Fortune reported on 30 October that Cisco president Jeetu Patel gave engineer Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy unlimited AI tokens, “with the final goal of refactoring 98% of Cisco’s legacy code within 24 months.” Patel: “I’ve given him unlimited tokens because he’s going to refactor code,”
Spread evenly, 98% in 24 months is about 4 percentage points of the legacy code a month, by our arithmetic. Fortune does not say the work will be spread evenly.
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The key insight: Fortune reports that Cisco gave one engineer unlimited AI tokens with a goal of refactoring 98% of its legacy code within 24 months; that is about 4 percentage points a month if spread evenly, by our arithmetic, and no cost or results are reported yet.
Fortune says Krishnamurthy “joined Cisco in 2025 after the $429 billion tech giant acquired EzDubs”, a real-time translation startup he cofounded in 2023. Patel found him “five levels” below him, “buried away in the organization doing something unstrategic.”
According to Fortune, “Krishnamurthy reckoned he could rewrite Cisco’s legacy code with a two-person team.” Fortune adds: “So he has given himself four weeks to prove it,”
Patel told Fortune: “So I’m like, you can go, you can go nuts.” He also said “Tension is good,” and “I actually try to create tension in the teams because you want to have enough friction on the ideas.”
Fortune’s page title reads “Cisco is letting a 27-year-old refactor 98% of its legacy code with unlimited AI tokens: ‘Go nuts’”.
Cisco’s stated goal of refactoring 98% of its legacy code within 24 months, with a four-week proof window for a two-person team, per Fortune. The even-pace line of about 4 percentage points a month is our arithmetic, not Cisco’s plan.
Patel said about a third of his team is experienced operators, a third outside-in systems thinkers and a third entrepreneurial, AI-native founders and engineers, Fortune reports. This week Proton’s CTO said AI wrote 90% of October code.
The article, by Orianna Rosa Royle, was published on 30 October at 3:00 AM ET. The story ranked #19 on the Hacker News front page on 31 October, with 171 points.
The Structural Read
As we read Fortune, the budget constraint here is time, not tokens: four weeks for a two-person team to prove the approach.
As we read the contrast with our earlier coverage, Accenture capped Claude funding at $29 a month per employee, while Cisco gave one engineer unlimited tokens, per Fortune.
As we read the gap in the reporting, the cost side is unknown: Fortune gives no token spend or cost figure.
Jeetu Patel, president, Cisco, to Fortune, 30 October 2026
“I’ve given him unlimited tokens because he’s going to refactor code,”
Three Implications
FOR CISCO Fortune reports a goal of refactoring 98% of Cisco’s legacy code within 24 months, with four weeks to prove it.
FOR ENGINEERING BUDGETS Fortune reports no token spend or cost figure for the unlimited allowance.
FOR HIRING Patel said about a third of his team is entrepreneurial, AI-native founders and engineers, Fortune reports.
The framework says “As companies move from chatbots to thousands of autonomous agentic workflows running 24/7, the line item that used to be a rounding error becomes the budget.”
As we read it, the framework treats tokens as a budget line; Fortune reports no token spend for Cisco’s project, and the framework predates this story and does not discuss Cisco.
What Is Not Established
Fortune does not report how many tokens Krishnamurthy has used, what they cost, or how much of the legacy code has been refactored so far.
This Week In The AI Supercycle
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This week’s issue: the AI build is not short of demand for its parts. It is short of cheap money, and its end revenue rests on a narrow base of large, often venture-funded buyers.
Fortune reports that Cisco gave one engineer unlimited AI tokens with a goal of refactoring 98% of its legacy code within 24 months. That is about 4 percentage points a month if spread evenly, by our arithmetic; no cost or results are reported yet.
A note on sourcing. Facts and quotes come from Fortune’s 30 October article. The monthly pace is our arithmetic and assumes an even pace, which Fortune does not state. We did not contact Cisco.
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.
