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I Let Claude Build My Home Network: Two ISPs Bonded, $312/Year Saved

jonathanclark.com

11–20 of 32 posts

Re: I Let Claude Build My Home Network: Two ISPs Bonded, $312/Year Saved

#11
post #5

oh boy, how amazing... an llm managed to generate some iptables rules and sysctl settings that have been well documented for years..

If you are starting from relative ignorance about the topic, then yes, it is amazing.

But it does mean that the user can build a solution that they don’t understand well enough to maintain.

Re: I Let Claude Build My Home Network: Two ISPs Bonded, $312/Year Saved

#12
post #7
post #5

oh boy, how amazing... an llm managed to generate some iptables rules and sysctl settings that have been well documented for years..

And Dropbox is an afternoon project for any Linux user, right? Right?

If you believe the two are similar in complexity and effort, you have much to learn.

Re: I Let Claude Build My Home Network: Two ISPs Bonded, $312/Year Saved

#13
post #5

oh boy, how amazing... an llm managed to generate some iptables rules and sysctl settings that have been well documented for years..

If you are starting from relative ignorance about the topic, then yes, it is amazing. But it does mean that the user can build a solution that they don’t understand well enough to maintain.

indeed.

Re: I Let Claude Build My Home Network: Two ISPs Bonded, $312/Year Saved

#14

AI clearly wrote the blog post too - it's a neat project but the "ai style of writing" really doesn't work well for a long form article. It's like a collection of listicles. I think it'd be a better presentation to use more prose and fewer bullet points - I'm more interested in the human experience than the machine experience here!

It's a lot of words that basically say nothing. There's no substance there - eg. no info on how the setup works (how, if at all, do they integrate MPTCP?). Just endless bullet points repeating themselves.

Re: I Let Claude Build My Home Network: Two ISPs Bonded, $312/Year Saved

#15
post #14

AI clearly wrote the blog post too - it's a neat project but the "ai style of writing" really doesn't work well for a long form article. It's like a collection of listicles. I think it'd be a better presentation to use more prose and fewer bullet points - I'm more interested in the human experience than the machine experience here!

It's a lot of words that basically say nothing. There's no substance there - eg. no info on how the setup works (how, if at all, do they integrate MPTCP?). Just endless bullet points repeating themselves.

Absolutely. The reason I clicked in the first place was to see if there was an elegant MPTCP implementation.

Re: I Let Claude Build My Home Network: Two ISPs Bonded, $312/Year Saved

#17
post #5

oh boy, how amazing... an llm managed to generate some iptables rules and sysctl settings that have been well documented for years..

Maybe I didn't make it clear from the post, the llm (cursor+claude 4.5 sonet) was actually driving the whole process from provisioning a server, installing wireguard, setting up certificates, configuring network, installing packages, and updating security - with some testing at each step. I never ran any commands manually, I just told it what to do.

Re: I Let Claude Build My Home Network: Two ISPs Bonded, $312/Year Saved

#19
post #10

Bonding two ISPs was previously too complex for most home use until agentic AI. Claude can automate the entire WireGuard/OpenWRT/VPN setup, testing, and security hardening via SSH as an afternoon project. Total cost: $305 over 3 years vs $1,241 for commercial solutions. Downgrade your current ISP and add a second cheap one to get faster more reliable internet at home.

yeaaaaaah .. something the llm didn't explain is how asymmetric bandwidth or latency between the connections will degrade performance... or how many services like streaming, banking, gaming will restrict, block, or otherwise treat the connection differently because the traffic now exits via a datacenter or VPN IP/ASN..

Also the DigitalOcean deoplet includes 500GB per month, which for me is absolutely limited. Last month I consumed about 10TB.

Re: I Let Claude Build My Home Network: Two ISPs Bonded, $312/Year Saved

#20
post #10

Bonding two ISPs was previously too complex for most home use until agentic AI. Claude can automate the entire WireGuard/OpenWRT/VPN setup, testing, and security hardening via SSH as an afternoon project. Total cost: $305 over 3 years vs $1,241 for commercial solutions. Downgrade your current ISP and add a second cheap one to get faster more reliable internet at home.

yeaaaaaah .. something the llm didn't explain is how asymmetric bandwidth or latency between the connections will degrade performance... or how many services like streaming, banking, gaming will restrict, block, or otherwise treat the connection differently because the traffic now exits via a datacenter or VPN IP/ASN..

> or how many services like streaming, banking, gaming will restrict, block, or otherwise treat the connection differently because the traffic now exits via a datacenter or VPN IP/ASN.

I did run into this and claude implemented a work-around (see step 8) to route some traffic through the normal exit IP for those special use cases. So far I've only run into this problem with 3 services (Ring, Blink, and Paychex). Surprisingly none of the streaming services seem to care (Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV).

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