Cisco Taps a 27-Year-Old to Rebuild 98% of Its Old Code with AI

Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel has given a 27-year-old engineer a big mission: rewrite 98% of the company's legacy code with AI within 24 months, with an unlimited token budget. Legacy code means old code written with outdated tech and little documentation, which is costly to maintain.

The engineer, Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, co-founded a real-time translation startup called EzDubs in 2023. Cisco bought the company in 2025, and he joined Cisco, but at first he was stuck doing minor work.

Things changed when Patel visited Cisco's San Francisco office. Krishnamurthy said he only needed a two-person team to rewrite all of Cisco's huge legacy code. Even Cisco's own AI experts had never come up with such an idea.

He has now set a four-week trial period. Note that the 98% goal is just a target for now, not a result. Cisco hasn't shared how much code has been changed or how the tests are going.