monday frames its journey in three levels:
- L1 — Assistant: human-facing pair-programmer workflows. Engineers use short-latency tools (Cursor) for quick tasks and heavier models (Claude Code) for complex coding. Adoption nearly doubled year over year.
- L2 — Skills and sub-agents: reusable agents for repeated tasks with engineers driving the work. This is where most of monday's usage sits and where the PR throughput gains occurred.
Sphera and the idea of agents as teammates
monday's internal agent system is called Sphera. Agents are given stable identities: profile, manager, scope, and a performance score. Atlas, a highlighted example, is assigned the role "Software Engineer": it picks tickets, writes PRs, and ships features using the same backlog and assignment semantics as human teammates. Agents show up in team pages and can be tagged, assigned, code-reviewed, or deactivated like any other member.
Event model: three inboxes, one agent
Overall architecture and AWS services
monday's implementation uses seven primary AWS services plus per-session secret management. The key components:
- Amazon SNS: receives external triggers and fans them out.
- Amazon SQS: per-team queues by topic and routing key to enable back-pressure, retries, DLQs, and durable replay.
- Amazon EKS: hosts SQS consumers (Builders CoWORK) and agent runner pods.
- Amazon ElastiCache: stores live state (current task, run cursor, distributed lock, heartbeat, message log) for sub-millisecond reads and self-expiring keys.
- Amazon Elastic File System (EFS): stores sessions and memory as directories per active session (for example /sessions/ /repos/).
- Amazon S3 and Amazon RDS are listed among infrastructure pieces used alongside ElastiCache and EFS.
monday also uses AWS Secrets Manager for per-session secret handling.
Event path and operational guarantees
monday-agent-sdk, cold-starts, and the harness
monday separates three kinds of state to avoid combined cost, latency, or correctness trade-offs. Live state goes to ElastiCache for fast, transient reads. Session memory and files live on EFS as directories per session. This combination supports performance-sensitive access patterns and persistent session contexts across agents and restarts.