Joël of the FoS said:
What is the Code Monkeys?
Back when 3e was released, WotC triumphantly announced that, soon, there would be the 3e "eTools" that would allow DM and players to create characters, monsters, dungeons, etc. easily on their computer. The first printing of the PHB even included a character generator demo of eTools.
ETools was never released as it was announced. It ended up being a big bunch of vaporware, and when it
was released, it had lost most of its vaunted features.
However, in the meantime, a bunch of gamer programmers started work on their own generator utilities. You may remember Jamis Buck's nifty random generators, who were hosted on EN World. The largest such effort was PCGen, a java program to create player characters.
WotC ended up giving the PCGen coders the eTools hot potato, and so these coders formed a little company named CodeMonkey.