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Sunday, 1 November 2026 Reading Room

Tech

Cisco Gave One Engineer Unlimited AI Tokens to Rewrite 98%

Cisco president Jeetu Patel found Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy five levels below him in the org chart during a visit to the company's San Francisco office. Krishnamurthy is 27, the former CEO of translation startup EzDubs (acquired by Cisco in 2025), and was — in Patel's words — "buried away doing something unstrategic." Patel pulled him out and gave him a mandate: take a two-person team, unlimited…

dev.to ·

On October 30, 2026, Fortune ran a story detailing Cisco's ambitious plan to rewrite 98% of its legacy codebase within 24 months - a task accomplished by a single 27-year-old engineer with unlimited access to AI tokens. The engineer, Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, was pulled out of his "buried away" status to lead this unprecedented project, which was given the directive to "go nuts."

The proposal sparked a polarized response online, with Hacker News commentators reporting successful translations of large codebases using AI tools, while Reddit skeptics argued that the plan was a PR stunt that would eliminate the need for junior engineers. Fortune's coverage highlighted Cisco's existing AI adoption (85% of engineers already using the technology) and the company's track record in AI-assisted product development.

However, the skepticism surrounding the initiative pointed to deeper organizational challenges. Critics argued that while AI could generate code with remarkable accuracy, the real challenge lay in the organizational structure required to review, test, and trust the millions of lines of AI-generated code. The team's success in smaller projects seemed to belie the complexities of applying the same approach to Cisco's vast, production-ready systems.

The article highlighted that while AI tools like Cisco's "coding agents" showed promise in translating code, the real challenge was ensuring that the generative output maintained the nuanced knowledge and context that comes from years of real-world engineering experience. The true test would be whether Cisco's organizational framework could evolve to accept and verify the output of such a bold, AI-driven initiative.

Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.

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