Summary

  • Andrei Dinu said an AI assistant produced a 16-page switch migration plan in 16 minutes. InterLAN IX staff followed it step by step; the assistant's tools are read-only.
  • Lighthouse can change Nokia and Arista equipment through validated, logged transactions with device rollback timers. A recovery it cannot prove goes to a human.

Sixteen pages in sixteen minutes is a good trick. Letting the trick write to a router would be a different decision. At RIPE 93, InterLAN IX engineer Andrei Dinu described Lighthouse, a self-service system spanning Nokia SR OS and Arista EOS. Customers may request a service; the system has to show what will change on each box and survive a failed step.

Dinu's account in the official transcript separates those jobs. Configurations are generated from versioned service templates and validated on the devices before application. A multi-device operation depends on device rollback timers; if a device fails or disappears, the transaction is designed to let changes revert. The talk's abstract says unsafe recovery is handed to a human. Manual changes on a router are visible as deviations from the database's intended state, not silently adopted as the new plan.

Then comes the fashionable assistant. Dinu said it wrote a 16-page migration plan for a switch connected by two independent links in 16 minutes. The team executed that plan step by step. The official abstract describes the assistant's tools as read-only. Dinu put AI-proposed changes with human approval in the future column. In the Q&A he added a narrower technical boundary: gNMI writing works in their digital twin, but is not currently used in production.

Lighthouse already serves a network Dinu described as ten Nokia routers, additional Arista switches and roughly 100 services and customers. The interesting measurement is not how quickly a plan appears. It is whether every actual write has a preview, a way back and a named person when automation runs out of proof.