(So you can skip ahead, if you want.)

01:31 Model Context Protocol (MCP) Overview
04:36 Network Automation Survey Insights
09:29 Automation Adoption Barriers Explained
17:27 AI Agents & Guardrails
24:34 Getting Started with LLMs
32:38 Connecting an MCP to LLM
45:44 Vibe Coding Challenges Discussed
48:08 Wrap Up & Career Advice

Andy Lapteff • 00:00

This is the Art of Network Engineering, where technology meets the human side of IT. Whether you’re scaling networks, solving problems, or shaping your career, we’ve got the insights, stories, and tips to keep you ahead in the ever-evolving world of networking. Welcome to the Art of Network Engineering podcast. My name is Andy Lapteff, and in this episode, we are joined by an old friend of the show, John Capabianco. Hi, John. How are you doing?

John Capobianco • 00:24

Andy. Hey, Michael, good to be here again. It’s been a long time. Really happy to see that the show is thriving after all this time and all those years. Yeah, thank you for having me.

Andy Lapteff • 00:33

This is like your 3rd or 4th time back on. Thank you so much for coming on. We have some really exciting, fun, provocative stuff to talk about in this episode. Before we get into that, my bearded friend, do you want to give a plug to your employer? And then I think you guys do have an MCP server that you created. Do you want to give a quick shout out to the work you guys are doing?

John Capobianco • 00:49

Yeah, so I’m with Itential now as the head of AI and DevRel. And their MCP server, their technology is one of the 1st in the industry. And a big reason why I joined Peter Sprygada’s work and a few other people, Joksan and Ankit, and William Collins. Really remarkable work. And it’s secure. It has OAuth 2. It has RBAC.

John Capobianco • 01:07

It has everything you would want in an MCP. And another reason why I joined is that they have a new product coming out in the summer, Flow AI, where we actually get to build and deploy agentic infrastructure agents. So it’s everything we’ve been talking about wrapped up into a job. I’ve really enjoyed it. The culture there is quite amazing. You know, and it does work very well with my previous employer selector. So there’s no hard feelings there.

John Capobianco • 01:29

It’s just a different opportunity for me.

Mike Bushong • 01:31

Let’s go over to Mike Bushang. Hi, Mike. How are you guys doing today? I’m super excited to talk to you.

Andy Lapteff • 01:36

Are you really excited?

Mike Bushong • 01:37

I am. I am. You said John is like larger than life. And for those of you who haven’t met him, you think that he’s larger than life because he says things with a lot of energy. And then when you meet him, you realize that he’s actually not just figuratively larger than life, he’s literally larger than life.

Andy Lapteff • 01:51

And he gives the best hugs.

John Capobianco • 01:53

Yeah, everybody’s 5 ft seven on Zoom, right? So yeah, it’s a bit of a shock when people actually meet me in person to see that I live up to this ambiance and this energy. But I know that there is probably a certain segment going, this is all going to be about AI and this, you know, all the cool stuff and why I’m falling behind. And I want to just maybe set the stage and say that this is intended to be a positive experience for the listener and for the panel here tonight with optimism and hope and a utopian outcome. And we’re going to say some provocative things. I left my AutoCon speech on a pretty provocative note, but it really is to inspire you to maybe look at things a little bit different, to consider the tools available to you. And that’s all that artificial intelligence is.

John Capobianco • 02:37

It’s still a tool, right? It’s a cool tool, but it’s still a tool, right?

Andy Lapteff • 02:41

So, John, thank you for doing my job for me. You are the man. That’s going to be our topic of this episode, really. The working title in my brain is ABCs of AI. And really, I have adopted the use of an LLM in my daily life. I’m a Chat GPT guy. I signed up a year or two ago.

Andy Lapteff • 02:57

I use it all the time. And for the most part, it helps me a lot. It’s good at certain things I needed to be good at. It seems like there’s AI everywhere. There’s AI toilets. There’s AI pen. Like it, for me, I don’t want to call it cynicism.

Andy Lapteff • 03:10

I don’t know what the right word is, but in my network engineering, you know, groups of people, anytime anybody says AI something, there’s like this proverbial eye roll and like, oh my God, okay, now you have the AI sticker too. So, what I would like to come away with in this episode is: if you’re a network engineer, And you are surveying the landscape of modern tooling, what you would need to stay employed, stay valuable to an organization, stay skilled up, right, in your career. Where does AI fit and all that? And really, how do you separate the hype from the reality? And, John, we were talking right before the show, you and my friend Duan Lightfoot. You two have always seemed further down the road than the rest of us.

Andy Lapteff • 03:50

You can seem to like see around the corners, and you’re always at the place that we’re all like, oh no, that looks really important. We need to catch up. So, here we are again, trying to catch up with John and all the things you’ve learned in AI in the past year or two. So, I thought where we’d start is something I heard you say at Auticon 4. It’s provocative, but I think it’ll get folks’ attention and get them engaged. The Network Automation Forum, they did their, I guess, annual survey, and the 2025 survey showed that I think it’s something around 70-ish percent of networks aren’t automated at all or automated meaningfully. And John had said at the end of his amazing talk, which was I think from CLI to GPT, you said the industry won’t upskill 70% of folks when the AI, LLM, machine learning.

Andy Lapteff • 04:36

Again, I don’t even know what words to use, so you’re going to educate us. But when agenic AI gets so good that it can do a lot of our networking jobs for us or better than us, 70% of those people who aren’t automating at all will be displaced. And how did you put it? Like, we’re all going to be out of jobs. So, you better skill up now, right? That’s that was the net.

Mike Bushong • 04:59

I stand up for a positive podcast. This is not, it’s going to be positive.

John Capobianco • 05:05

So, John, fixed it. I know what I was trying to get at. So, 1st of all, I was shocked at the number. I was optimistic again: okay, this is going to be the year, like the year of the Linux desktop. 2025 is the year of automation. Finally, there’s been a breakthrough, and the numbers were disappointing again. And it’s 10 years going on, 12, 13 years of some of these automation tools:

John Capobianco • 05:26

RESTConf and NetConf, and Ansible, and Python. And I was let down by that. And then I sort of thought, but what does that mean in the age of AI? There is 30% that are doing that. And I used to think that the 70% was an opportunity to teach people new skills and to upskill them and make it. 50-50 and then make it 70-30 the other way. But I think the 30% are clearly using, and I’m glad to hear that you’re using AI and have been for a couple of years now, Andy, at least even in learning how to interface with it and how to prompt it and what is a good use case and what’s not.

