Cisco Gives Engineer Unlimited Token Budget to Rewrite 98% of Legacy Code with AI
Cisco has assigned a 27-year-old engineer an unlimited token budget and a two-year timeline to rewrite 98% of the company's legacy code using artificial intelligence. The initiative was sparked by a conversation between Cisco President Jeetu Patel and engineer Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy. This initiative highlights an aggressive enterprise push to modernize massive codebases through generative AI rather than traditional, manual refactoring. While currently a bold goal rather than a proven metric, it showcases how large corporations are rethinking software engineering workflows. The engineer, Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, joined Cisco after the company acquired his startup EzDubs in 2025. He proposed that a tiny two-person team could overhaul Cisco's legacy code and set an initial four-week verification window to test the approach.
## BACKGROUND
Legacy code refers to outdated source code associated with discontinued operating systems, old technologies, or embedded compatibility layers that are costly and difficult to maintain. AI code refactoring uses machine learning and natural language processing to automate the restructuring of internal software code while keeping external functionality intact.