Jeetu Patel gave Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy unlimited AI tokens and told him to rewrite 98% of Cisco’s legacy code within 24 months. The assignment turns a young engineer into a test case for how far AI can push enterprise code modernization.
Patel’s 24-month code target
Patel told Fortune, “I’ve given him unlimited tokens because he’s going to refactor code” and, “So I’m like, you can go, you can go nuts.” The goal is not a vague cleanup, but a rewrite of 98% of Cisco’s legacy code, with four weeks set aside for Krishnamurthy to prove the approach.
That puts a hard number on the work instead of a loose mandate. If Cisco measures progress honestly, the obvious yardstick is share of code touched, rewritten, and left stable enough to ship, not just how much AI output was generated.
EzDubs and Cisco in 2025
Krishnamurthy is 27 years old. He joined Cisco in 2025 after Cisco acquired EzDubs, the real-time translation startup he cofounded in 2023.
That background matters because Patel said he found Krishnamurthy “buried away in the organization doing something unstrategic.” The move pulls a former founder into a central engineering problem and tests whether a small team can move a huge codebase faster than a traditional rewrite process.
Baya, Gen Z, and trust
Patel also wants more young hires who will challenge the system and the status quo. He treats every intern as kind of a reverse mentor, and he said he gives college talks to find students who are hungry.
One example is Baya, a Stanford scholarship student who later became a Cisco intern after emailing Patel every month with what she had learned about AI and never missing one. Patel said, “Tension is good,” and added, “What you have to do is establish enough trust with people to say you are going to be expected to create unreasonable goals for yourself,” which shows why he is willing to pair Gen Z energy with long-tenured teams even when friction follows.
The unanswered piece is what specific systems or codebase segments Krishnamurthy will rewrite over the next 24 months.
