Cisco Gives 27-Year-Old Engineer Unlimited AI Tokens to Rewrite 98% of Legacy Code in 24 Months

Cisco president Jeetu Patel told Fortune he handed a 27-year-old former founder, Padmanabhan 'Paddy' Krishnamurthy, unlimited AI tokens and told him to 'go nuts' refactoring Cisco's legacy codebase. The stated goal is rewriting 98% of legacy code inside 24 months with a two-person team. Krishnamurthy joined Cisco via its 2025 acquisition of real-time translation startup EzDubs.