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?

  1. Plenty of IXPs are using one of them, and the Internet must be up and running, or you wouldn’t be reading this. ↩︎

  2. Some people disagree because of the inevitable bloat caused by text-to-JSON expansion. ↩︎

  3. Because everything needs to have a REST API to be useful ;) ↩︎

  4. In case you think the LLM you’re using can work better with data formatted some other way. ↩︎

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2 comments:

  1. Chris 25 February 2026 02:33

    GoBGP has a good gRPC API. For a project where I needed a BGP daemon to send some routes it was a perfect match. I wrote a REST API around that to have an high level interface.

    I really don't see the point of writing (well "vibe-code") a new daemon for BGP which is not a trivial protocol in my opinion.

  2. henk 25 February 2026 10:05

    > with a socket interface returning information on BGP neighbors, received and sent routes.

    We have BMP for that.
    Last I heard, Nokia SR-OS has an awesome BMP implementation ....

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