Cisco gives engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite 98% of the company's code — SkimNews
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- Jeetu Patel gave Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy unlimited AI tokens and told him to “go nuts,” assigning him to refactor 98% of Cisco’s legacy code within 24 months, with four weeks as a proof of concept.
- EzDubs was the translation startup Krishnamurthy helped build in 2023 and whose acquisition brought him to Cisco; Patel said the founder had been “buried away” in a role five levels below, doing unstrategic work.
- Fortune reported that Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy told Patel in San Francisco that he could rewrite Cisco’s legacy code with a team of just two, adding that even the most AI-forward people on Patel’s own team were not thinking that way.
- Jeetu Patel wants to recruit early-career employees plus outside founders, CEOs and AI-native engineers to challenge Cisco’s status quo, while retaining experienced scale operators; he calls the combination of all three groups “magic” and says he deliberately creates friction in teams.
- GitHub deployed 4 million extra CPU cores and 160 petabytes of storage to cope with surging AI coding; separate rogue agents have deleted entire databases and altered television edits and production setups.
- IOS was singled out in a reader’s warning that testing rewritten networking software across thousands of devices would take longer than Cisco’s 24-month target; the commenter recommended beginning with a lower-stakes product segment.
- Cisco was the subject of a reader’s intellectual-property question: who owns AI-generated code, and who would be sued if a future AI program produced similar code? The commenter noted that Cisco has claimed such rights in the past.
Why it matters: For Cisco, the 24-month, 98% mandate elevates a 27-year-old engineer within a decades-old engineering hierarchy and directs Patel’s recruiting toward early-career talent. Patel explicitly anticipates friction with veteran staff, while readers question whether testing across thousands of networking devices can fit the same deadline.
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