GoKawiilI’ve been refraining from saying ‘vibe networking’ or ‘vibkrotik’ or some other abomination, but it is true - I have been using LLMs to setup a few networks these last few months, and things have generally gone over swimmingly.
I’ve been a fan of MikroTik equipment for a while - the short story is that the equipment is reliable, inexpensive, and they cover a ton of networking use cases - IoT cell phone routers, regular routers, switches, point to point systems, etc.
One of the usual complaints about MikroTik has been its complex ui/configuration. In a sense, I don’t know if that’s true inasmuch as networking is complicated in itself - as in, it goes deeper than one thinks? Maybe there should be a iceberg-format meme about this. At the top you’d have “ip address”, and going deeper you’d see “the dude” and other you’ve-never-heard-of-them’s. mpls! igs! ospf!
The point I’m trying to make is yeah, networking can just be hard. I’ve been half-networking, amateur-ishly, for a while now - setting up networks for friends and friends’ offices, making cables, patching small panels etc. I almost certainly couldn’t pass an official “Certified Routing Engineer” cert - well, not without studying a lot (believe in yourself).
But you know, it hasn’t stopped me (and I suppose it shouldn’t?) from having fun and fixing people’s wifi (most people’s wifi problems can be categorized into… oh brother - I should make another post about this. Never use extenders.)
Where do LLMs fit in? Well, as elsewhere (in coding, etc.) they are a chaotic force multiplier - they definitely know how to configure MikroTiks and networking in general, but they also still get things wrong, go off-path, etc. As with coding, you can/should keep a tight leash, mis-trust and verify, but you can also make more progress faster ((remember the 2025 study that said that LLM speedups were not real - well…)).
And so these last few months I’ve been able to setup networks - small, for sure - and had a lot of fun giving claude code access to my devices and letting it do its thing. (As I discussed here, yes, I do mean dangerously-skip’ing-permissions).
I’ve compiled a short list of maybe/hopefully useful notes for myself - in one case, I was migrating an existing network (a very small single-router-with-integrated-wifi to a router+switch+two wireless access points), while in two other cases the networks were net new.
In any case, if useful, here’s Greg’s list of LLM MikroTik tips and tricks:
even though mikrotiks can be configured over ssh, there’s a “death by a thousand cuts” that tends to happen when llms try to pipe text back and forth. the much better (ie more llm native) channel is to use the REST/JSON api.
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