LLM-Powered Internal Tools: A Practical Guide for Software Teams

🏗️ Under construction 🏗️

Introduction

Within companies with large codebases and knowledge bases, finding the right information, or understanding how different parts of the system connect, is often harder than it should be. LLM-powered internal tools are a practical solution to this. They help employees find what they need faster, and surface relationships across a codebase or knowledge base that a simple keyword search would miss. This article covers what I learned building one for a software company, including the architecture decisions, tradeoffs, and things I would do differently.

The Foundations

Choosing the Right LLM

Approaches: RAG, Agents or Both?

RAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Agents

Combining Them

What to Tune and How to Evaluate

Final Remarks