A weekend experiment that turned into a sandbox I keep coming back to. Three retrievers, one LLM, and one absolute rule even in a lab: nothing changes without me clicking yes.
A few months back I rebuilt my home lab. Four routers, four vendors, containerlab on a beat-up Linux box under my desk. R1, R2, R3, R4 are based on multivendor enviroment. Full OSPF underlay, eBGP between vendors, the works. Pure lab gear, no customers, no SLAs, nobody paged at 2am if it fell over.
I built this so I could break things. And test patterns. And try out the kinds of integrations I’d never get approval to try on a real network. Right around the time the lab came up I’d been reading about LLM tool calling and got curious. Could I sit at the chat box and just ask the network questions? “What would happen if R1 dies?” “Why is the BGP session to AS 65100 flapping?” “Which routers depend on R3?”