Cisco Betting on AI to Revamp Its Codebase

Cisco appears to be all-in on AI-assisted coding, reportedly giving an engineer unlimited tokens to revamp 98% of the company’s legacy code in 24 months.

AI is upending the software development industry and dividing software engineers along the way. Some engineers have fully embraced AI, while others continue to avoid it or use it only when absolutely necessary. Many in the field worry that, as engineers and companies use AI more, junior engineers will increasingly be squeezed out of work.

As Fortune reports, however, Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel appears to be bucking that trend. Patel has tapped 27-year-old Padmanabhan (Paddy) Krishnamurthy to revamp the company’s legacy code. Paddy joined Cisco in 2025 when Cisco acquired the startup he had cofounded.

“I’ve given him unlimited tokens because he’s going to refactor code,” Patel told Fortune at a small roundtable dinner. “So I’m like, you can go, you can go nuts.”

Paddy told Patel he could rewrite the legacy code with a two-person team, and the project now has four weeks to prove itself. Interestingly, unlike peers in other companies, Patel saw Paddy’s youth and ambitious thinking as a pro rather than a con.

“If you don’t hire the early-in-career [workers], and you just let your workforce continue the way that they were, where do fresh ideas get injected? How do you challenge the status quo?” he said.

Patel told Fortune that getting seasoned engineers to work effectively with Gen Zers isn’t always easy, and certainly presents its own challenges, but is ultimately worth it.

“Tension is good,” he said. “I actually try to create tension in the teams because you want to have enough friction on the ideas. You don’t want to have friction with people and personalities.”

“What you have to do is establish enough trust with people to say you are going to be expected to create unreasonable goals for yourself,” he added. “And so, in order to go out and achieve those unreasonable goals, think outside of the box.”

It’s safe to say the industry will be watching Cisco’s ambitious undertaking. If the company succeeds in rewriting its legacy code and delivering what customers need, it could prompt a complete rethinking of how AI — and Gen Z — fit into the new tech landscape.