Category: Worth Reading

Tony Mattke built several networking-focused CLI tools and released them on GitHub. You might find them useful.

Doug Madory wrote an interesting article (published on APNIC blog) arguing that we shouldn’t worry about ephemeral BGP leaks that can be observed only during the BGP path hunting process that follows a route withdrawal.

I have to disagree with that. It’s never a good idea to ignore a dead canary in the coal mine.

While the ephemeral leaks do not impact the end result (after all, the route is gone), they are an important indicator of the lack of BGP route policy enforcement in the autonomous systems that propagate them. If an autonomous system is propagating a bogus route when no better routes are available, it’s equally likely to propagate a bogus route when an intruder manages to inject it.

Did you manage not to stumble on a dramatic post explaining how someone generated 10,000 lines of code with AI while wasting time on your LinkedIn feed? Congratulations, you’re lucky.

However, as Nathaniel Fishel explained in his Your Code Is Worthless article, the “lines of code” is a useless vanity metric that sounds great in a LinkedIn self-promotion, but doesn’t matter when one has to maintain the product one has shipped to the customers. Add the natural laziness, and you have a perfect storm. As he wrote:

Most of the hyperventilated AI “success stories” are as useful as the “ANSIBLE!!!” movement was a few years ago. It’s thus always a pleasure to find someone with well-established software development chops who took the time to describe what works for them.

One cannot argue with Mike McQuaid’s credentials (at least if you happen to be using homebrew on MacOS, which you REALLY SHOULD), and his Sandboxes and Worktrees: My secure Agentic AI Setup in 2026 article is full of relevant recommendations in case you’re brave enough to let AI agents loose on your GitHub repository.

Kyle Kingsbury published a long (10-part) article about his frustrations with AI, aptly named The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess.

Regardless of where you are on the skeptic-to-fanboy spectrum, I would highly recommend you read it, even if you believe you’ll disagree with everything he wrote.

A while ago, I found the How Automatic Return Routing solves IP overlap article on Cloudflare’s blog. They evidently have a technology that addresses a pain point well worth solving (access to shared resources from clients using overlapping address ranges). I just hate how they’re selling it. Go read the article first; I’ll wait.

OK, here’s what bothers me: the “VRFs and NAT are bad” claims, while they use the same technology in disguise.

@sjhloco wrote an excellent in-depth description of how you can use containerlab and netlab to manage your labs as code.

He also documented a few netlab shortcomings (one of which caused a crash); fortunately, I found his blog post (admittedly over a year later) and fixed most of them in release 26.04:

Another week, another interesting AI article (is anyone writing about anything else these days?), this time from Noah Smith (another author worth following). I found this gem hidden in his weekly roundup:

Instead of trying to write a piece of code from scratch, or prove a math theorem from scratch, or figure out some piece of knowledge for yourself, you just ask AI to do it all for you. So everyone ends up getting the right answers to questions whose answers are already known, so they don’t end up adding anything new.

Phil Gervasi wrote an interesting article describing Rail-Optimized Networking for AI Training Workloads. Go read it first; I’ll wait.

Does it sound interesting? Were you able to see behind the curtain and figure out what it’s really about?

Milan Zapletal, the author of the biggest netlab topology I’ve seen so far (full story), has published a nice introductory article explaining What is Netlab and Why Network Engineers Should Care.

Thank you, Milan! Much appreciated ;)