Cisco president hands 27-year-old unlimited AI tokens to rewrite 98% of its code
Jeetu Patel tapped a junior engineer found "five levels" below him to lead a 24-month rewrite of Cisco's legacy codebase using unlimited AI tokens.
What to know
- Cisco president Jeetu Patel gave 27-year-old Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy unlimited AI tokens and a four-week trial toward rewriting 98% of Cisco's legacy code within 24 months using a two-person team.
- Krishnamurthy joined Cisco in 2025 when it acquired his startup EzDubs and was previously in an 'unstrategic' role before Patel elevated him.
- Patel frames the move as part of a broader bet on early-career hires to 'challenge the status quo,' deliberately creating friction between junior and veteran staff.
- The story spread widely on social media, amplified by a viral X post, amid broader anxiety about AI reducing entry-level hiring for Gen Z workers.
“If you don't hire the early-in-career [workers], and you just let your workforce continue the way that they were, where do fresh ideas get injected? How do you challenge the status quo?”
Jeetu Patel, Cisco President and CPO · Fortune ↗ · Oct 29
Jeetu Patel Cisco President and Chief Product OfficerPadmanabhan Krishnamurthy ('Paddy') 27-year-old Cisco engineer, ex-founder of EzDubsBaya Stanford scholarship student turned Cisco intern
How it unfolded 3 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump articlesposts
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Tech outlets and aggregators pick up the Fortune story
Tom's Hardware, India Today, and Google News syndications republished and reframed the Fortune report, with Tom's Hardware emphasizing the 24-month timeline and India Today framing it as Cisco rewriting 'all' of its code.
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It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for them. https://www. tomshardware.com/tech-industry /big-tech/cisco-gives-27-year-old-engineer-unlimited-ai-tokens-to-rewrite-98-percent-of-the-companys-legacy-code-in-24-months-president-plucks-former-startup-founder-telling-him-to-go-nuts
2 more of the top 3 · 78 posts in this stretch
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We just recently use Claude Code to port an old Coldfusion site to Java Spring and it went amazingly well. It's around 50K lines of Java, one of our engineers did it in his spare time over about a week, using the $200/mo Claude plan. We had been talking about doing it for at least the last dozen years but never found the time. It would have taken…
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I didn't think you wanted me to fail. But I get where you're coming from, I am blessed with some work mates who have let these tools take their performance to the next level but I also have some who use it as an excuse to phone it in a bit. I'm sorry you have to deal with that too, it can be incredibly frustrating. Like most technology, it has a…
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@choblin29's viral post amplifies the story as 'INSANE'
A social media post summarizing the Fortune report drew 976 points and 99 comments on X, spreading the story widely.
“This is INSANE. Cisco's president Jeetu Patel has given a 27-year-old engineer unlimited AI tokens to try to rewrite 98% of the company's legacy code within 24 months, Fortune reports.”
— @choblin29 -
This is INSANE. Cisco’s president Jeetu Patel has given a 27-year-old engineer unlimited AI tokens to try to rewrite 98% of the company’s legacy code within 24 months, Fortune reports. Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy thinks he can do it with a two-person team. He has just four weeks
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Fortune details Krishnamurthy's background and Patel's hiring philosophy
Fortune's profile explains Krishnamurthy joined Cisco in 2025 after it acquired his startup EzDubs, was previously "buried away" in an unstrategic role, and that Patel is now seeking more young hires to "challenge the system and the status quo."
“buried away in the organization doing something unstrategic…”
— Jeetu Patel -
first by Fortune, 13d ago
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background
Patel gives Krishnamurthy unlimited AI tokens to rewrite Cisco's code — At a roundtable dinner, Cisco president Jeetu Patel told Fortune he gave 27-year-old Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy unlimited AI tokens and told him to "go nuts" refactoring Cisco's legacy code, with a goal of rewriting 98% of it within 24 months starting with a four-week, two-person trial.
Also covered reported alongside — the timeline has no entry for these yet
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first by Mastodon, 13d ago · also HN Best, HN Frontpage, Tom's Hardware
2 more headlines
- Cisco gives engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite legacy code HN Best · 13d ago
- Cisco gives engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite 98% of the company's code HN Frontpage · 13d ago
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first by India Today, 13d ago · also Fortune
1 more headline
What people are saying 20 voices from 3 sites · best of 79 · verbatim
- Nov 6
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Yes, the person steering it is the experienced engineer. An experienced engineer isn't just giving the model work and pushing it. The edge cases you talk about are something that exist that needs to be addressed whether you use AI or not. AI just gets you to the solution way faster.
- Nov 2
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There's a lot of jobs robots can't do. Either way, obviously, many will go unemployed, as already happens in many countries, especially across the third world, and will have to scramble to gather whatever scraps they can to make living out of. It's not an endorsement, it's just the logical consequence of capitalism's inevitable advance. What do…
- Oct 31
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The cost of AI tokens for this guy is a low risk investment. Smaller companies are already doing this. Rewriting products from scratch in the time it would take to plan and propose a legacy system modernization.
