Build a Codebase Intelligence Tool Like repowise With a RAG-Assisted MCP for Your Monorepo

Originally published on tamiz.pro.

Introduction

Modern monorepos contain hundreds of thousands of files spanning multiple services, libraries, and configurations. Traditional code search—whether ripgrep, Sourcegraph, or IDE search—struggles with semantic queries like "how do we handle payment retries?" or "find all places where user permissions are checked". A RAG-assisted Model Context Protocol (MCP) server can turn your local codebase into a queryable knowledge base, giving LLMs and CLI tools accurate, context-rich answers. This tutorial shows you how to build a production-grade version of tools like repowise for your own monorepo.

Table of Contents

1. Architecture Overview