Cisco gave employee Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy unlimited AI tokens to rewrite 98 per cent of its legacy code within 24 months. President Jeetu Patel said, "Every engineer at Cisco will benefit from this experiment." The company hopes this small team will help core engineers build software that is more secure and innovative.
Cisco's ambitious plan to rewrite much of its legacy code using AI began with an unusual assignment for a 27-year-old employee. Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, former startup founder, popularly known as Paddy, was given unlimited AI tokens and a target to rewrite 98 per cent of the company's existing code within 24 months. After the news gained momentum on the internet. Now, Cisco says the experiment could have a much bigger impact than one engineer modernising old software.
Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel shared this thinking in a post on X, responding to a post by RK Paleru (an X user) about the growing shift towards AI-first businesses. Patel said the experiment was designed around a small team of two to three people that would help get the work moving before handing ownership of the final product to Cisco's core engineering teams.
"These experiments are super important to sponsor," Patel wrote. Acknowledging that not every experiment will work, he added that "it's definitely worth the pursuit".
Cisco wants its entire engineering team to benefit
Patel explained that the small team is meant to act as a catalyst rather than work in isolation. The idea is to get Cisco's existing engineers to see the benefits of a different way of building software and eventually take ownership of the modernised code.
"The thing that we have done here is thought of this 2 to 3 person team as someone that catalyzes the movement and gets the core team to own the final product," he wrote.
There is also a security angle to the experiment. Patel said the approach could help Cisco carry out more migrations to memory-safe programming languages, which can reduce vulnerabilities linked to memory-related errors.
He believes the benefits will extend beyond the small group working directly on the project. "Every engineer at Cisco will benefit from this experiment," Patel said. He added that being part of modernising their areas of code could help engineers build things they previously could not, and move faster than before.
Patel also argued that companies need to keep looking for new ways to get more out of technology. He believes this kind of experimentation could eventually lead to software that is "infinitely more secure, more innovative and filled with a lot more possibilities".
The 98 per cent legacy code rewrite plan
The latest comments build on Cisco's unusual assignment to 27-year-old Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy. As reported by Fortune, Patel has given the former startup founder unlimited AI tokens and a target to rewrite 98 per cent of Cisco's legacy code within 24 months.
Krishnamurthy joined Cisco in 2025 after the company acquired EzDubs, a real-time translation startup he co-founded. During a conversation at Cisco's San Francisco office, he suggested that a team of just two people could take on the legacy code modernisation work. The proposal caught Patel's attention, as even some of his AI-focused teams had not considered approaching the problem this way.
Patel told Fortune, "I've given him unlimited tokens because he's going to refactor code." The engineer has set himself an initial four-week period to demonstrate what the approach can achieve before taking on the larger target.