Yeah - code rewrites are generally a thing to be avoided since the requirements of older production code is typically not fully documented, even if it originally had been. Production code accumulates bug fixes, performance tweaks, special cases, additional requirements, etc, with documentation and test suites not always being updated in sync.

Your rewritten codebase will presumably look much cleaner and more maintainable that what it's aiming to replace, but it's easy to miss the purpose/necessity of all of the old "cruft" which need not be just poor coding but rather later enhancements not anticipated by the original design whose implementation was therefore crufty.

Does anyone here work at Cisco, and have any insight as to why a rewrite is considered necessary and might be expected to succeed?

It's because the old bits are starting to stink a bit from age. Get those stinky bits out of here, I say! Let the AI make some new bits!

Because it's Cisco?

We had to turn off a bunch of on-by-default features in the system I'm deploying now because IOS matches too aggressively and decides that arbitrary UDP datagrams are DHCP requests or PTP packets that need rewriting (and then dropping when they turn out to not be DHCP/PTP). I have to think that an AI rewrite with a today-good model would recognize the lax checks and do them better.

It is not in Rust.

No goal, and no results, but a younger guy was enthused about AI!

AI has electrolytes!

It's what Cisco does, as they've done several times before.

It's got tabs instead of spaces. Yuck!

Somebody needs a promo packet. Duh

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