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The CEO of Cisco is a fucking pervert chud. ""Tension is good.... I actually try to create tension in the teams because you want to have enough friction on the ideas. You don't want to have friction with the people and personalities." https://www. tomshardware.com/tech-industry…
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> I see some of the best ideas coming from the younger generation that have not yet been in the job market.The views of these business leaders betray their own lack of vision, they are barking up the wrong tree.The ability to think differently is not the preserve of the young. Instead of only hiring a bunch of greenhorns they should identify and…
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Not something at Cisco scale. But a co-founder and I, rewrote a dating app we had written in Ionic/Angular/SpringBoot/Postgres to React-Native/NextJS/Supabase in two weeks, and released it without the users/paid subscribers not knowing what happened, but they were happy to see the new slick/faster interface.We had developed the original app in…
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I agree with the sentiments that it important to understand the code during major refactoring projects. But what if while the code was being refactored the AI was asked in addition to keep a ledger of the changes it made and why. That ledger could be the basis of providing understanding to a code base that most likely had minimal corporate…
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"Where there's no sense, there's no feeling". The words, I am told, of my father's maternal grandmother. It is strange to feel such an intense kinship and to inhabit so closely the mind space of a woman who I have never met.Perhaps I'm merely feeling my age. But while I suspect Cisco will eventually be disappointed, my emotional state remains a…
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@ ludicity have you seen this? https://www. tomshardware.com/tech-industry /big-tech/cisco-gives-27-year-old-engineer-unlimited-ai-tokens-to-rewrite-98-percent-of-the-companys-legacy-code-in-24-months-president-plucks-former-startup-founder-telling-him-to-go-nuts Total # AI psychosis. I honestly thought it was an Onion article when I first saw the…
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Unlimited Tokens. I regularly get blocked at work for exceeding our unlimited token policy to build sample quick start environments for our team to learn from and train an AI to build environments more efficiently. Got our deployment time down from hours to under 30 seconds, but it does take an hour to get the underlying infra up and running.
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Translating from one language/platform to another is something AI is very very good at, so this sounds like a good use of it, bonus points if they create a comprehensive test suite first.Yes it will lead to new bugs, but the older code probably contains a ton of bugs already and is probably difficult to update (original writers long gone, docs out…
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Tired: the internet is for porn Inspired: the internet is for incompetence porn https://www. tomshardware.com/tech-industry /big-tech/cisco-gives-27-year-old-engineer-unlimited-ai-tokens-to-rewrite-98-percent-of-the-companys-legacy-code-in-24-months-president-plucks-former-startup-founder-telling-him-to-go-nuts
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I very much doubt this is going to be a single person project and the article is uh, taking some liberties. Or “legacy software” is doing some heavy lifting and the scope is not as wide as it is being made to seem.
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Our software has a fair amount of bugs that users considered to be features or went unfixed so long that users would complain about the changed behavior if they were fixed. Unleashing an AI on it would cause so many problems. Not to mention how hard it is to test end-to-end use cases to make sure a fix didn't break things waaaay downstream in our…
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This decision is about so many things except the code that it deserves some kind of award.Demonstrates fanatical devotion to capital’s golden idol - “yes, all of the code; yes, unlimited budget”. Doesn’t actually cost the company anything - only one engineer off task, any nuggets of value can be harvested as it progresses but any costs or big…
- Oct 30
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"Translate an early edition of War and Peace into modern English." LLMs are great at this. But converting existing text isn't authorship of a masterpiece, and porting 40-year-old legacy code isn't invention. Refactoring legacy systems using existing logic as a blueprint is valuable syntax translation, not 40 man-years of original engineering…
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The first thing should be design a decent fscking rack kit and an algorithm to place the fscking reset button in the right place… Cisco gives 27-year-old engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite 98% of the company's legacy code in 24 months — president plucks former startup founder, telling him to 'go nuts' https://www…
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Right but one of the things AI does really well is reading a lot of text way faster than any human can. Maybe the big AI revolution is, mainly, that no codebase can become obscure anymore, that with enough tokens thrown into it you can have code of any age and source documented and understood by the current team.
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Well last year round this time I took a knife but apparently also dodged a bullet. This is not a satirical website. https://www. tomshardware.com/tech-industry /big-tech/cisco-gives-27-year-old-engineer-unlimited-ai-tokens-to-rewrite-98-percent-of-the-companys-legacy-code-in-24-months-president-plucks-former-startup-founder-telling-him-to-go-nuts…
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Yeah - code rewrites are generally a thing to be avoided since the requirements of older production code is typically not fully documented, even if it originally had been. Production code accumulates bug fixes, performance tweaks, special cases, additional requirements, etc, with documentation and test suites not always being updated in sync.Your…