Cisco gives one engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite its legacy code

Cisco president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel told Fortune at a roundtable dinner that he has given Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, 27, unlimited AI tokens to refactor code. Krishnamurthy, who joined Cisco when it bought his translation startup EzDubs in 2025, reckoned a two-person team could rewrite Cisco's legacy code. Fortune reports a four-week window to prove the approach and a final goal of refactoring 98% of Cisco's legacy code within 24 months. The only source is Patel himself; there are no details on which codebases, how it will be tested, or what the tokens will cost. On Hacker News (74 top-level comments when we read it) there is no consensus: sceptics say no goal is stated and that testing, edge cases and institutional knowledge are the hard part, while others say AI is good at translating code and shared their own ports, such as ColdFusion to Java and an old FoxPro program. Sorted take: this is a CEO quote, not a result; the useful idea from the thread is to write tests that pin today's behaviour before letting AI rewrite anything.