Fortune: Cisco Gives a 27 Year Old Engineer Unlimited AI Tokens to Rewrite 98% of Its Legacy Code
This is INSANE. Cisco’s president Jeetu Patel has given a 27-year-old engineer unlimited AI tokens to try to rewrite 98% of the company’s legacy code within 24 months, Fortune reports. Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy thinks he can do it with a two-person team. He has just four weeks to prove the approach.
Context
If a two person team using AI can rework most of a large company's old code, it would show how sharply AI could cut the cost of modernizing enterprise software.
Jeetu Patel is Cisco's president and chief product officer. Legacy code is older software still running in a company's products. Tokens are the units of text AI models process, so unlimited tokens means no cap on AI usage costs.
Deep dive
Choblin posted on Friday that Cisco president Jeetu Patel has given a 27 year old engineer unlimited AI tokens to try to rewrite 98 percent of the company's legacy code within 24 months, as Fortune reports.
According to Fortune, the engineer is Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, known as Paddy, who joined Cisco in 2025 when it acquired EzDubs, the real time translation startup he cofounded in 2023. Patel told Fortune at a small roundtable dinner that he found Krishnamurthy five levels below him, buried away in the organization doing something unstrategic. He said he gave him unlimited tokens because he is going to refactor code, telling him he could go nuts.
Fortune reports that Krishnamurthy believed he could rewrite Cisco's legacy code with a two person team, an approach Patel said even the most AI forward people on his team were not considering. He has four weeks to prove it, with the final goal of refactoring 98 percent of the code within 24 months.
The 98 percent figure is a goal, not a result, and Cisco has not published details on the codebase or how the work will be checked. Patel used the story to argue that companies should keep hiring early career workers to bring fresh ideas.
What to expect next
Watch for whether Cisco reports results after the four week trial, and how it tests that rewritten code behaves like the original, since bugs in networking software can be costly. Other large companies with old codebases may try similar small team efforts. The token bill will also be worth watching as a measure of what AI modernization really costs. Success would strengthen the case for small AI native teams inside big companies.