Hi @John_White
Thanks a lot for taking the time to try out my SmartConsole AI Chat extension — I appreciate the positive feedback and I’m glad to hear you found it useful.
To address the question about why the extension was released with read‑only (show) capabilities:
the current public version was deliberately designed this way because it’s trained solely on Check Point’s official Management MCP, which only covers safe, non-destructive read‑only commands. As most of us know from real‑world firewall administration, even a single incorrect API write operation can have a massive operational impact. With an LLM in the loop — and its natural tendency to occasionally make confident but wrong assumptions — giving it unrestricted write access could, in the worst case, lead to misconfigurations, outages, or even severe disruptions in a production network.
Beyond the technical risk, there’s also a liability aspect. Hosting a publicly available extension that can modify customers’ security policies via AI would open the door to situations where a model‑generated change causes damage, and that’s simply not something I’m willing to expose users (or myself) to on a public forum.
That said:
For anyone who truly wants full read‑write capabilities, it's absolutely possible — but intentionally not enabled out of the box. You’d need to:
- Download the extension file and implement the full Management API reference
- Download and modify the JSON manifest to unlock full read-write access
- Upload both files to your SmartCenter as described here
- Load your unlocked ChatGPT Extension into your SmartConsole
I’m happy to assist with this in a private project setting, where proper guardrails, testing procedures, and responsible usage can be ensured. But it’s not something I plan to publish publicly on the CheckMates forum for the reasons above.
And one last note for those who are interested:
While I haven’t released a read‑write SmartConsole extension yet, I am currently working on one in a bit of a “stealth mode.” If it reaches the level of reliability and safety I’m aiming for, it might be very interesting to a lot of Check Point admins out there. More on that when it’s ready.
