Polymarket Says Cisco's Chief Product Officer Gave a Gen Z Engineer Unlimited AI Tokens to Rewrite 98% of Its Legacy Code in Two Years
JUST IN: Cisco's Chief Product Officer gives a Gen Z engineer unlimited AI tokens to vibecode a rewrite of 98% of the company's legacy code within 2 years.
Context
A major tech company betting that a tiny team with AI can modernize most of its old code would change how big firms staff software work.
Polymarket is a prediction market whose X account posts news headlines. The underlying report is a Fortune article from Oct 30 in which Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel described the project. The engineer is Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, 27, who joined Cisco in 2025 when it bought his translation startup EzDubs.
Deep dive
Polymarket posted on Nov 1 that Cisco's Chief Product Officer gave a Gen Z engineer unlimited AI tokens to vibecode a rewrite of 98% of the company's legacy code within 2 years. The post is a secondhand summary, and the word vibecode is Polymarket's.
The source is a Fortune report from Oct 30. Fortune says Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel told it at a small roundtable dinner that he had given unlimited tokens to Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, known as Paddy, because he is going to refactor code, and told him he could go nuts. Krishnamurthy is 27 and joined Cisco in 2025 after it acquired EzDubs, the real time translation startup he cofounded in 2023. Patel said he had been buried in the organization, five levels below him.
According to Fortune, Krishnamurthy said he could rewrite Cisco's legacy code with a team of two, and has given himself four weeks to prove the approach, with the final goal of refactoring 98% of the legacy code within 24 months. Patel said even the most AI forward people on his team were not thinking that way.
India Today later reported that Patel wrote on X that the two to three person team is meant to start the effort and have Cisco's core engineers own the final product, that it could help move more code to memory safe languages, and that not every experiment will work but this one is worth pursuing.
What to expect next
Watch for whether Krishnamurthy's four week proof period produces results Cisco shares publicly, and whether the company sets out how it will test and review AI rewritten code in products that run networks around the world. The 98% goal over 24 months is a target, not a result. Other large companies with old codebases will be watching to see if small AI heavy teams can deliver this kind of rewrite safely.