Article · AI translation
IT Home reported on November 2 that, according to Fortune, Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel revealed that he had tasked a 27-year-old engineer with using AI to refactor or rewrite 98% of the company's legacy code within 24 months and given him an unlimited token budget.
IT Home notes: Legacy code is source code in a computer system associated with operating systems or technologies that are no longer maintained. The term also refers to code embedded in modern software to preserve compatibility with older features. It is usually written using outdated technologies, lacks complete documentation, and is costly to maintain.
“I've given him unlimited tokens because he's going to refactor the code,” Patel said. “So I told him, go for it and do whatever you want.” The “him” is Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, whom Patel affectionately calls “Paddy.”
IT Home notes that Krishnamurthy co-founded the real-time translation startup EzDubs in 2023. Cisco acquired EzDubs in 2025, and he joined Cisco as a result. Despite his background as a founder and CEO, Patel said he was then “buried deep in the organization, working on peripheral matters that didn't affect the bigger picture.”
The turning point came when Patel visited Cisco's San Francisco office and the two had an in-depth conversation. Krishnamurthy proposed that, with a team of just two people, he could completely rewrite Cisco's vast body of legacy code. Patel said that, before then, even the most forward-thinking AI experts on his team had never envisioned anything like it.
Krishnamurthy has reportedly set himself a four-week period to validate the approach. His ultimate goal is to refactor 98% of Cisco's legacy code within 24 months.
Notably, 98% is currently only a stated goal, not an achieved result; the reports also do not disclose how much code has been modified so far or the specific results of the trial.
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