alt Hacker NewsCisco gives engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite legacy code
Comments
There's no goal mentioned in this article as why 98% of the code needs rewriting.
First LLM PTSD case coming soon. You heard it here first, folks.
Don't they have no other AI news to share
Is this like a PR piece for the guy? It's odd to see him singled out in a piece that would be normally be about the company, the CEO or the decision itself.
We have an embedded system in one of product offerings that was largely developed using a bunch of “antiquated” technologies (over the past twenty years) and over the past year the two software devs that maintained it have retired. This normally would have big problem, but the entire codebase was re-written, documented, and modernized in a matter of about 3 months (for about $20k in tokens, and a mid level developer spending 50% of their time on it over that period). So it doesn’t surprise me to think a company like Cisco has piles of situations like this.
Never thought I'd say this, but, "thank god I use unifi".
As much as I dislike AI, having worked on Cisco gear for years, I can't imagine AI can put out a worse product. If the re-write is full of bugs and security holes and static SSH keys, then it has not changed at all.
There also seems to be some weird hero-worship from the CEO, directed at this 27-YO engineer? Like, "he is the one who can save us."
Anybody have an estimate of how much that is going to cost in token cost?
Unless they also have 750K tests like sqlite do, I can't imagine this will go well, even if/especially if the legacy code warrants a refactor.
Does this one engineer have the domain knowledge to know WHY the old code was written the way it was, and what the graybeards would have done differently if they could start again now?
Otherwise he's just going to replicate all the legacy bugs and questionable design decisions.
Well they say the last 20% of the work takes 80% of the time so if he gets the prototype in 4 weeks, which I have no doubt he will be able to do, and assuming that prototype is the first 80% of work, then he should be able to do this in 20 weeks. He even has some margin! Looking forward to seeing the results
Most successful companies and innovative ideas come from middle aged founders and inventors. Silicon Valley loves the romantic notion of a contrarian young adult or even teenager "seeing what nobody else sees" , but they are the exception and not the rule.
Misleading title, someone should fix it. 98% of legacy code. Check out the full title of the article.
"According to a report by Fortune" - here's that report: https://fortune.com/2026/10/30/cisco-president-jeetu-patel-g...
Fortune's source was the CEO himself:
> “I’ve given him unlimited tokens because he’s going to refactor code,” Patel told Fortune at a small roundtable dinner. “So I’m like, you can go, you can go nuts.”
I think that Fortune story is better than the Tom's Hardware one. It ties the Cisco anecdote into a larger trend of some people deliberately hiring younger, less experienced developers for their AI projects - because they are more likely to be "AI native".
I guess Cisco decided it has not alienated its customers enough till now & its finally time to get people running for the woods - at least if those peoples would like their network to continue working.
Literally anyone can do this
I think Cisco is an interesting use case for AI, because it's code, probably:
-Works according to a defined specification
-Within the bounds of that specification, has a lot of code written to optimize speed, cost, latency, etc - all measureable goals
-Written in c, with all it's weakness
-Given limitless engineering work, some could be ported to better hardware
-the new system could be automatically compared to the old system for functional correctness
All those factors fit well with agent based development.
Btw, many of them are true in general to embedded systems.
Cisco that powers more than half of the backbone of all things online? Are we trying to lose control of AGI as soon as it emerges??
He'll pull it off, get feature complete, and spend a year or two with better models as they are released ironing it out. We just did an experiment, in four weeks generated 3500 commits, 200k sloc with a 1:1.15 ratio of production to test code and it all works very well. We are well on our way from 10x to 100x.
What's so special about the other 2%, is it good?
ha ha .. that sounds like an Onion article. To be fair - if they did a narrow refactor to focus on fixing only obvious and known issues, they probably might be able to pull it off because a ton of that code is hairballs.
They need to cut cost & to figure out productivity per engineer. They're doing this b/c they are going to significantly cut their engineer workforce.
Shocking to realize how many on HN do not realize that this is NOT a tall order, and has not been a feat for at least six months.
If i was an ex founder and having a low profile in a big company, I am doing it on purpose, either to have a peaceful life or heal from a burnout, definitely I don’t want to be on the spot like that, especially when I am not innovating anything new nor I will take any meaningful credit after since it will mostly go to AI, worse, if it didn’t work out I will have my career ruined being known to had an unlimited supply of tokens and still failed.
its never unlimited....
I mean, this is going to be easy. I've worked on Cisco gear before and this will be a simple job for AI. The big question is what the goal is... so you've rewritten new C++ code or ported to a newer version of Linux? Or you've unified the codebase of the Catalyst + Meraki switches?
Not clear to me what he's doing. Re-implement switching? Simplify features? Reduce LoC? Add test coverage? Either way, AI in that world will be helpful. I'm sure it'll spot all kinds of problems in opaque drivers that are hard to follow from MF specs.
Maybe Stanford found some more of their stolen code being used by Cisco. /s Cisco origins is a fascinating subject.
So there's a real risk that Cisco might become history in just a few years. Taking that kind of risk with a rather unproven technology has to be psychosis. Or is that kind of belief a form of Religion?
rewriting code is the easy part
it's the testing in real world usage to shake out all the edge cases and bugs that's hard and that you can't just write unit tests for
[dead]
[dead]
I suspect we are approaching a world where this makes sense to do annually. Opus 5.5 is good enough to improve on most codebases, and Opus 7 will no doubt be good enough to improve on that.
'98% of the company's legacy code' is very vague. How many code bases? How each code base is connected to any supported Cisco product? How many KLOC the company's legacy code?
Having to rewrite decades worth of legacy Cisco code is going to make Claude retire and start a goose farm.