On AI Agents Speaking BGP
I guess your LinkedIn feed is as full of AI nonsense as mine is, so I usually just skip all that posturing. However, every now and then, I stumble upon an idea that makes sense… until you start to dig deeper into it.
There was this post about AI agents speaking BGP with an associated GitHub repo, so I could go take a look at what it’s all about.
The proof-of-concept (so the post author) has two components:
- A natural-language interface to BGP information (makes sense)
- A vibe-coded (so claims the author) BGP daemon with a socket interface returning information on BGP neighbors, received and sent routes.
That second part made me facepalm. We have several high-quality open-source BGP implementations1, and at least FRRouting (I haven’t tested the others) can produce the required information in easy-to-consume (for machines) JSON format, in case you think that’s easier to work with than text printouts2. Adding a REST API in front of that3 or a translation layer4 is a piece of cake. Want to have a science project? Skip the intermediate layers and write your own output module that processes the information directly from the BGP table.
Anyway, wouldn’t it be better to use a well-maintained, field-tested, pretty scalable implementation and pair it with something that adds value (natural language interface) instead of trying to prove you can reinvent a rough approximation of a wheel? Why do people feel they have to do that?
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Plenty of IXPs are using one of them, and the Internet must be up and running, or you wouldn’t be reading this. ↩︎
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Some people disagree because of the inevitable bloat caused by text-to-JSON expansion. ↩︎
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Because everything needs to have a REST API to be useful ;) ↩︎
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In case you think the LLM you’re using can work better with data formatted some other way. ↩︎