Cisco gives engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite 98% of the company's code

Cisco president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel has tasked 27-year-old Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy with rewriting 98% of Cisco’s legacy code within 24 months, starting with a four-week proof of concept. Krishnamurthy joined Cisco when it acquired EzDubs, a translation startup he helped found, but had been working in a relatively low-profile role. After Krishnamurthy argued that a two-person team could tackle the rewrite using AI, Patel gave him unlimited AI tokens and encouraged him to proceed. The plan reflects Patel’s willingness to give an early-career, AI-native engineer unusual scope to challenge established practices.

Patel also wants Cisco to recruit more young employees and entrepreneurs, arguing that fresh perspectives can unsettle corporate routines. He sees the strongest teams as combining those hires with experienced employees who know how to operate at Cisco’s scale; constructive disagreement, rather than personal conflict, can improve ideas. The ambitious rewrite also illustrates the risks of AI-assisted coding: generating or refactoring code is not the same as proving it works. Cisco’s many networking products would require extensive testing and debugging to catch regressions, and flaws in routers, switches, or security systems could have serious consequences. The central question is whether AI can accelerate modernization without compromising the reliability Cisco’s infrastructure depends on.