John Capobianco • 05:59

I really think that the availability of things like agent development kits, ADKs, relatively low barrier to entry, things like fast MCP to make an MCP server out of a tool, it’s democratized a lot, right? And in terms of how good these models are, the latest Claude 4.6, Opus model, Codex 5.3, Gemini 3, these models are very, very good now as foundational models to the point that they are equivalent of an average CCNA, CCNP. If you have the right approach, a CCIE or a JNCIE or an Azure expert or you name your expertise level. Right. They’re very capable of doing these things. So, with the right platforms and the right guardrails and the right approach, and we’ll talk about things like RAG and things like MCP tonight. By the time this podcast is aired, there’s probably going to be like a million new agents on the internet, right?

John Capobianco • 06:58

Like they’re proliferating at an extremely fast rate. And from a corporate point of view, right? What I’ve heard is that it’s not. AI is not going to displace the people. It’s people who are using AI are going to displace the people that are not, right? And I make maybe an assumption there. Maybe it’s a bold assumption or incorrect assumption that if you’re not doing network automation, you’re not using AI.

John Capobianco • 07:20

But that to me was my trajectory. It was a natural evolution of my phase of life doing automation, right?

Mike Bushong • 07:27

I’m curious, when you look at like automation and sort of the take rates, I guess, do you attribute the low take rate primarily to, you know, we’ve been waiting for the right tool, we’ve been waiting for the right piece of technology, or do you attribute it to, you know, there’s a people problem that we have, whether that’s training or incentives or fears or confidence or whatever, right? There’s like, I guess, how do you view the tool versus, or I guess tech versus people, which is the bigger inhibitor to progress?

John Capobianco • 07:54

I think it’s probably a 30, 30, 30 split between the solutions offered by the industry itself, all vendors included. I’m not going to pick on one individual vendor, but something that you have to know, net conf and templating and a domain-specific language. And we’ve tried to unify with things like Yang models, but there’s three different flavors of Yang models and there’s a lot of friction around those using them. So I think some of it is the actual tooling that has been available for the last decade. And I think that there’s a cultural aspect to this at the individual contributor level, a sort of a mindset of, listen, I went to school to learn networking. I’ve been getting networking certifications. And now you’re asking me to become a programmer and a proficient programmer and put production on the line with code that I’m not comfortable writing, right?

John Capobianco • 08:41

Like there’s years to become comfortable doing automation in production. That takes some time to learn things like Git and VS Code and all that stuff around the tools. And then I think there’s just the general enterprise approach, whether or not they’re investing and saying, let’s do an automate 1st approach, right? Next year, we’re going to put a line in the sand and everything after that date must be automated. Or every new project that comes up, we’re going to start automating with that new project, right? I think those three have led to the 30% number, right? There’s also questions about scale.

John Capobianco • 09:14

Are some networks too big to automate? Are some networks too small to automate? How do you automate or move things to the cloud or CI CD pipelines in an air-gapped environment? We’re a blue chip company. We care about stability, not innovation. Yeah, there’s a lot of competing factors here, right?

Mike Bushong • 09:29

I think there’s two things that I want to kind of pick up there. And before we move to the, I guess, the tech side, I have a belief, I guess, that networks, the way they’re constructed today, tend to be quite fragile in a lot of environments. And so even if you could go fast, it’s like you wouldn’t because you’re so afraid of change that you have these draconian change controls and you have blackout windows that extend from before Thanksgiving, you know, well into February. And so, you know, those to me don’t scream, we need a tool. Those scream to me, we’re afraid of doing anything. And if you can’t take away the fear of doing something, then the tool is almost irrelevant. And so I think part of it’s that.

Mike Bushong • 10:06

And there’s probably roots in architecture and in change management. And then I actually think the tools have a huge role to play in making sure that people don’t make mistakes. I think there’s like a big, a big piece of that. The other piece I think is interesting. And this is where, because I think what you’re going to do in the next however many minutes we talk, I think you’re going to take away this next one for me. I think the industry dialogue is always around, you know, automate or die, right? Like you’re asking a workforce to implement a thing that they fundamentally believe is aimed at removing their jobs.

Mike Bushong • 10:38

And I think when the narrative is like that, it’s like you can’t tell people that, you know, hey, please build your demise because you won’t see kind of the broad adoption of it, widespread adoption of it, because people are afraid. And I think the way you’ve positioned it already, you know, so far in this call or in this podcast, like it’s opportunity-based. And this, you opened up by saying this is like a positive, a story of triumph. This is not a story of, you know, misery and defeat. And I think that’s the piece. Like, if I could wave a wand and change anything in our industry around automation or on operations broadly, it would be that. Like, it wouldn’t be a tool.

Mike Bushong • 11:08

It would be like, look, give people the fundamental understanding that, like, look, what AI is doing on top of bringing in a bunch of other, you know, capabilities is this driving like just a monstrous amount of traffic and spend and whatever. And so we can’t grow the teams linearly with the CapEx . And so at some point, automate, like the AI to me is like the, it’s sort of the thing that allows us to even cope with it all. I would be more afraid of not AI than I would of AI because like my job is going to be terrible if you’re telling me I got to manage, you know, four times the capacity and devices and whatever, and I’m going to have the same headcount. Like, I think there’s hope in that, but I don’t know, I guess I don’t know how you view it. And then, well, you know, clearly we have to figure out how do you get those people like enabled so they can do something.

John Capobianco • 11:51

I agree with you on both points. I think the 1st one is a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy in that networks are fragile because we don’t change them ever. So they’re fragile because we don’t change them ever, right? Like, I think there’s a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy there. If we never touch the network and we never progress or change our methodologies or the tools we use, right? Like, you know, Putty is still around, things like that. I think there are better ways now.

John Capobianco • 12:16

Here’s what I’d like to see network engineers do: pick the top five or 10 things that they do every day. And you used to think of a way to orchestrate them in a workflow with automation in some way. I think now the opportunity is to try to make a personal assistant, an agent, a co-pilot, a co-worker. There’s many ways to look at it that is under your management, right? Like, I believe that this AI agent issue is an HR problem. It’s not a technology problem. It’s how do we incorporate these agents into an org chart?

