Cisco Gives a 27-Year-Old Unlimited AI Tokens to Rewrite Its Legacy Code
Cisco's product chief says a young former founder has four weeks to prove AI can rewrite 98% of the company's old code, a goal reported only from Cisco's own account.
Cisco president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel has handed a 27 year old engineer unlimited AI tokens and told him to “go nuts”. The job: rewrite Cisco’s legacy code, meaning the older software the company still relies on. Tokens are the small chunks of text an AI model reads and writes, so “unlimited tokens” is a polite way of saying “no usage meter”. The engineer, Padmanabhan “Paddy” Krishnamurthy, joined Cisco in 2025 when it bought EzDubs, a real time translation startup he cofounded.
The timeline is ambitious. Paddy has four weeks to prove the approach works, and the long term goal, reported by Fortune, is to rewrite 98% of Cisco’s legacy code within 24 months. Patel says Paddy told him a two person team could do it, which is not how even his most AI forward staff were thinking. Patel found him several levels down the org chart doing work he calls “unstrategic”.
Patel uses the story to argue for hiring young people who ask naive questions and challenge the status quo. He treats interns as “reverse mentors” and wants a mix of experienced Cisco hands, outside systems thinkers and AI native founders. Investors quoted in the piece echo the idea of favouring early career talent.
Now the caveats, which matter. Almost everything here comes from Patel’s own account. The 98% target and the two person team are goals, not results, and the four week test is still running, with no independent check of progress. Paddy is also a former founder with executive experience, so he is not a typical entry level hire. The article’s broader statistics, such as about 40% of bosses planning to hire fewer graduates because of AI, come from outside sources that were not verified.
What’s behind it: Rewriting old code is one of the most promising uses of coding agents, because the “right answer” is partly defined: the new version must behave like the old one. That makes it easier to test than building something from scratch. It is also risky, because old systems often hide rules nobody wrote down. A big claim in week one tells you the company’s ambition more than the technology’s readiness.
What this means for you: If you work in tech, the practical lesson is that the valuable skill is steering and checking AI output, not typing code. If you are early in your career, this is one encouraging data point, but a single anecdote from an executive is not a hiring trend. For everyone else: watch whether Cisco reports real results after the test. Until then, treat it as an experiment, not proof.
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