Using AI to re-architect the Cisco DevNet sandbox environment – Part 1

Part 1 of a five-part series on AI network design: building a production-grade sandbox network with Claude as a second architect in the room, not a tool I queried for facts. The rest of the series: Part 2 – The Fabric Claude Designed; Part 3 – Why I Let Claude Talk Me Out of Its Own Design; Part 4 – From Whiteboard to Rack; Part 5 – The Outage Claude Diagnosed in Minutes.

I’ll be upfront about where I started: skeptical. In one short AI network design review, Claude caught a cabling mistake I was about to make, and a few questions later, two routers I’d budgeted for had become spares.

I was building a sandbox network with real Cisco firewalls, real edge routers, and a real Nexus switching fabric: the kind of gear that costs real money and doesn’t get re-cabled on a whim. I’d used AI chatbots plenty for drafting and summarizing, but I didn’t expect one to push back on an enterprise network topology. At best, I figured, it would politely agree and recite a spec sheet…