John Capobianco • 12:45

Properly and with very closed guardrails and specific defined permissions. You know, the company I work for now has 200 people. If every one of us could make five agents that worked for us, we’ve just added that many more people that work for the company, even though they’re not physical beings. Like you said, we just can’t keep throwing people at these things. And the time it takes to become an expert on these things versus, you know, some of the approaches of making that knowledge available. Like, I think it can really augment the senior network engineer who really knows their stuff as much as it can a junior engineer who is learning their stuff. I think there’s a spectrum here.

John Capobianco • 13:23

And AI is as good at or better if it’s going to multiply your skills by 100. If you’ve got zero skills in that thing, that’s still zero, right? But if I’ve got 70 or 80% on that scale of expertise, that 100 times force multiplier is really powerful.

Andy Lapteff • 13:39

I have a question. I think I see what my role is going to be in this episode. So, if 70% of our networking experts won’t automate, and I think your statement was just that, you know, AI can augment the experts, then if you’re an expert and you’re not automating, I think it’s a fair connection that you made earlier, which is you’re probably not using AI either. Do those experts go away? And then where does our tribal knowledge go in networks? Like, it’s this, it’s a circular argument I have in my own head.

John Capobianco • 14:07

I’m optimistic that I think they will adopt this. I don’t think that they will hold out. I think that sort of patience has run out around this topic and now there’s no more excuse, right?

Andy Lapteff • 14:17

Like, whose patience? If they’re not going to automate, who’s going to make them do AI? I guess is. My, I’m being provocative here. I’m not, I’m not arguing.

John Capobianco • 14:25

No, no, you’re right. You’re right. I’m not trying to argue. It’s a good point. I don’t want to see the displacement. I’d rather see them embrace it and augment themselves with AI to write those scripts that they were previously held back on. Right.

John Capobianco • 14:37

Like there’s sort of a jump to the front of the line effect here. Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t focus on learning Python over the last 15 years because now an AI can write better Python than if I had spent the time learning Python. If you’re looking at it through the lens of I’d like to automate something on my network and I’ve never had the skills to write the scripts or the Python to do that, now you have this expert that can give you tested code using your source of truth and using your rag and using MCPs. So e.g. , there’s literally an RFC MCP server for the request for comments, right? So if you plug that into your agent and say, I’m writing OSPF code, use the standard to help me guide my config. It will not hallucinate. It will not get it wrong.

John Capobianco • 15:22

It literally has access to the OSPF. IEEE RFCs. And that’s just one example of an MCP that’s I found very useful doing network automation code because it’s truly referencing the standard, right? There’s many, many uses around this for network engineers. One, to like you’re, you know, when you had Erica on talking about learning the code through AI, right? But it really should be a co-pilot, a co-worker of you, right? So there’s certain tools that I think, if you haven’t been already using VS Code and Git and some of the foundational network automation tools, the water is deeper for you to start using AI just from scratch, right?

John Capobianco • 16:02

And I understand it. Some people play with it for 15 minutes, it gets something wrong or it hallucinates and they’re turned off by that and they have a bad experience and they sort of dismiss it. There’s many deeper layers when you start to use it programmatically through the REST API or connecting it to agents or connecting it to model context protocol. I keep coming back to MCP because I feel like that was a really big necessary step. And tool in the ecosystem of AI to kind of standardize around a protocol, right? So it’s done for AI what SMTP did for email or what HTTP did for the web, right? Like I really think it’s that big of a protocol because it allows you to provide that context to the model through JSON RPC.

John Capobianco • 16:47

It’s just a transport mechanism, right? You can wrap anything from a REST API call to a Python script to a database call. Anything you could think of can basically be presented now as a tool that the agent can call upon. So when I wrote a PyTS MCP, so that way I could just say to the agent, can you test the health of these interfaces? And because one of the tools the MCP has is a show command tool, it can just call that show command tool and execute whatever arbitrary show commands the agent needs to run. Like that truly is autonomous, Andy. Like I could set that agent to monitor the health of a network, to configure a network, to make documentation, to write tests.

Andy Lapteff • 17:27

Are there guardrails to constrain that from? Doing things you don’t want it to do. I’m guessing there are.

John Capobianco • 17:33

So, there are like markdown format files where you kind of outline: here’s a good example, right? Please do not update the enable secret. Do not lock me out of this device. Do not add an ACL that’s going to prevent me from reconnecting to the device. So, yes, you, and that’s where the human expertise comes in, right? To Michael’s point, and to your point about senior network engineers, who would know that other than a senior network engineer to put those guardrails into an AI agent, right? It’s still very much augmenting a human expert that would know the nuances of some of the protocols, Vty lines, enable secrets, default routes, management interfaces.

John Capobianco • 18:08

So, yes, there are guardrails that you put in place in the agent, the way you build the agent itself.

Mike Bushong • 18:14

I think that the role of the network engineer. So, if you’re mopping SOP-based, where you’re not thinking about the workflow, you’re not thinking about the architecture, you’re not making decisions, you’re executing what’s written for you and you’re a set of hands. It’s not hard to see those people replaced by scripts because you’re literally executing what somebody else has documented for you to execute. You’re like the deployment arm, if you will. I think when you know workflow, and I don’t mean like basic workflow, like you know, provision this, ping that, but like when you understand how these things come together, then you’re in a position that you can use your co-pilot or your agent to do something because you have this unique insight into what has to be done. Every tool in like an operational ecosystem is like a window to a workflow, right? It provides some information or it lets you execute something or do whatever.

Mike Bushong • 19:00

And the question is never how does a tool work? It’s like how do you work across tooling boundaries? How do you get like multi-dimensional things happening? And I think the network engineer has a like an operational architect role to play there. And there’s a lot of things that I think you can do. And then, as AI gets better at translating some of the workflows into code or applications or whatever, then you have your toolbox is bigger. You’ve got more things that you can go do.

Mike Bushong • 19:24

But I don’t think it obviates the need for someone who actually understands like what do you actually trying to do. So, I do think there’s value. I think the people who really know workflow, the people who really know operations, the people who can look at something and discern what’s going on, I think there’s value for them. And then I think it’s a different story if they’ve relegated themselves to read prompt, type prompt.

John Capobianco • 19:45

I agree with you, and that can elevate them. They do become more strategic. It becomes more focused on the governance and all that, you know, not the sexy stuff. But I think that you’re right. And those people should, that’s what I’m trying to appeal to network engineers listening to this of all stripes and of all experience is to try to start building your own agents that can do some of this work for you. The other thing is, with the reasoning and tool calling capability, it’s quite remarkable what an agent can do. You could have a ticket in ServiceNow , and through the MCP, right, pull that ticket information in.

