Internal Developer Documentation RAG

Developer RAG is about providing "Actionable Answers" from messy technical sources: READMEs, API docs, Jira tickets, and the source code itself.

Pattern: The "Doc-Code Bridge"

A developer query is often: "How do I implement auth in the new microservice?" The RAG needs to:

1. Retrieve the Auth API Specification (Swagger/OpenAPI).
2. Retrieve the Internal Boilerplate (Python/Typescript code).
3. Retrieve the Onboarding Guide (Markdown).

Technical Splitting for Code

Standard text splitters break code in the middle of a function. You must use a Code-Aware Splitter that respects function boundaries and indentation.

from langchain.text_splitter import RecursiveCharacterTextSplitter, Language

python_splitter = RecursiveCharacterTextSplitter.from_language(
    language=Language.PYTHON, chunk_size=1000, chunk_overlap=100
)

Handling Diagrams (PlantUML / Mermaid)

Developers use diagrams. If a diagram is in code format (Mermaid), it is already text-searchable. If it's a PNG, you must use Vision Models to convert it to a textual "Description of the architecture."

Impact on Onboarding

Developer RAG can reduce the "Ramp-up Time" for new engineers by providing them an "Expert Colleague" they can ask questions to at any hour of the day.

Exercises

1. Why are "Code Snippets" better than "Full Files" for RAG context?
2. How do you handle "Outdated" documentation that has been superceded by a newer version of the library?
3. Design a prompt that asks the model to "Provide a working code example" based on the documentation.