Cisco gave a 27-year-old engineer unlimited tokens to rewrite legacy code
Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel said the company gave 27-year-old engineer Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy unlimited tokens to rewrite legacy code. Krishnamurthy co-founded the real-time translation startup EzDubs in 2023, and joined Cisco in 2025 after the company was acquired by Cisco. He promised that a two-person team could rewrite Cisco's legacy code, secured four weeks to validate it, and the ultimate goal is to refactor 98% of Cisco's legacy code within 24 months.
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Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel said in an interview with Fortune magazine that the company gave a 27-year-old engineer unlimited tokens to rewrite legacy code. Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, 27, co-founded the real-time translation startup EzDubs in 2023; the company was acquired by Cisco in 2025, after which he joined Cisco. The two had a conversation in the San Francisco office, where Krishnamurthy promised that a two-person team alone could rewrite Cisco's legacy code. He secured four weeks for himself to prove the idea, with the ultimate goal of refactoring 98% of Cisco's legacy code within 24 months.