John Capobianco • 20:18

And then, like I mentioned, the PyTS or there’s Ansible MCPs. There’s all kinds of config management MCPs out there. Have the agent pull the ticket, read the ticket, address the situation on the network via another MCP, send a Slack, send an email, right? Do all the things with a high degree of quality. Like the information you get in an email that’s AI generated, yes, it’s obviously AI generated, but it would take a human hours just to craft the email with the details you get, right? Like what this is about rapid and moving faster and resolving issues quicker. And that’s sort of Andy, you had some questions earlier about examples of human out of the loop.

John Capobianco • 20:56

Here’s, I think, the path that people should take: start with human in the loop, have the AI prompt you. Is this the config you want to deploy? And use your reasoning and your expertise to say, yes, proceed. Right? I wouldn’t even start with configuration management. I would start with read-only activities. Show logging is a great one.

John Capobianco • 21:13

It’s just pages and pages of text. And humans are not very good at parsing logs. They just never have been because of the nature of the logs. So why not take that dump of logs and either just put it right in the context window, put it into a vector store for rag so you can look up logs in a vector store, make an MCP that you can use to do show logging on a certain platform, right? Config management, your intent versus what’s actually configured. It’s very good at text deltas. Right.

John Capobianco • 21:43

So, config management, not just pushing config or generating config, but compliance, right? Things like that. There’s tons of read-only stuff you can do. Testing. What I think is neat about the PyTS thing is that if I’m asking about BGP tests, it will dynamically know what commands to run and what tests to generate. Like we’ve gotten so far that the AI agent is now actually generating the tests and looking at the results of its tests and giving you the evaluation. It’s not even running handwritten deterministic tests anymore.

John Capobianco • 22:13

On the fly, it’s creating those tests and running them, right? And this is what I think network engineers should be building. This is why I’m so passionate about this: those are the tools I think that people should be building now to augment themselves. Imagine an interface health test, and you just say, run the agent or in Slack, are all my interfaces healthy on the core? Enter. So that’s sort of what I mean by VibeOps. And it’s funny, someone said to me today about Vibe coding: in the near future, it’s just going to be called coding, right?

John Capobianco • 22:41

Like everyone does it. Everyone does it that way now, right? So to distinguish it as vibe coding, I think is almost past. Say, I think it’s just called coding now, right?

Andy Lapteff • 22:51

Yeah, there’s I want to take us in a direction, and I could spend days talking about any one of these things, Vibecoding included, because I have tried and failed multiple times. But this episode of The Art of Network Engineering is sponsored by Meter. Meter delivers network infrastructure for the enterprise because every organization deserves seamless connectivity. Whether you have a large team of network engineers or an IT team of one, Meter makes it simple to get online and stay online. Meter provides a full-stack integrated platform that combines hardware, software, deployment, and support. So enterprises can ensure their networks have the performance, security, and reliability they need without the inefficiencies of juggling multiple vendors. It’s Enterprise Networking Reimagined, giving IT teams the ability to spend less time managing complexity and more time driving business strategy.

Andy Lapteff • 23:41

Go to meter.com forward slash A1 to book a demo now. That’s M-E-T-E-R.com forward slash A-O-N-E. Now back to the show. A couple things I want to say, and then I’d love to steer us into some definitions and some terms that at the end of this conversation, if people know three or four terms and definitions from you and maybe how they can apply them, you know, at the end of this conversation, how can you get into this world and do some of the things that you’re talking about? So, real quick, you were talking earlier and it made me think of this TM forum, like levels of autonomous networks, which I had never heard before until last year with a coworker who brought it up. You know, it can sound very tinfoil hat of me to be like, oh no, automate is going to take all our jobs and AI is going to take all our jobs. But I do think that if our networks can get to the point of reliability where it’s just like the power flowing or the water turning on, that’s probably a good thing for everyone.

Andy Lapteff • 24:34

So I think a lot of the things that we are talking about that my instinct says, oh no, it’s going to make me lose my job. If you skill up, you can stay in that environment and then you can help those networks run more reliably, like power and water. So just one point to try to reorient my biases. The other thing you said I liked was the time to learn. It takes years and an enormous amount of effort to understand networks enough to be able to unleash a human on them, right? And then years to learn all the automation tooling and coding and all that stuff. And now probably years to ingest all of this stuff.

Andy Lapteff • 25:09

So I have a lot of newbies reach out to me: hey, I heard this thing and I’ve been following you and I’d love to get in and what should I learn? And my advice five years ago, it was different than two years ago. And now today it’s like, well, learn all the routing and switching, learn all the programming, and now learn all this AI. Like I would go running if I were them, but we just keep piling on more and more onto network engineers and it’s tricky, but here we are. The last thing I’ll say is something about fragility. And I really want to get into some AI terminology and technologies. You had said before, you know, don’t touch anything.

Andy Lapteff • 25:37

And like my experience in production was we had standards, which our industry would call validated designs, and very smart people wrote them, and we were supposed to build all of our data center networks to follow the standards. And then there were exceptions driven by business units who had this very important thing that had to be deployed yesterday, and the timeline has been bastardized. Blah, blah, blah. So we make exceptions and put in a temporary solution to build this thing that the BU needs right away. And then that thing stays there forever. And if you are a big enough company and you do that enough times, now you have one-offs and snowflakes all over the planet. Good luck.

Andy Lapteff • 26:14

Trying to make those networks reliable, stable, and have expected outcomes when you touch them because everything’s a snowflake. So, again, not that there’s anything to say there other than I think that’s what drives a lot of the fragility: not following your standards or your validated designs. What I really want to get into: LLMs, MCP, Agenic AI, and RAG. I just have a list of like terms. So, for a network engineer who wants to get up to speed on all things John and Dawan and these AI experts talk about, like, where do we start? Do we pick an LLM and just start?

Andy Lapteff • 26:43

And then, how do we apply these things to networking? So, let’s bring it together here: tooling, and then how do you do network stuff with it?

John Capobianco • 26:49

First of all, I would not do any shadow AI, right? So, if you’re on your corporate asset, follow your corporation’s guidelines and reach out and find out: am I allowed to use Copilot in VS Code, e.g. ? Do we have an enterprise subscription with be it Anthropic, be it Google, be it Azure, be it whoever? And can I get API keys right through my company on your own at home? I would suggest you start with OLAMA, LM Studio, or Microsoft Foundry. Now, those are three free open source private ways for you to download models onto your device and start doing inference. This is for like zero, day zero.

