Cisco has taken a bold step in software modernization by providing a single engineer with an unlimited artificial intelligence budget to overhaul nearly all of its legacy code within a two-year timeframe.
According to Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel, speaking to Fortune, the initiative is being spearheaded by Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy. The 27-year-old engineer originally joined the technology giant through its 2025 acquisition of translation startup EzDubs. Krishnamurthy initially gave himself a strict four-week window to demonstrate the feasibility of the massive code rewrite.
The ambitious project highlights how major enterprise infrastructure companies are increasingly turning to advanced AI tokens and specialized engineering talent to accelerate the retirement of aging software systems. By granting unlimited resources to a lone developer, Cisco is testing the limits of AI-driven code generation and automated translation at an unprecedented scale.