From Tailscale to Netbird: migrated my overlay network infra — and took DeepSeek V4 Pro for a spin along the way
After a few years on Tailscale and then Headscale, I switched to a self-hosted Netbird setup. The migration itself was handled with Pulumi — clean, reproducible, no complaints there.
But for day-to-day ops — spinning up a user on the fly, tweaking a policy, debugging a peer — IaC was getting in the way. I needed something fast, ergonomic, built for ops work.
So I had two goals:
- Build netbird-cli, kubectl-style
- Use OpenCode + DeepSeek V4 Pro as a real alternative to Claude / Copilot
What I shipped after two weeks:
- 10MB Go binary, zero external dependencies (stdlib, cobra, yaml.v3)
get / create / edit / deleteverbs, dynamic autocompletion, name → ID resolution- Interactive YAML editor + declarative
apply -fmode - Built almost entirely through pair programming with DeepSeek / OpenCode
On the OpenCode / DeepSeek combo — two things surprised me.
The model: DeepSeek V4 Pro generates structured, idiomatic Go code with conventions respected from the first draft. Minimal context is enough to get something coherent and immediately usable. No lengthy prompts, no endless back-and-forth.
The tooling: OpenCode delivers where a lot of AI agents fall apart. Clean context management, parallel command execution, surgical file edits without rewriting everything around it. It's the glue that turns a good model into an actual copilot — without it the experience would've been a lot more frustrating.
Takeaway: Claude's models are genuinely excellent and I've always had that feeling of not needing to over-explain myself to get what I want. This was the first time I got a comparable experience with the OpenCode + DeepSeek combo.
DeepSeek is a credible alternative for assisted dev — especially on greenfield projects — as long as you pair it with the right tooling. That said, keep a critical eye on large refactors, that's where things can go sideways.
Project is open source (BSD-3), available on GitHub: https://github.com/Apo-Z/netbird-cli
Happy to hear your feedback — on the CLI itself, or your own experiences with DeepSeek / OpenCode in a dev context. If you're on the fence about trying it: just go for it.