John Capobianco • 27:28

I’ve not done any of this. How do I get started? Before you invest in a public hyperscaler model, which is a subscription fee, which is better quality typically, and you can do cooler things with them. But if you just want to get started locally, by the time this podcast is over, you could literally have pulled down a language model and be chatting with Olama. Olama has a REST API locally. So, if you want to start writing code and writing agents, you can use Olama or LM Studio or Foundry.

Andy Lapteff • 27:55

That’s local that runs on your GPU, right?

John Capobianco • 27:57

On your Mac. Olama will actually run in a Raspberry Pi. It’s very, very small, lightweight stuff.

Andy Lapteff • 28:03

But is it dumb? It hasn’t been trained. It doesn’t have like how does it know anything? So, is that in the model?

John Capobianco • 28:08

That’s just the framework. So, that’s where you’re going to use to run models that you then download from the cloud. And in terms of models, and I may be behind, way behind on some of this, but you know, there’s models from Google called Gemma 3. That’s a Google open source free model you can download. Phi 4 from Microsoft, PHI4, Mistral, Llama 3.3. There’s various models that you can download just to try locally. Yeah.

Andy Lapteff • 28:35

Why would you start locally and not just do like a free Chat GPT as an example? What’s the benefit of doing something?

John Capobianco • 28:41

Locally, I think that network engineers generally feel more comfortable doing things offline, and there’s a security and there’s a privacy concern. So, any so that I why I recommend starting there is because if that is what’s holding people back and they think they have to turn over their data or pay the $20 a month, you have a broad range of people watching and listening to this, right? Some people just don’t have 20 bucks a month to invest. But from there, I would go AI shopping. It depends on what you want to do. If you want to do code, if you want to do image generation or video generation, there’s a lot of different uses, and some models are better than others. But you can’t go wrong with ChatGPT, Gemini, Anthropic, Meta, even, right?

John Capobianco • 29:26

The X model. Or the Grok, I mean. So, yes, I would find one and invest the $20 a month. And from there, you’re going to get an API key. And that is really the key to all of this: starting to do programmatic stuff. Yes, you can use it to help you polish your resume or send that email. But when you want to plug it into something like Copilot in VS Code or anti-gravity or cursor, there’s many different IDEs that are AI capable.

John Capobianco • 29:55

And then you can start doing the cool stuff, right? Help me write an Ansible playbook that.

Andy Lapteff • 29:59

Can we pause 1 s ? So, the 70%, this is my role here, I guess. The 70% of folks who don’t have VS Code running don’t understand programming. So, I don’t know if we just hit the point in the conversation where if you haven’t learned anything in coding and you haven’t installed VS Code and you don’t know how to do a co-pilot add-on in VS Code. Is this the point of the conversation for the listener? Like, oh shit, okay. I just hit the perimeter of what I know, what I can do.

Andy Lapteff • 30:27

And now I’m going to tune out because I don’t know VS Code. And you get what I’m saying? Like, how do we pull them along? So do you have to know programming to do what you’re saying? I think so.

John Capobianco • 30:36

You’re making a good point. I think maybe I jumped too fast, too far in that you’re going to spend some time in Claude Desktop or Chat GPT or Gemini in the browser, just getting your feet wet with prompt engineering. Why is the sky blue? Maybe copy and pasting things out of your router or out of your logs into the context window. Help me understand these logs, and you just dump in some stuff there.

Andy Lapteff • 30:58

Like, I want to bring that 70% along with me. I know.

John Capobianco • 31:00

You do not have to be a programmer to start doing this stuff.

Andy Lapteff • 31:04

Well, let’s say for those people, like, what was that agent you talked about where you could. Do something and it would go against the RFC. Like, like to me, who isn’t a programmer, right? Like, that sounded compelling when you said that earlier. Okay. Oh, wow. Okay.

Andy Lapteff • 31:16

Okay.

John Capobianco • 31:16

So, the 1st thing you’re going to want to do is to try to connect that model that has a knowledge cutoff date and think of it as a closed book exam. You’re going to want to give that access to your resources or external resources, right? So, that’s where the model context protocol would come in. So, in Cloud Desktop, there’s a simple settings developer tools and a button that says edit, right? Edit the JSON file. And here’s where it does get a little tricky for people. If you’ve never worked with JavaScript object notation, if you don’t know how to read JSON, if you’ve never worked with it, unfortunately, you don’t know what Cloud Desktop is.

Andy Lapteff • 31:52

Like, this is where I’m like, uh-oh, now my butt’s puckering.

John Capobianco • 31:56

So, I go to Cloud Desktop is Anthropic’s version of ChatGPT.

Andy Lapteff • 32:01

Okay.

John Capobianco • 32:02

So, it uses a different set of models, it has a different kind of look and feel to it, or Gemini from Google. So, those are sort of the three chat interfaces. The good news is that MCP being a protocol is agnostic. So, that RFC MCP that I mentioned, you can connect it to any of the tools I’ve mentioned: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, VS Code Copilot. So, you plug in the JSON, and now suddenly your Cloud Desktop has direct access to the RFCs, and you can start asking questions about OSPF or BGP or whatever, as an example.

Mike Bushong • 32:38

Okay, timeout. Let me ask a question. So, John, what’s the hello world? So, most people use Chat GPT as an extension of Google, right? They just put in search stuff and then they get things out and then they do add questions to it so they get maybe a richer answer, but they don’t even use that to do like real work. And this is partially why there’s like this huge disconnect between what AI is capable of, because people had that experience like a year ago and they were using it like kind of ineffectively, and they were using models that have many generations past. So now there’s like this world of capability, but you got to use it in a different way.

Mike Bushong • 33:14

In your mind, like, what’s the hello world to get people away from? I’m going to use any of these sites as effectively a different search bar.

John Capobianco • 33:22

I hear a pretty universal hello world, specifically for model context protocol. So, if you’ve gotten to the point in this discussion where you have Cloud Desktop or a co-pilot and you want to connect your 1st MCP, I would use Netbox or Nautobot. Both are equally good. They both have an MCP. That’s the important part. And you can use their sandbox environment. So, you do not have to use production.

John Capobianco • 33:46

I would recommend staying away from production, actually. Use the demo Netbox site or the Demo Nautobot site. Issue yourself an API key. Okay, now that might be the 1st time you’ve done that, but you’re going to need that key. And then see if you can connect their MCP to your, I’m going to say agent because all these things we’ve been talking about are agents, they’re agentic. So I plug that Netbox MCP into my agent. Let’s say miraculously get it working on my 1st attempt.

