Cisco President Jeetu Patel gave a 27-year-old unlimited AI tokens to rewrite legacy code
Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel revealed at a small dinner organized by Fortune that he had given the company a major project to 27-year-old Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy (Paddy). The goal is first to prove feasibility in four weeks, and ultimately to rewrite about 98% of Cisco’s legacy code within 24 months. Patel explicitly said he had opened unlimited AI tokens to him and said he could go wild.
Paddy co-founded the real-time translation app EzDubs with a partner in 2023. After Cisco acquired it in November 2025, he was folded into the Webex-related team. Although he has founder and CEO experience, he is five levels below Patel in the organizational structure. Patel described him as having previously been buried in the organization doing unimportant work. After the two spoke at the San Francisco office, Paddy proposed rewriting Cisco’s decades-old legacy code with a two-person team; Patel said even the most enthusiastic AI users on his team had not thought of this path. Patel then provided him with unlimited tokens and set a four-week validation period and a 24-month target of 98%.
Patel also said he wanted to create friction at the idea level within the team to introduce new perspectives, and said that veteran employees find it hard to raise the questions that only inexperienced people would ask. He views interns as reverse mentors, and cited the example of a Stanford scholarship student who obtained an internship through persistent follow-up and solved tasks left unfinished by veteran employees. His team currently consists roughly of three parts: senior managers who understand Cisco’s operations, external people with a broad perspective, and AI-native founders/engineers. Source: public information.
Original sources:
Title: Cisco is letting a 27-year-old rewrite 98% of its legacy code with unlimited AI tokens: ‘Go nuts’
Publisher: Fortune (Orianna Rosa Royle)
Publication date: 2026-10-30
URL: https://fortune.com/2026/10/30/cisco-president-jeetu-patel-gen-z-27-year-old-unlimited-ai-tokens-rewrite-legacy-code-entry-level-jobs/
Source type: first-hand interview report
Verification status: original text read
Supporting content: unlimited tokens, 24-month 98% target, four-week validation, organizational hierarchy, conversation process, team composition and hiring philosophyTitle: Cisco acquires translation startup EzDubs
Publisher: TechCrunch
Publication date: 2025-11-17
URL: https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/17/cisco-acquires-translation-startup-ezdubs/
Source type: acquisition report
Verification status: checked
Supporting content: EzDubs founding time, Cisco acquisition time, Paddy’s joining background
ABAB AI Insight
The core of Patel’s arrangement is to redefine the traditionally senior-team-led task of legacy code modernization as an experiment that can be catalyzed by a small AI-native team. The 98% and 24 months are explicit targets, not completed results; the current stage is only a four-week validation period, and Fortune did not disclose the specific definition of “rewrite,” the measurement method, or any delivered results. The significance of unlimited tokens is that it removes the cost constraint on AI use, allowing the team to read and generate code at scale, but it does not change the final responsibility for code correctness, compatibility, and production stability.
Cisco was founded in 1984, has a complex product line, and a large body of legacy code; the traditional path depends on senior engineers’ knowledge of the system’s history. Paddy’s path is the opposite: he proposed the feasibility hypothesis of a “two-person team + AI” from a founder’s perspective and received direct resources from senior leadership. Patel publicly emphasized that he had previously been “buried in the organization,” indicating that talent integration after the acquisition did not automatically unlock his ability; only after senior leadership intervened did the task allocation change. This contrasts with the current trend among many companies of reducing campus hiring and using AI to replace entry-level roles, but this case itself is still a one-off authorization rather than a systemic change to hiring structure.
Patel’s remarks that “friction over ideas is beneficial, interpersonal friction is harmful” and that interns are “reverse mentors” reflect his judgment about how organizational knowledge is refreshed: senior managers provide knowledge of how the system operates, outside people provide a broad perspective, and AI-native founders provide new questions and new methods. Any one of the three groups alone is insufficient; only the combination can produce results. Similar views also appear in Josh Kushner’s and Tastewise CEO Alon Chen’s preferences for less-experienced talent, but the special feature of the Cisco case is that the authorized person had already entered the company through an acquisition and was directly given resources and goals that touched the core codebase. Actual results will still depend on the four-week validation outcome and subsequent code quality, integration, and operations costs, rather than token usage itself.
ABAB News · Cognition Laws
Unlimited tokens solve the cost constraint of use, not the problem of code correctness and production responsibility.
Senior leadership proactively pulled someone up from the bottom of the organization and gave them a core task, showing that talent value release after an acquisition does not happen automatically.
98% and 24 months are target settings; the current stage is only a four-week validation and has not yet entered a measurable delivery phase.