r/networkautomation

Great. It's pretty cool what we can do with LLMs.

Here's the thing though. By and large, no one is going to use it.

Why?

Because you don't know what you're doing. I mean, that's the point. The LLMs do know. But you don't. Long term support, active development, etc. It's too easy now to spit out a tool and it's even easier to say "meh" and abandon it.

These are the reasons why your vibe coded tool is being downvoted into oblivion.

Most of us are pretty particular about our tools. We want tools we can rely on today and rely on tomorrow. Right now at least, vibe coded tools don't seem like viable tools long-term.

This doesn't mean the tool can't be great for you. But the larger network community is almost certainly going to pass.

Now, if you are a programmer and have experience in the language for your tool and are using AI to extend your knowledge, that's another thing. You can be insanely productive that way. I use it myself to build discrete chunks of code, typically a function at a time, so I still understand the overall structure and architecture of the code. But if my prompt is too broad and it spits out 1,000 lines of Python/Go/whatever then I'm going to refine it so it only spits out 30-50 lines of code at a time that I can follow and understand.

So before you post your project, make sure to disclose if it's vibe coded and if you've got programming experience yourself.

I'm working on an open-source, read-only tool that documents small networks (router API, hypervisor API, ARP/mDNS/nmap discovery, output as Markdown in git). Not public yet, no link.

One problem I keep running into: a lot of homes and small offices use cheap "easy smart" or unmanaged switches with no SNMP, no LLDP, and no usable MAC table you can query. So there's no clean way to say "this device is on port 5."

Options I'm weighing:

- A guided cable trace: unplug or replug one port at a time and watch which device drops off or reappears

- Inferring from link-state changes plus ARP timing

- Just letting the user fill it in once and keeping it as an override

Has anyone dealt with this? Is there a smarter trick I'm missing for dumb switches, or is guided manual tracing the realistic answer?

https://i.redd.it/u4toy3ynsvsh1.gif

https://github.com/LambdaBytes/sping

I built Sping because I kept running into the same problem: ping tells you that something is not replying, but then you still have to figure out whether the problem is your local network, your gateway, the Internet connection, or the target itself.

Sping tries to put that context in one place. It monitors the target, gateway and WAN connectivity at the same time, and combines that with latency, jitter, packet loss, TTL, trends and a simple quality score.

It is written in Rust and uses its own ICMP implementation on Linux, macOS and Windows rather than shelling out to the system ping command. It also supports IPv4/IPv6, multiple targets, batch mode and a stable NDJSON output for scripting.

The goal is not to replace tools like mtr or traceroute. It is mainly meant to answer the first practical question when something feels wrong: is the problem local, upstream, or just the target?

I would be interested in feedback from people using it on different networks and platforms, especially cases where the diagnostics get the situation wrong.