John Capobianco • 34:11

Now I can start to ask how many circuits I have in Atlanta. What IP addresses are free in this certain subnet. You can literally start talking to your source of truth. That is, that, Michael, would be my hello world because it’s sort of a universally used tool, a source of truth. InfraHub, there’s other ones. I don’t want to leave anyone out of this discussion, by the way. I’m just using two as an example.

John Capobianco • 34:35

But find something like that you can sink your teeth into. And it really isn’t as hard as JavaScript and this and that. It really isn’t as hard as I’m making it out. In the Claude desktop, you’re going to paste in the link to the MCP on GitHub and you’re going to say, help me understand how to install this, right? You’re going to use AI to help augment AI. I wouldn’t do any of this without AI. Here’s the MCP server I want to install.

John Capobianco • 34:59

Help me understand how to install it. Walk me through this because I’m a network engineer, not a programmer. I’ve never used JSON before, right? Help dumbness down so that I can install the Netbox MCP into Claude. And then you can start adding records from Claude, right? I’m going to provision a new site tomorrow. Here’s the details, enter.

John Capobianco • 35:16

And now suddenly those details are populated in Netbox, right? It really is that simple and that smooth.

Andy Lapteff • 35:22

I had a visceral reaction to what you said because in my job in production, someone would ask me, how many circuits do we have in the Phoenix data center or how many such and such routers are we running somewhere? And now I’m grabbing spreadsheets, trying to find them in a SharePoint, logging into the jump box, spending hours jumping around to make sure they’re updated. If I could have a conversation with my source of truth in natural language, like when you said that. I got tingly. I’m like, holy shit.

John Capobianco • 35:47

Well, what if, but, but what if you applied? What if you built that agent, Andy, because you are the expert in that stuff and you just said, people go to Andy Jr. just ask that. You’re never going to get rid of me, right? Right.

Andy Lapteff • 36:00

You’re never going to get rid of me. Like, right. I mean, wow, the value I just created. Hey, guys, you could talk a natural language to our source of truth. You’re welcome. Right. I’m going on vacation.

John Capobianco • 36:09

So the other thing is, and you know what? Michael, I wanted to pick up on this earlier, actually. It almost slipped my mind, but I’ve always been rewarded for automating myself out of a job. Like when I went to my leadership of parliament and explained to them that we were going to do this, you know, 50 router upgrade and it was all going to just be a playbook. They didn’t say, well, we don’t need your help anymore, John. Thanks for doing all that. Right.

John Capobianco • 36:32

They actually said, what else can you automate? Are there other things that you’re thinking about doing? It actually elevated me quite a bit. I was never fearful for automating myself out of a job. I feel the same way about the agents, Andy. If it’s Andy’s agent and you call it Andy’s agent, right? You’ve established real value and you’ve made everyone’s lives easier.

John Capobianco • 36:53

Just talk to the bot, right? You got a question about an IP or a subnet or a site or a circuit? Well, we’ve just wrapped it in an AI agent that can fulfill those needs, right?

Andy Lapteff • 37:02

You make a good point. There’s so much mess to clean up and automate. I don’t think they get rid of us. I just interviewed the St. Jude network architects and they were telling me about they automated their device replacements, you know, their switch replacements, and they went from six months to replace a stack of switches to like four weeks with an automation thing. But they’re all there, right? They’re not, they’re not all gone because they’re automating all this stuff.

Andy Lapteff • 37:24

Right. I’m glad that you shared that. Like they weren’t like, oh, great, John, go away now. We don’t need you because there’s just so much, I think, to clean up.

Mike Bushong • 37:31

Economies that we could create with automations when Dave Ward and I were doing a bunch of work in kind of the early network programmability days. That’s what we called it before it became SDN. So we were terrible at marketing, but we were like very, very early. I told Dave, and we actually worked it into a keynote that he gave it at some crazy, like some huge event. I told Dave, though, that network programmability, same idea, right? Was network programmability going to drive people’s jobs away? And I’m like, no, it’s like a lottery ticket.

Mike Bushong • 37:58

So I think there is a continuum of time. So if you get there early, it’s a lottery ticket, it’s opportunity. If you’re the last one to the party, then you know what? The keg is going to be empty and there’s nothing for you. And so I think there’s people need to feel a little bit of urgency because I think the faster this train goes, the harder it is to jump on while it’s moving. And so you’re better off going in now. I like the hello world.

Mike Bushong • 38:22

Like I like the idea of doing something that’s relevant to what you’re doing day to day. It’s super bounded in terms of what can go wrong because it takes away a lot of the fear. It’s super constrained. Like you’re only talking about, in this case, two elements that you have to kind of pull together. You’re going to use natural language. So there’s not like some heavy syntactical component to it. Like those elements, that’s what makes it a great hello world.

Mike Bushong • 38:44

And the people who can do that, like the way the way they should view it is, you know, yes, you’re picking up a new Skill or you’re dabbling in a new tech, but you’re you’re purchasing a lottery ticket. And the thing that’s cool is you can purchase more of those lottery tickets, like the more you kind of double down. And so you have a chance to participate. Like there will be wealth created during this boom. And not everybody will participate because not everybody Gets off the couch.

Mike Bushong • 39:06

Right. But you can, right? And it doesn’t have to be super scary.

John Capobianco • 39:09

I think it’s very much a bit from a zero to a one that will flip in people’s minds. Maybe they just haven’t had that personal epiphany, that personal inflection point. It happened to me quite early, right? Connecting network automation to ChatGPT 3.5. That bit flipped. And I’ve drifted away from my networking roots and focused most of my energy now on trying to keep up with artificial intelligence over about three years. So it’s not insurmountable.

John Capobianco • 39:35

It’s not, I know it’s intimidating thinking, I’m going to go from networking to artificial intelligence. Don’t I have to be a computer scientist to do that? Don’t I have to know machine learning to do that? Think of it in terms of the tactical using the tool, right? You’re not going to be training models or fine-tuning models or building big GPU farms. Some of us will, but most of us are going to be using this to augment ourselves in our day-to-day jobs and trying to build agents to reduce the friction. Now, once you have that netbox agent, the next thing you’re going to do is say to yourself, hang on, there’s a ServiceNow MCP.

