Cisco Gives Engineer Unlimited AI Tokens to Rewrite Legacy Code

Cisco has handed one of its engineers unlimited access to AI tokens to refactor a large body of the company's legacy code. Jeetu Patel, Cisco's president and chief product officer, described the decision to journalists at a roundtable.

"I gave him unlimited tokens so he could get on with refactoring the code," Patel said. "I told him: go for it, pull out all the stops."

A founder lost in the org chart

The engineer is 27-year-old Padmanabhan Krishnamurthi, known as "Paddy". He joined Cisco in 2025 after the company acquired EzDubs, a startup he co-founded in 2023. According to Patel, he had been "lost" in the company, working on something with no strategic importance, about five levels below Patel in the hierarchy. That changed when Patel met him in person at Cisco's San Francisco office and was impressed by his communication skills and work ethic.

Krishnamurthi argued that a team of just two people could rewrite Cisco's outdated code. Patel said even the most AI-savvy people on his own team had not thought in those terms. Krishnamurthi now has four weeks to prove it. The ultimate goal is to rewrite 98% of Cisco's legacy code within 24 months.

Tension as a management tool

Patel is now looking for more "Paddys": young employees who challenge the status quo. He says his team is roughly one-third veteran Cisco managers, one-third systems thinkers hired from the market, and one-third founders and engineers for whom AI is native. Separately, he says, none is as effective as all three together.

He argues that Gen Z staff should not be limited to data entry and can even teach experienced colleagues. Patel admits this creates friction, and he says he creates it on purpose, as long as conflict centers on ideas rather than people. He treats every intern as a "reverse mentor" and recruits at colleges.

One example is a Stanford scholarship student who listened quietly after a talk. Patel asked her to email a monthly report on what she had learned about AI. She never missed one, won an internship at Cisco and reworked a task that experienced employees had been unable to solve. Patel now wants her on his team.