Here's something new that came up on the "AI will take over everything" world. The Chief Product Officer of Cisco (a networking giant) has asked a 27 year old employee to replicate Cisco's legacy code base in 4 weeks using unlimited AI. This is an interesting situation with a lot at stake.

I will not offer any comment right now about how I think it will go, but I will just wait and watch and come back in 4 weeks to post here about how the experiment went. I will either laud them or laugh at them.

Here is the task:

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he has given himself four weeks to prove it, with the final goal of rewriting 98% of Cisco's legacy code within 24 months.

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READY.... SET... GO!

Cisco chief found a 27-year-old ex-founder 'buried away in the organization doing something unstrategic'now the Gen Zer is rewriting 98% of its code
https://fortune.com/2026/10/30/cisco-president-jeetu-patel-gen-z-27-year-old-unlimited-ai-tokens-rewrite-legacy-code-entry-level-jobs/
By
Orianna Rosa Royle
Associate Editor, Success
October 30, 2026, 3:00 AM ET

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Gen Z can't catch a break. Entry-level jobs are vanishing; some 40% of bosses say they plan to hire fewer grads because AI can do the job cheaper, and young workers are routinely slammed for showing up late and refusing to put in overtime for free. Cisco's president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel isn't buying ithe's just handed one of the company's biggest jobs to a 27-year-old he found hidden in the org chart "five levels" below him.


"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."

The "him" is Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, or "Paddy," as Patel affectionately calls him. He joined Cisco in 2025 after the $429 billion tech giant acquired EzDubs, the real-time translation startup Krishnamurthy cofounded in 2023. And despite coming in as a former founder with CEO experience, he was, in Patel's words, "buried away in the organization doing something unstrategic."


That changed when Patel dropped into Cisco's San Francisco office, and the pair got talking. Krishnamurthy reckoned he could rewrite Cisco's legacy code with a two-person team. Patel says even the most AI-forward people on his own team weren't thinking that way.
So he has given himself four weeks to prove it, with the final goal of rewriting 98% of Cisco's legacy code within 24 months.
Now, he's on the hunt for more Paddys: young hires who will "challenge the system and the status quo," or, as he puts it, be "an energizer bunny that just goes out and kind of revs everyone up."

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Some day in the future, they will release this AI garbled garbage on their networking devices and the Internet will be #*$&*ed.

I hope it fails

samurai_science said:

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I hope it fails

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It well may. But sooner rather than later it will be the reality.

Agents directing agents, measuring work, integrating, elaborating. More foot soldiers, officers, and generals than we can imagine.

More work? Create more agents.

Over_ed said:

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samurai_science said:

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I hope it fails

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It well may. But sooner rather than later it will be the reality.

Agents directing agents, measuring work, integrating, elaborating. More foot soldiers, officers, and generals than we can imagine.

More work? Create more agents.

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It's probably an H1b that's why I want it to fail

OP is Indian so I am pretty sure that's why he posted the article praising the Indians and their zany outside the box thinking.

Legacy code of what? Routers? HR Database?

Everything is a pretty broad category

Sea Speed said:

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OP is Indian so I am pretty sure that's why he posted the article praising the Indians and their zany outside the box thinking.

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Since when have they ever been to think outside the box?

Fightin_Aggie said:

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Legacy code of what? Routers? HR Database?

Everything is a pretty broad category

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Probably a lot of COBOL.

Sea Speed said:

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OP is Indian so I am pretty sure that's why he posted the article praising the Indians and their zany outside the box thinking.

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So the guy whose post history is heavily anti-H1B is praising indians? That's some zany outside the box thinking you got there.

Between illegals and businesses/politicians the people of America are getting screwed over bigtime!!

Instead of Thing 1 and Thing 2. It should be H-1B ONE and H-1B TWO

?v=1736355389&width=600

There is actually a Dr. Suess store, which I think is pretty cool!!!

https://shop.drseuss.com/

BharatAg said:

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Sea Speed said:

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OP is Indian so I am pretty sure that's why he posted the article praising the Indians and their zany outside the box thinking.

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So the guy whose post history is heavily anti-H1B is praising indians? That's some zany outside the box thinking you got there.

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Yea honestly I can't understand that part of his posting history tbh. I'm sure there is an angle though.

Decay said:

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Jeetu Patel is basically me having the name Crackerton McSmith

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I wondered if anyone else would notice that. It is hysterical

Decay said:

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Jeetu Patel is basically me having the name Crackerton McSmith III

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FIFY

They are not replicating it, they are refactoring it. Look up the definition OP.

And It's not 4 weeks.

Many of the Indians I work with are obsessed with getting AI to do their jobs. Don't they see where this leads? Do they think they will still get paid if the bots do their jobs for them? Total midwit thinking.

Ozzy Osbourne said:

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Many of the Indians I work with are obsessed with getting AI to do their jobs. Don't they see where this leads? Do they think they will still get paid if the bots do their jobs for them? Total midwit thinking.

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They use AI to do their jobs because it does it better and faster than they can do it.

All.it takes is one Indian using it to kick everyone else's ass and the rest are forced to follow suit.

My job now is telling Claude what to do.

Worked software projects my entire career. On my last project now which has a legion of overseas software 'engineers' who can't code their way out of a wet paper sack. CLAUDE and other such tools will tsunami these folks into other lines of work. I've used Claude on some data and software analysis and been incredibly impressed. I spoke to a distant relative last week - another old like me - and he is using Claude to manage their entire production support operating. It manages the queues, detects issues, makes fixes and migrates code. Very impressive.

Yeah I'm just worried they'll just outsource the AI guy since it's not long before LLMs code better than anyone period. What happens when you're the world's best traffic director after the traffic light is invented?