John Capobianco • 40:09

I could snap that into this agent and now start making tickets in ServiceNow through natural language, referencing the netbox data. So our prompts become more compounded. We’re actually invoking multiple tools in one paragraph of instructions to the agent, right? I want you to then send an email. I then want, I’d like a Slack. I’d like you to make a PowerPoint out of it. There’s unlimited possibilities, right?

John Capobianco • 40:32

We’re only bounded by our imagination at this point. It really is about how creative you can think about the availability of this. They’re not tools in maybe like a toolbox, but more like a palette of paint. There’s all these different colors, there’s all these different technologies. And you can dabble in here and do a little bit of rag, do a little bit of MCP, build an agent. And now suddenly you’ve painted this wonderful picture.

Andy Lapteff • 40:55

Hey, John, MCP is the protocol that allows, I guess, intelligent systems to talk to each other. Is that.

John Capobianco • 41:02

So it’s client server. So the server might be like Google Maps just released a cloud-hosted MCP for Google Maps. So if anyone wants to do cool things with Google Maps, you used to have to read the API spec. You used to have to use a tool like Postman or write-coded Python with a JSON body and a post. All of that has been replaced now with just natural language. So I could plug in my into my client, and we’ve been talking about clients tonight: Cloud Desktop, AI agents, Copilot.

John Capobianco • 41:34

Well, I plug the MCP server into that client, and now I can say, where’s the nearest Arby’s, right? In my co-pilot. And because it’s got the access to the map MCP, it will give me an answer based on the Google Maps. The last time I checked, there were over 17,000 MCP servers on a clearinghouse.

Andy Lapteff • 41:53

Are they free and people make them? So, like, Snapbox made one, Google Maps made one. Yeah. Is it accurate?

Mike Bushong • 41:58

Now, for the Google Maps one, you need a Google API, but people want their tools integrated into their tools because that’s what drives you use. So, what you’re going to see is like a proliferation of connectivity options. And then, what they’re trying to do is, if you can reduce the barrier to doing something cool with access to your tool, then consumption goes up. So, like, vibe coding, like to me, it’s like you used to have like an RD team that sat between you and an idea or your idea and execution. Now, what you have is a set of agents or a set of tools that sit between you. So, your ideas have never been more accessible than they are today. Right.

Mike Bushong • 42:34

And every day, they’ll be more accessible than they were the day before.

John Capobianco • 42:37

That’s very insightful. So, Andy, here’s an example, Andy. There’s a WordPress MCP server, okay? And my automateyournetwork.ca blog has been hosted on WordPress forever. So, what I did was I added that MCP server to my cloud code. And at the end of one of my more successful Vibe coding sessions, I said to it, Can you please do a blog write-up of everything we’ve accomplished here together and post it on my WordPress site? And I pressed enter.

John Capobianco • 43:04

And 35 seconds later, there was a multi-page blog that was referencing all the stuff we had done during my VIPE coding session.

Andy Lapteff • 43:12

I’m sorry, who did you give that instruction to? A WordPress MCP server?

John Capobianco • 43:16

So, I plugged in the WordPress MCP server into my cloud code where I was doing my Vibe coding. And then at the end, I just said, use the WordPress MCP server to publish a blog about the code we’ve written here today.

Mike Bushong • 43:29

Andy, let’s be clear. What he’s basically signing you up for is that you’re going to go through and you’re going to do a hello world and we’re going to record it. We’ll edit it down so that any mistakes along the way, like you want to, you know, it’s almost like speeding it up. But that’s like, if you want to show people that hello world is possible, you should show people that hello world is possible.

John Capobianco • 43:50

I’d be happy to join and guide you through that. And we could actually use the Netbox dev site and make an agent, whatever.

Andy Lapteff • 43:58

I think we need to show, and I know you’re doing this, John. This isn’t a gap. Of content, but like I, that’s so impactful to any network engineer that you wouldn’t even need to know coding. Like, if I think the hello world is that netbox, let’s do it, let’s schedule it up, guys.

John Capobianco • 44:13

Okay, honestly, you need VS Code and Copilot, and you get free, a free certain number of free calls to copilot. So, that’s free to get started. The Netbox MCP, JSON code, and we’ll and an API key. And because it’s ephemeral and because it’s not production, we can share the key, we can do all this in public, and uh, and we’ll do it from we’ll do it from a couple places. We’ll do it on Claude Desktop. Yeah, it’s really cool.

Mike Bushong • 44:39

We’re gonna document it on John’s blog because we’re gonna, at the end, you’re gonna connect it into uh his WordPress site and oh, the WordPress MCP, yeah, yeah, Mike.

Andy Lapteff • 44:49

Can you Mike, can you talk to my boss and clear the deck? I got stuff to do to help you.

Mike Bushong • 44:53

No, I look, this, I think this is fun. I’m not gonna type, but I’m gonna be on the I want to be watching because I’m not even a network engineer, so I look at this and this is this is cool. And let’s do it, let’s just say yes, yes, yes, John.

John Capobianco • 45:05

I got questions, yeah, you’re Andy. Actually, you know what? You know what a good MCP for you, Andy, would be is the YouTube MCP because all these transcripts from all your videos could be accessible through natural language, right?

Andy Lapteff • 45:18

Thank you for saying that. So, my vibe coding attempt and failure: an hour of my life, I’ll never get back. Before I had Erica the Dev on my show, I wanted to pull her nine transcripts from her YouTube learn to code with AI videos. So, this is one way I use LLMs. Pull down her transcripts, give me a quick summary, tie it in, and help me build an episode on, oh my God, look what you’ve built. This is beautiful. An hour with ChatGPT.

Andy Lapteff • 45:44

It’s spitting code at me, me using it, me getting an error, and then it gaslighting me and telling me, oh no, this is great. It’s okay. We’re almost there. An hour of my life, John. Now, and this is something that Duan said: if you don’t understand the code it’s giving you, you’re helpless. And that was my experience. So give me code, put it in, get error, give me code, put it in, give error.

Andy Lapteff • 46:06

Now, I’m a human in the loop that is probably in the way. And I don’t understand. Oh, the API thing is all. Oh, the YouTube agent is this. I’m like, so I do not enjoy that experience because I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t understand it. And ChatGPT loves to just tell me we’re almost there.

Andy Lapteff • 46:25

We’re so close. Now it’ll definitely work. And it’s so full of crap. It doesn’t.

Mike Bushong • 46:29

Now I know that Andy, you’re going to have a dead. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to do it live and we’re going to invite your subscribers. They can join. Everyone can just, we’ll all be in the audience, not watching and judging you. We’ll be cheering you on and experiencing it with you.

