Cisco gave a 27-year-old unlimited AI tokens and four weeks to refactor legacy code

A four-week proof, a 24-month target

Fortune reports that Cisco president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel handed a code-modernization project to Padmanabhan "Paddy" Krishnamurthy, 27, who came to Cisco when it acquired his real-time translation startup EzDubs in 2025. Krishnamurthy proposed refactoring legacy code with a two-person team. Patel gave him unlimited AI tokens and four weeks to prove it works, against a longer target of refactoring 98% of the legacy code in 24 months. Patel frames it as a hiring philosophy: companies that skip early-career talent lose fresh questions.

The thread asks what the rewrite is for

The most common complaint was that the article never names a goal. One commenter put the risk in domain terms:

"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?"

The counter-evidence came from a commenter whose employer's embedded product lost both maintainers to retirement, who reported that "the entire codebase was re-written, documented, and modernized in a matter of about 3 months". The four-week clock tests whether a rewrite can preserve the quirks that the old code encoded, which is what the first commenter asked and Fortune does not say.