The safest AI change workflow is the one where the AI never touches your network.
That is the line we held while building HORA, and it is worth explaining, because everyone is racing to let models run commands and we deliberately did the opposite.
First, what HORA already is. It grew inside our own NOC before it became a product, so it is built around the things engineers actually open on a daily basis:
– Inventory as a real source of truth, not a stale spreadsheet
– Traffic flows, metrics, and logs in one place
– BGP monitoring across the whole network, with a clean view of prefixes and the best paths actually chosen
– L1 and L3 topology, drawn from the network rather than from memory
– Auto discovery, so the picture stays current on its own
Then the part we just shipped. HORA now does change management, including an AI-assisted flow: propose a change, review it, approve, commit, roll back if needed.
Here is the design decision that matters. The AI does not have access to your devices. It cannot log in, it cannot push config, it cannot touch anything. When a change is approved, it is carried out by a separate deterministic automation, real code, written by engineers, that does exactly what it is told and nothing else. The model proposes. A human approves. Automation executes. The boundary between deciding and doing is built into the system, not written as a rule the model is asked to respect.
That is what makes AI change management safe enough to actually use in production. Not a prompt telling the model to be careful, but an architecture where it structurally cannot do the thing you are afraid of.
Kudos to Nicolai Moraru, Cristi Crudu and their team for building this.
And on top of all of it sits an AI that can use every one of these tools, the inventory, the flows, the metrics, the logs, the BGP view, the topology, to help you troubleshoot and actually work a problem, not just chat about it.
So a real question for the operators here. Setting the AI aside for a second: what would you want a platform like this to show you? Which view, which signal, which thing you currently piece together by hand across 5 tabs, would you most want in one place?
We are building, and we would rather build what you actually need.