Andy Lapteff • 46:44

If that MCP server works better than vibe coding, I’m in, is, I guess, the point of that rant.

John Capobianco • 46:49

Oh, absolutely. So MCP server will actually augment your vibe coding. So part of your vibe coding. It’ll actually make it a lot easier to vibe code. Yeah, it really will.

Andy Lapteff • 47:03

Bad vibes. When I vibe code, it’s all bad vibes, man. Okay.

Mike Bushong • 47:06

So, Andy, we’re 55 minutes in. I think you have where you want to go on this. John, for the people who are still questioning, like what would you leave them with? So we’ve made an impassioned plea. We’ve said the things that you want to do, right? The pain you want to alleviate, the thing you always wish was better has never been more accessible than it is today. You’ve made a great, a bunch of suggestions around where you might get started.

Mike Bushong • 47:37

You’ve given people some very specific tips on different tools that they might look at 1st . And you’ve actually given a bit of a sequence. And then we’ve committed, at least loosely, to then walking through that hello world. How far do you think this goes? Not like over a five-year window, because who knows five years, but let’s say by the end of the year, even for somebody who’s starting today, what might they be capable of if they put in a reasonable effort given the normal constraints of day-to-day life?

John Capobianco • 48:08

One thing to just be optimistic about is that all this MCP stuff we’ve been talking about is it’s literally one year old, right? So how far behind can you be? You’re not that far behind. It’s one year old, and most iterations of it didn’t come out until nine, eight, nine months ago. So the train is still in sight to Michael’s point, right? But don’t let it drift too much further ahead without trying model context protocol. Because I think as network engineers, we should be excited by a new protocol.

John Capobianco • 48:35

We live and die by BGP and OSPF and RIP and HTTP and all these different protocols. Think of it that way. Think of it as another protocol in the digital era that’s going to help make your life a lot easier. Another, a couple of other points. I sort of think we’re kind of beyond slop now. I think these models are so good and the code they’re creating. So 20,000 clawed agents.

John Capobianco • 48:59

work together to create an operating system. So that’s how smart they are right now: is that 20,000 of them together can actually create Linux in just a couple of days. So ask yourself: is there going to be more or less of this tomorrow? Right. And I know that there’s fears of a bubble. You know, I don’t know. I think maybe like a dot-com bubble that leaves behind all the fiber and all the telecoms and all the infrastructure, maybe less like the housing bubble.

John Capobianco • 49:27

But I don’t know. Even that I hear less about, less talk about the bubble. Just get onto the train. Just find that one thing that will help you if you had an agent be able to do it for you, right? And Andy and I are going to get you set up with how to start with MCPs. But you’ve heard me talk a lot about different tools today. One is better than none, right?

John Capobianco • 49:48

Don’t be hung up on analysis, paralysis on the tools you should start with. And the other thing is, you really do have to sort of keep your ear to the ground. It’s moving very fast. Every day or two, there’s new groundbreaking announcements, new models, new capabilities. Model context protocols are being announced. And maybe even look at something like Cisco. Cisco has added MCP to their automation exam.

John Capobianco • 50:11

So, to get a CCNP in automation now, you have to know about model context protocol. I’ve been looking at the news coming out of Cisco Live in Amsterdam, and every session has to do with AI, MCP, agents. I think that the tide has shifted. And to my earliest point, about the 70 and 30%, like I said, Andy, I think that generally speaking, enterprises are starting to run out of patience with the network, right? It can no longer continue to be the bottleneck or the source of pain or the reason why things go down, right? Another BGP issue, another DNS issue, right? I think that patience is going to be lost.

John Capobianco • 50:47

And to your point, they want running water, they want taps that turn on and off, right? They’re not too interested in the nuances or the minutias of network engineering. They want a utility that works, right? And Michael, you said it earlier. Our systems are so complicated now. What better time in human history for AI to come along to help us understand and untangle some of this mess, right?

Andy Lapteff • 51:09

I love it, John. Thanks for coming on. I learned a lot. Where can people find you, John, if they have more questions, if they want to reach out and learn more? About what you’re up to, sure.

John Capobianco • 51:17

So, I’m available still on X, Twitter, 1st name_last name. LinkedIn, I’m easy to find. My YouTube’s pretty easy to find. I’ve been a little slow on YouTube videos lately, but that’s just a consequence of a new job and some new responsibilities. But I hope to get making more videos soon. And there’s a new Vibe Ops forum that we’ve started in a Slack channel. So, if you’re interested in sharing your work in a safe, you know, open space that’s embracing AI and there’s about 500 people in there already, you can find out how to get into there on my socials.

Andy Lapteff • 51:48

Mike, where can people find you? Because the new thing is people come to me to get to you, and I’m fine getting out of that loop.

John Capobianco • 51:54

You need an agent for that, Andy.

Andy Lapteff • 51:57

I am the agent.

Mike Bushong • 51:59

Yeah, I gave up on the socials. I’m mostly on LinkedIn these days. I couldn’t handle the socials. I’ll just leave it at that. The constant doom scrolling kind of got to me. So, reach out on LinkedIn. Anyone who sends me a note, I respond to basically everything.

Mike Bushong • 52:13

And so, if people need help with stuff, you know, let me know. I can’t always help, but I can usually direct to other people who are smarter than I.

Andy Lapteff • 52:19

Thanks so much for coming on, guys. This is a great conversation. For all things Art of Net End, you can check out our Linktree at linktree forward/art of network engineering. All kinds of fun resources and things there, including our Discord server called It’s All About the Journey. Thousands of folks in there lifting each other up when they win and patting each other on the back when they lose, which usually means failing an exam. Home lab channel, just all kinds of wonderful things happening in our community. So, you don’t have to trudge this road alone.

Andy Lapteff • 52:43

If you don’t have a community, you can check us out there. As always, thanks so much for listening and watching, and we’ll catch you next time on the Art of Network Engineering podcast. Hey folks, if you like what you heard today, please subscribe to our podcast and your favorite podcatcher. You can find us on socials at ArtofnetEnge, and you can visit linktree forward/artofnetenge for links to all of our content. Including the A1 merch store and our virtual community on Discord called It’s All About the Journey. You can see our pretty faces on our YouTube channel named The Art of Network Engineering. That’s youtube.com forward/art of netenge.

Andy Lapteff • 53:18

Thanks for listening.