I've been a pyATS practitioner since 2019 and I wrote the pyATS book for Cisco. So when I tell you this one surprised me, I mean it. Nothing was pre-staged. I opened Claude Code, pointed the Anthropic Itential Builder Skills at two of my repos, and described what I wanted in plain language. pyATS Skills → lnkd.in/gcNZNWew pyATS MCP, rewritten from scratch as a stateless streamable HTTP server → lnkd.in/eDrCDAKs Then I asked for two agents: interface health and overall device health. From there it: → Built and launched the pyATS MCP server as a Docker container → Registered it with my local Itential Gateway → Re-registered the gateway with the Itential Platform, surfacing all 26 pyATS tools for selection at build time → Created a new "pyATS Network Testing" project with RBAC scoped to the right group → Assembled both FlowAgents, tested them in a scratchpad against a live Cisco DevNet sandbox device, caught its own schema gap, fixed it, and re-validated That last part is the one I'd underline. It didn't hand me untested agents. It called a real device before finalizing anything. The results: Overall Health Agent: 2 min 21 sec. CPU, memory, interfaces, OSPF, BGP, log and crash indicators, returned as a structured report with an overall status. Interface Health Agent: 1 min 35 sec. Takes a device name and nothing else. Core, distribution, data center, whatever you've got. Returned admin and operational status, IP addressing, error and drop counters, and flagged that VLAN 20 had an IP but a down SVI, so that subnet was unreachable. Both read-only. Both scoped to only the tools they need, the interface agent got three of the twenty-six. Both logged, both governed by RBAC, both callable by API. Roughly 15 minutes of active build time. The pyATS expertise was already sitting in the skills. The MCP server exposed it as tools. The Builder Skill turned it into something the whole team can run, on demand, with permissions that actually mean something. Full demo below. 22 minutes. Start to finish. No cuts. No edits. Authentic innovation. If you are an Itential user or want to know more just reach out to me directly! lnkd.in/gspSHeTA #pyATS #NetworkAutomation #Itential #ClaudeCode #MCP #AgenticAI #Cisco