I Built an AI Chatbot That Actually Knows Networking
Most AI assistants choke on real networking questions. I built one that doesn't — and embedded it across my free Cisco tools site.
Why general-purpose AI falls short for network engineers
If you’ve ever tried to use a general-purpose AI chatbot to debug a BGP neighbor stuck in Idle state, or to understand why your OSPF adjacency won’t form across a specific platform, you already know the problem. You get answers that sound confident but miss the context. The AI doesn’t know which IOS train you’re on. It mixes up syntax between platforms. It hallucinates interface names that don’t exist on your hardware.
I’ve spent 26 years in networking, and I earned my CCIE a long time ago. Over the past year, I’ve been building automation tools that pair that networking background with AI. Some of those tools live on my free CiscoTools.dev site — a config diff tool, an IOS to NX-OS translator, a config sanitizer, a template manager. They get used by network engineers every day.
But a tool is only useful if you know how to use it. And a config translator doesn’t help you if you can’t describe the problem you’re actually trying to solve. That’s where an AI assistant should come in — one that speaks the same language network engineers do.
So I built one.
What I shipped this week
I spent the last ten days or so shipping an MVP networking AI chatbot and embedding it across the tools site. The chatbot is trained to handle the kinds of questions a CCNA, CCNP, or CCIE candidate would ask, plus the everyday operational questions that come up for anyone running a real network — route leaks, VLAN mismatches, spanning tree weirdness, migration planning from one platform family to another.
What makes it different from dropping the same question into a generic AI chatbot is the context. The assistant knows it’s talking to a network engineer. It knows which command syntax belongs to which platform. It doesn’t apologize for five paragraphs before giving you the answer. And critically, it doesn’t invent interface names or configuration commands that don’t exist.
I also built it as an embeddable widget. That meant I could drop contextual “Ask AI” buttons throughout the free tools site. If you’re using the config diff tool and you see an unfamiliar command in the output, you can click a button and ask the assistant about that specific line without copying, pasting, and switching tabs. Same with the IOS to NX-OS translator — if a conversion comes out and you want to know why, the assistant is right there.
The testing reality check
Building the MVP was the easy part. Testing it revealed six distinct bugs I had to chase down — edge cases where the widget didn’t load cleanly, contextual buttons that didn’t pass the right information, UI states that broke on mobile. That’s the part of shipping real products that doesn’t show up in demo videos. You build something that works in your head, then you actually use it for a few days, and you find everything that’s wrong with it.
I don’t think AI tools are magic. They’re software, and software has bugs. The difference between an AI product that feels polished and one that feels frustrating is usually dozens of small bug fixes after the initial launch.
Why this matters for teams, not just individuals
The reason I built this isn’t just to put another free tool on the internet. It’s because the same pattern — a focused AI assistant with real domain knowledge, embedded where people actually work — applies to everything I do for clients.
Most of the automation projects I’m building for businesses right now follow this pattern. Take a workflow that currently requires a specific expert. Build an AI assistant that knows that domain deeply. Embed it in the tools people already use. Suddenly the junior engineer can answer questions that used to require a senior’s attention. The senior engineer gets their afternoon back.
That’s the real leverage. Not replacing expertise — amplifying it, and making it available at the exact moment someone needs it.
Want one of these for your team?
If you’ve got a workflow or a toolset where your team keeps asking the same specialized questions — and the expert who knows the answers is a bottleneck — that’s exactly the kind of problem I build AI assistants to solve. Reach out via /ai-assistant or /contact and we can talk through what it would look like for your business.