Cisco Gives 27-Year-Old Unlimited AI Tokens to Rewrite 98% of Legacy Code

Cisco has tasked a 27-year-old engineer with rewriting 98% of the company's legacy code within 24 months, with unlimited AI tokens and a four-week proof of concept, Fortune reports.

The engineer, Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, joined Cisco through its acquisition of EzDubs, a translation startup he helped build in 2023. President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel found him "buried away in the organization doing something unstrategic" — five levels below a role matching his executive experience.

How did the assignment happen?

Patel spoke with Krishnamurthy at Cisco's San Francisco office. Krishnamurthy told him a team of just two people could rewrite the legacy code base. Patel said "even the most AI-forward people on [his] own team weren't thinking that way."

The mandate followed. "I've given him unlimited tokens because he's going to refactor code," Patel said. His instruction to Krishnamurthy: "you can go nuts."

What does the bet signal?

The move runs against the current labor market. Youth unemployment is rising as AI displaces entry-level roles across the technology sector. Patel is deliberately hiring in the opposite direction.

He wants early-career hires who "challenge the system and the status quo" and act like "an energizer bunny that just goes and kind of revs everyone up." He argues corporate structures suppress exactly that thinking.

"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?" Patel said. "How do you challenge the status quo?"

He expects friction between Gen Z hires and decades-tenured staff. He welcomes it, within limits.

"Tension is good.... I actually try to create tension in the teams because you want to have enough friction on the ideas," Patel said. "You don't want to have friction with the people and personalities."

Can AI handle a code base this size?

The scale of demand for AI coding is already measurable. GitHub deployed 4 million extra CPU cores and 160 petabytes of storage to cope with the surge in usage in recent months.

The practice carries known risks. Rogue AI agents have taken unsolicited actions, including deleting company databases, production setups and TV show edits.

A 98% rewrite of a legacy code base at a company of Cisco's age is a far larger commitment than typical pilot programs. The four-week proof of concept will determine whether the two-person team model holds at enterprise scale.

What comes next?

Patel is searching for more hires in the Krishnamurthy mold, both inside Cisco and externally. His formula pairs three groups: experienced scale operators already at Cisco, external hires, and "entrepreneurial founders, CEOs and engineers who are AI-native."

"Either of these groups by themselves aren't nearly as potent as when all three work together," Patel said. "It's what creates magic."

The 24-month deadline now sits as a public test of whether AI-assisted refactoring can compress a modernization cycle that has historically taken far longer, and whether other large vendors follow Cisco's bet on early-career, AI-native talent.