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Cisco gives 27-year-old engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite 98% of the company's legacy code in 24 months

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Cisco gives 27-year-old engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite 98% of the company's legacy code in 24 months

In a world where youth unemployment is growing as AI replaces more and more entry-level jobs, Cisco president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel is going for a different approach. According to a report by Fortune, he's given a 27-year-old ex-startup founder — brought into the company by an earlier acquisition, and previously languishing in a role five levels below — a new job to refactor 98% of the company's legacy code within 24 months.

The employee, Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, joined Cisco after it acquired EzDubs, a translation startup that Krishnamurthy helped build in 2023. While having executive experience, Patel found that "Paddy" was left "buried away in the organization doing something unstrategic."

According to the report, Patel spoke to Krishnamurthy in Cisco's office in San Francisco, where Krishnamurthy told him that he could rewrite Cisco's legacy code in a team of just two people, and that "even the most AI-forward people on [Patel's] own team weren't thinking that way."

As a result, he's now been tasked with rewriting 98% of Cisco's legacy code within 24 months, with four weeks as a proof of concept. "I've given him unlimited tokens because he's going to refactor code," according to Patel, telling him "you can go nuts."

AI coding has skyrocketed in recent months, with GitHub forced to deploy 4 million extra CPU cores and 160 petabytes of storage to cope . However, the practice is not without its pitfalls, with rogue AI agents notorious for taking unsolicited actions including deleting entire company databases, TV show edits , and production setups .


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