Originally published at ConvertElementor.
Cisco has done something almost unheard of in enterprise tech: it handed a 27-year-old founder unlimited AI tokens and a team of two, and asked them to rewrite up to 98% of Cisco's legacy code.
The story broke in Fortune on October 30, 2026. Cisco needs a total rewrite of its products because its legacy code has now become the biggest obstacle to product development. Its old codebase is not directly backend-independent — the stack has changed so dramatically that even Cisco's own engineers could not easily work with it.
Who got the job
Paddy Krishnamurthy, 27, co-founder of EzDubs (a Y Combinator startup), and one other engineer. Cisco's Jeetu Patel is backing the experiment personally. The pair proved themselves in a 4-week proof of concept before Cisco committed.
Their target: rewrite 98% of Cisco's legacy code in 24 months. For scale, Cisco now does $15.8 billion in a single quarter — a record — and runs some of the most complex networking software on earth, including IOS XE, networking switches and unified communications.
Why this is a big deal
- It is a bet on AI-assisted coding at enterprise scale, not a side project. Unlimited tokens means cost is not the constraint — correctness and architecture are.
- Legacy code is the bottleneck everywhere. If Cisco can rewrite decades of code with a tiny team plus AI, every large company with a legacy codebase will ask the same question.
- It is also a risk. A rewrite that big, that fast, has to keep security, compatibility and reliability intact. Cisco's customers run critical infrastructure.
This is one of the clearest signals yet that AI coding has moved from helping individual developers to reshaping how the biggest companies rebuild their software.
Read the full article on ConvertElementor: https://convertelementor.com/blog/cisco-just-gave-a-27-year-old-unlimited-ai-tokens-to-rewrite-98-of-its-legacy-code-here-s-what-it-really-means-for-developers-20261106
