From Prompt to Production: Six Months of AI-Built Network Tooling at Carolina
Tuesday, September 29 · 10:10–11:10 AM America/Denver · Main Room
Between February and August 2026, UNC-Chapel Hill's network engineering practice used an AI coding agent as a full-time development partner. The output was not prototypes: it was roughly a dozen systems now running in production against the live campus network.
The flagship is a cross-estate wireless observability platform covering ~12,000 access points — a Cisco Meraki estate and an Aruba estate mid-migration — plus the 16,800 devices AKIPS monitors. It unifies client search and troubleshooting across both vendors, ingests syslog from twenty mobility controllers, models RF propagation over real CAD floor plans, maps the campus from Facilities GIS, and reports service levels against the availability targets AKIPS already holds. Alongside it: a self-service private-PSK portal serving students and departments, a fabric-migration tracking dashboard, passive RADIUS telemetry, DHCP diagnostics reconciling Meraki against Infoblox, and read-only MCP servers that let engineers ask questions of AKIPS, XIQ-SE and switch CLI in plain language from Teams.
The talk will discuss the enormous possibilities of agentic A.I. in actual practical outcomes, as well as some of the dangers that come from it.
Ryan Turner
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Ryan Turner is the Director of Networking and Head of the Operations Center for UNC. He is our co-leader of the Network Manager's Constituency Group and Co-Founder of the HENC workshop. He oversees a network with over 12,000 wireless access points and 3000 switches.