I’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：https://mikrotik.com/ 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：https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/iceberg-charts about this. At the top you’d have “ip address”, and going deeper you’d see “the dude：https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWt6eL6Hj7M” 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：https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust,_but_verify, but you can also make more progress faster ((remember the 2025 study that said that LLM speedups were not real - well…：https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/#wider-adoption-of-ai-has-made-it-more-difficult-to-measure-task-level-productivity)).

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：https://agentsandengineers.com/episodes/0001-vibe-coding-in-the-physical-world-robotics-circuits-and-dangerous-permissions/, yes, I do mean dangerously-skip’ing-permissions).

I’ve compiled a short list of hopefully useful notes on this topic - 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, here’s my list of LLM MikroTik tips and tricks:

I’ve been in situations (or maybe the LLM led me down this path..) where IP addresses are conflicting, you have multiple overlapping 192.168.88.x networks, and it’s generally a mess and hard to even connect to the router or switch, even if you’re physically connected to those devices over ethernet (which you should always be)

The best tool for this in my opinion is the L2 “MAC Telnet：https://manual.mikrotik.com/docs/management-tools/mac-server” ie a server that lets you telnet over the L2 (MAC-address) layer. It’s sort of the equivalent of using WinBox：https://mikrotik.com/download/winbox (which to my surprise is now cross-platform, and works quite well on Macs) - except that having an L2-layer telnet client allows your LLM to talk to your MikroTik devices. WinBox is a GUI software that LLMs can’t control.

For this, I deeply recommend MAC-Telnet：https://github.com/haakonnessjoen/MAC-Telnet - it will come in handy at the worst time ie when IP addresses don’t work! I/Claude just built a tiny Homebrew formula：https://github.com/gregsadetsky/homebrew-mactelnet/ to make its installation easier, but you can also follow the original installation instructions - it’s the same code. I also made this small CLI：https://gist.github.com/gregsadetsky/eab0be331cb99342dd4be6bab7353f13 just to make MAC-Telnet a bit more LLM-friendly to consume/use, but generally speaking, LLMs will figure out how to use a CLI tool by themselves. You don’t need an MCP server.

Have fun - and feel free to tell me I have it all wrong (it’s happened before). Bye!! xx