.instrument())
• Text I/O tracking + LLM judge sample collection
• Prompt compression suggestions
• Slack / PagerDuty alerts
• Web dashboard

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Contributing

To add a detector, see the contributing guide on GitHub.

The short version: create monk/detectors/your_detector.py extending BaseDetector, register it in monk/detectors/__init__.py, add tests. Detectors must be deterministic — same traces → same findings.

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License

MIT — github.com/Blueconomy/monk

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Built by Blueconomy AI — Techstars '25
If monk saves you money, a ⭐ helps others find it.