netbox

If you’ve been using Claude and wondering how it suddenly knows how to generate a perfectly formatted PowerPoint or fill out a PDF form without you explaining anything, that’s Agent Skills doing the work. It’s one of Anthropic’s newer features and it’s surprisingly underused by the network automation community, which is a shame because it’s genuinely well-suited for what we do. In this post I’m going to explain what Skills are, how they actually work under the hood, and then build a real network automation skill from scratch, one that gives Claude the procedural knowledge to query NetBox, pull device configs, and follow your team’s runbook steps, automatically, every time, without you explaining it in every single prompt....

If you’ve been following the AI space lately, you’ve probably heard the term MCP thrown around a lot. Model Context Protocol. It sounds complicated and enterprise-y, like something that requires a team of developers and a Jira board to set up. It doesn’t. And if you’re already doing network automation with Python, Ansible, and NetBox, I’ve got news for you: you’re already halfway there. In this post, I’m going to walk you through building your own MCP server using FastMCP that exposes real network tools directly to an AI like Claude....

Introduction to NetBox and Ansible Core NetBox is an open-source tool designed for network automation and infrastructure management, specializing in managing IP address allocations and data center infrastructure. Ansible Core is a widely used automation tool that allows you to automate software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment. Integrating NetBox with Ansible Core can centralize your network inventory, making it easier to manage and automate your network devices. This integration leverages NetBox’s API to dynamically pull inventory data into Ansible using a YAML configuration file....