Bobaloo said:

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Worked software projects my entire career. On my last project now which has a legion of overseas software 'engineers' who can't code their way out of a wet paper sack. CLAUDE and other such tools will tsunami these folks into other lines of work. I've used Claude on some data and software analysis and been incredibly impressed. I spoke to a distant relative last week - another old like me - and he is using Claude to manage their entire production support operating. It manages the queues, detects issues, makes fixes and migrates code. Very impressive.

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I have been out of serious coding / proprietary architectures for many years, doing more data science after I stopped teaching. So, rusty does not begin to describe my current coding skills. And I have been using second tier tools (like Grok/gemini).

But I like to game and Witcher 3 has a new version out. I gave grok bot about 250 mods I wanted to integrate into a modlist, create custom menu pages, and configure (as much as possible) to be able to pick an choose mods as well as winners/losers on conflicts.

:-). It even goes out everyday, looks for changes, summarizes, and keeps a separate list for the latest and greatest. It refactors old mods to use the newest architecture. Grok Bot also does my CAD using python to generate fairly complex components and 3d assemblies for printing. Who needs to know Autocad/Freecad/Blender ? (admittedly some limitations here.)

The democratization of programming is real. I could have done all of this w/o knowing much of anything about coding at all.

Decay said:

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Yeah I'm just worried they'll just outsource the AI guy since it's not long before LLMs code better than anyone period. What happens when you're the world's best traffic director after the traffic light is invented?

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Start a business directing traffic outside of Mega Churches on Sundays?

I no longer write code at work but that was one of the most satisfying parts of my career. When I had a problem to solve and many days/weeks to get it done. I'd hope that I had no nervous manager constantly bother me asking for status every hour interrupting my thought process as I gone into the zone.

Looks like things are changing a lot.

I use code to do small tasks with my photos or my investing and I don't write them myself anymore. I just ask Claude or ChatGPT. I am now working on an AI feature with an engineer overseas where I am directing him and he writes the code. I can see that he uses Claude though he thought I wouldn't find out. He just needed to go easy on the silly emojis in the streamlit code.

Charpie said:

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What could possibly go wrong?

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Depends on the quality of the regression tests.

"AI" is mostly great at translating messy and obfuscated code to readable pseudocode. Then it's just a matter of a human writing new code with modern tools.

Decay said:

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What happens when you're the world's best traffic director after the traffic light is invented?

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You get paid well when the lights can't handle a situation.

Over_ed said:

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Bobaloo said:

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Worked software projects my entire career. On my last project now which has a legion of overseas software 'engineers' who can't code their way out of a wet paper sack. CLAUDE and other such tools will tsunami these folks into other lines of work. I've used Claude on some data and software analysis and been incredibly impressed. I spoke to a distant relative last week - another old like me - and he is using Claude to manage their entire production support operating. It manages the queues, detects issues, makes fixes and migrates code. Very impressive.

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I have been out of serious coding / proprietary architectures for many years, doing more data science after I stopped teaching. So, rusty does not begin to describe my current coding skills. And I have been using second tier tools (like Grok/gemini).

But I like to game and Witcher 3 has a new version out. I gave grok bot about 250 mods I wanted to integrate into a modlist, create custom menu pages, and configure (as much as possible) to be able to pick an choose mods as well as winners/losers on conflicts.

:-). It even goes out everyday, looks for changes, summarizes, and keeps a separate list for the latest and greatest. It refactors old mods to use the newest architecture. Grok Bot also does my CAD using python to generate fairly complex components and 3d assemblies for printing. Who needs to know Autocad/Freecad/Blender ? (admittedly some limitations here.)

The democratization of programming is real. I could have done all of this w/o knowing much of anything about coding at all.

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I just did this with Skyrim. Ha. Worked great. The last time I tried to play Skyrim with mods (just a couple of years ago) it was pointless because I could never get the mod order to work without Skyrim crashing out every 5 minutes. I was using recommended lists from gaming sites and they simply didn't work.

YouBet said:

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Over_ed said:

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...
But I like to game and Witcher 3 has a new version out. I gave grok bot about 250 mods I wanted to integrate into a modlist, create custom menu pages, and configure (as much as possible) to be able to pick an choose mods as well as winners/losers on conflicts.

:-). It even goes out everyday, looks for changes, summarizes, and keeps a separate list for the latest and greatest. It refactors old mods to use the newest architecture. Grok Bot also does my CAD using python to generate fairly complex components and 3d assemblies for printing. Who needs to know Autocad/Freecad/Blender ? (admittedly some limitations here.)

The democratization of programming is real. I could have done all of this w/o knowing much of anything about coding at all.

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I just did this with Skyrim. Ha. Worked great. The last time I tried to play Skyrim with mods (just a couple of years ago) it was pointless because I could never get the mod order to work without Skyrim crashing out every 5 minutes. I was using recommended lists from gaming sites and they simply didn't work.

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Yeah I did the Skyrin thing with a private Mod List. The list developer had problems at school and some mental "issues" and spent untold hours updating and adding to the list, patches... His list ruined his life. I am doing everything he did and not doing much. A different world is unfolding.

Ozzy Osbourne said:

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Many of the Indians I work with are obsessed with getting AI to do their jobs. Don't they see where this leads? Do they think they will still get paid if the bots do their jobs for them? Total midwit thinking.

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Engineering is solving problems not writing code. A lot of SW teams are transitioning to use Claude to write code. So far been wildly productive for us.

Time from idea to strategy to outcome is much faster.

It's cisco. Whatever a third grader could scrawl on one sheet of paper in crayon would be better than the bug infested, security as a sieve tripe they have now would be an improvement.

CascadiaAg said:

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Cisco's president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel i



The "him" is Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy

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Oy vey. What have we done allowing Indians to take over tech in this country?