Post #1465353

2026-04-20 12:25 UTC

I have a “prosumer” internet setup at home for various reasons. It’s UniFi gear, which is highly configurable, and configs are centrally managed. They provide a pretty robust web UI to manage it all, but the configuration all resides in plain text files that you can also hand edit if you want to do anything really advanced. While troubleshooting an issue recently I came across a post on their support forum from somebody who had used Claude to analyze those config files and make recommendations. Since I have access to Claude through my employer I decided to give that a try. I was pleasantly surprised with the recommendations it made after it spent a few minutes analyzing my configuration.

Replies (2)

@tburkhol@lemmy.world 2026-04-20 12:52

To me, that's the 'fancy search engine' mode of AI where it works well and basically focuses the human effort. A needle-in-haystack problem. It might still be missing things, but they're things you've already missed yourself, so no loss. It's different from asking Claude, for example, to create a new guest VLAN with limited internet access and access to only a specific service on the private network. For that, you have to 1) trust Claude because you lack the expertise to review, 2) spend time learning the config system well enough to review, or 3) already know the system well enough to check it. 1) just sounds bad. 2) sounds like Claude isn't saving much time, but maybe helps focus the human where to study, and 3) seems like the human might have been able to just do the job in similar or less time than writing the prompt + reviewing the result.

Open ##1465354
@badgermurphy@lemmy.world 2026-04-20 16:49

The application you're talking about might not be a bad one at all. Network configuration is a relatively narrow scope with very well-defined rules and protocols. I feel that people often ask LLMs to do things that are far too broad in scope for them to have a lot of hope of doing a good job, but I think you might have found a solid one. Obviously you want to double check everything for sanity, but that's not so hard to do either.

Open ##1465356