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

[EgregiousCube]

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!

[q3k]

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.

[sema4hacker]

To save money, I would have just switched to ATT fiber like you did, drop Xfinity completely, and try that for awhile. It's worked for me for years, and my only downtime has been a few times during winter storms when the power goes out completely.

[jclarkcom]

nice. I wish fiber was available for me. I only had access to AT&T's copper service (DSL) but they do 2-pair bonding so speed is not far from Xfinity.

[kundi]

You completely neglected the egress cost for DO, and also the time / maintenance needed, which makes this a poorly engineered fantasy

[jclarkcom]

Harsh, but a good point on egress cost that I overlooked, I'm adding a section on this - if you use Oracle cloud it looks like you get 10TB included at no additional cost where DO would be around $84 at the same bandwidth levels

[kemotep]

It would be cool if the output that that the LLM made (commands it ran to harden, the iptables, MPTCP config, etc.) was included in the post.

It seems incredulous that this didn’t take dozens of back and forth prompts and fixes. It was able to one-shot deploying a digital ocean droplet and configure wireguard?

[jclarkcom]

Here are some of the commands it used (censored & auto-generated) with a few specific examples at the end: https://jonathanclark.com/posts/bonded-internet-connection-c...

> It was able to one-shot deploying a digital ocean droplet and configure wireguard?

Yes, that part was pretty easy - but the whole thing wasn't one shot. The parts I struggled with were: - getting automated SSH installed on the $130 router, once you have that the LLM can drive things - during security hardening, I got fully locked out and had to recreate a new VM. But it was able to automatically recreate everything in a few minutes.

[satertek]

My first concern would be using a digital ocean droplet as a VPN. Last time I tried that, datacenter IP ranges often made things slower or unusable.

[woleium]

this. the cameras are not the only thing that won’t work

you could use an azure VDI machine as a cloud endpoint, i believe those ips are flagged correctly. It’s not this cheap though.

[damieng]

I also went with an Xfinity cable and Frontier fibre combo in about 2018 I think.

I just bought a Synology RT2600 router at the time and plugged each provider in then set it to load balanced.

Reliability and speeds were great. Possibly not as optimised as this perf wise but a lot easier to setup.

[phillipseamore]

Looks like this proposed a solution that costs about the same as the mentioned Speedify (more expensive at the moment because of blackfriday deals) but lacks all the features and is more likely to break.

[jclarkcom]

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.

[nickphx]

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..

[nickphx]

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

[shermantanktop]

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.

[mattbee]

And a really dreary blog describing something simple at great length :/

[jclarkcom]

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.

[ctoth]

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