Cisco’s president Jeetu Patel handed a 27-year-old engineer something most senior staff never get: unlimited AI tokens and a mandate to refactor 98% of the company’s legacy code within 24 months. His instruction was blunt: ‘go nuts.’ The engineer, Padmanabhan ‘Paddy’ Krishnamurthy, joined Cisco in 2025 when it acquired his real-time translation startup EzDubs, and had been sitting five levels down doing something, in Patel’s words, unstrategic.
Paddy’s pitch was simple: a two-person team can do the rewrite with AI tools and memory-safe languages. Patel gave him four weeks to prove it. An early refactor already compressed 500,000 lines of code to 120,000 in two weeks: a dramatic cut, though line count alone doesn’t prove the new code behaves the same under production load.
It fits a bigger bet. Cisco wants 32,000 engineers moving to AI-centric development, with 70% of its offerings AI-generated by 2027. The interesting part isn’t the AI tokens. It’s handing a greenfield rewrite of critical networking code to someone junior and fast, and treating friction with the veterans as a feature. The real test won’t be how few lines remain, but how few regressions ship.
source: fortune.com
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