Cisco president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel has given a 27-year-old engineer unlimited AI tokens to refactor the company’s code, Fortune reported on Friday. The final goal, per Fortune, is rewriting 98% of Cisco’s legacy code within 24 months.
Patel said on X the same day that the 2-to-3 person team is meant to catalyse the work and get Cisco’s core team “to own the final product”. Cisco had about 82,400 employees at the end of fiscal 2026, so the team is roughly one person in every 27,500 to 41,200, by our arithmetic.
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The key insight: Cisco has put a 2-to-3 person team with unlimited AI tokens on rewriting 98% of its legacy code within 24 months, according to Fortune and Jeetu Patel; by our arithmetic that team is roughly one in 27,500 to one in 41,200 of Cisco’s ~82,400 employees.
“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.”
The engineer is Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, who joined Cisco in 2025 when it acquired EzDubs, the real-time translation startup he co-founded in 2023, according to Fortune. Patel described him as “buried away in the organization doing something unstrategic”.
Fortune reports that Krishnamurthy reckoned he could rewrite Cisco’s legacy code with a two-person team, and that he has given himself four weeks to prove it. The article does not name the AI models or tools used, the size of the codebase, or a token budget.
Cisco research and development expense for fiscal 2024 to 2026, from its fiscal 2026 Form 10-K: $7.98 billion to $9.56 billion. The team Fortune and Jeetu Patel describe for the AI code rewrite is 2 to 3 people. Ratios are our arithmetic.
What Was Posted on X
This is INSANE. Ciscoโs president Jeetu Patel has given a 27-year-old engineer unlimited AI tokens to try to rewrite 98% of the companyโs legacy code within 24 months, Fortune reports.
Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy thinks he can do it with a two-person team. He has just four weeks to prove the approach.
Choblin summarised the Fortune report on X: Cisco president Jeetu Patel gave a 27-year-old engineer unlimited AI tokens to try to rewrite 98% of the company’s legacy code within 24 months, with four weeks to prove the approach.
multiple big tech companies have essentially one (very well paid) person who really knows how to use AI, and this โAI fixerโ is their great hope โ taking on projects and educating others.
problem is, some donโt have anyone, and a lot of those frontier people would rather work in a broadly AI-native company and find out what a team of people going this fast can do
Sarah Guo wrote on X that multiple big tech companies have essentially one well-paid person who really knows how to use AI, and that many frontier people would rather work in a broadly AI-native company.
What Patel Added on X
In a post on X at 14:55 UTC, Patel wrote: “The thing that we have done here is thought of this 2 to 3 person team team as someone that catalyzes the movement and gets the core team to own the final product.”
He also wrote that the effort is “important to have more memory-safe language code migrations that by definition reduce vulns”, and that “every engineer at Cisco will benefit from this experiment”.
Our Arithmetic
Cisco’s Form 10-K for fiscal 2026, the year ended 25 July, reports about 82,400 employees. Its research and development expense was $9.56 billion, up from $9.30 billion in fiscal 2025 and $7.98 billion in fiscal 2024, according to the filing’s financial data.
By our arithmetic, fiscal 2026 R&D was 15.1% of Cisco’s $63.3 billion revenue and averaged about $26.2 million a day. The 2-to-3 person team Patel describes is roughly one in 27,500 to one in 41,200 of the company’s staff.
The AI Fixer Model
Investor Sarah Guo, quote-posting a summary of the Fortune report on X, wrote that “multiple big tech companies have essentially one (very well paid) person who really knows how to use AI”, and that this “AI fixer” is “their great hope”. She added that “a lot of those frontier people would rather work in a broadly AI-native company”.
As we read Patel’s post, the small team is framed as a catalyst rather than a replacement: he says it gets the core team to own the final product.
As we read the Fortune report, the constraint being removed is spend on tokens, not headcount: Patel says he gave the engineer unlimited tokens to refactor code.
As we read the two sources together, neither gives the models, tools, token spend or codebase size, so the scale of the bet is stated as a goal, not a result.
Jeetu Patel, Cisco president, to Fortune
“I’ve given him unlimited tokens because he’s going to refactor code.”
Three Implications
FOR ENGINEERING LEADERS Patel says the 2-to-3 person team is meant to catalyse the work and get Cisco’s core team to own the final product.
FOR SECURITY TEAMS Patel wrote that the effort is important for memory-safe language code migrations that by definition reduce vulnerabilities.
FOR TALENT STRATEGY Sarah Guo wrote on X that many big tech companies rely on one well-paid AI fixer, and that frontier people would rather work in AI-native companies.
The framework puts it this way: “The new job of finance is to manage the ratio between the two — work produced per token burned.”
The framework is the owner’s general argument about AI spend, not evidence about Cisco; it does not discuss Cisco’s code rewrite.
What Is Not Established
Neither Fortune nor Patel’s post gives the AI models or tools in use, the token spend, the size of the legacy codebase, or what share of it has been rewritten so far. Fortune describes 98% as the final goal and four weeks as the window to prove the approach; neither source reports results.
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Cisco has put a 2-to-3 person team with unlimited AI tokens on a goal of rewriting 98% of its legacy code within 24 months, according to Fortune and Patel. Patel describes the team as a catalyst for Cisco’s core engineers, who will own the final product.
A note on sourcing. Details of the rewrite come from Fortune’s report of 30 October 2026 and Jeetu Patel’s post on X that day, read that day. Cisco employee and R&D figures come from its fiscal 2026 Form 10-K; ratios are our arithmetic.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
