AI project · November 2026
Network Engineer AI: A Self-Hosted Assistant Built Around Guardrails
An assistant for network engineers that reviews FortiOS and Cisco IOS configurations, searches a knowledge base of uploaded documents, and answers with exact commands plus risk and rollback notes. It runs on a small virtual machine in my homelab.
Useful AI help, without handing over the keys.
AI is good at explaining configurations and drafting changes. It is risky when it can see passwords, run commands on devices, or spend money without limits. This project starts from those risks.
Review, search and answer.
FortiOS and Cisco IOS, with 24 local rules such as insecure admin access, any-to-any policies, Telnet, default SNMP communities and missing logging or time sync.
Searches the knowledge base, reads and compares uploaded configurations, and answers with exact commands plus risk and rollback notes.
PDF and text upload with PostgreSQL full-text search; no vector database needed.
Every AI action goes through the same pipeline.
The assistant can only call tools that are registered and allowed.
Each action is checked against the user's role and given a risk level.
Risky actions wait for a person to approve them.
The result is checked before it is reported.
Every step is recorded.
A fixed budget, enforced by the software.
- Token use tracked for every call
- Monthly and per-task budgets, plus step limits
- Automatic switch to cheaper models at 70% and 90% of the budget
- Prompt caching to avoid paying twice for the same context
Small enough for a homelab VM.
Container memory limits keep idle use under about 1 GB.