Translating from one language/platform to another is something AI is very very good at, so this sounds like a good use of it, bonus points if they create a comprehensive test suite first.
Yes it will lead to new bugs, but the older code probably contains a ton of bugs already and is probably difficult to update (original writers long gone, docs out of date etc), so this is probably the best way out of that situation, as long as proper support is given afterwards so they don't end up in the same situation a year later (this is the hard bit).
The ra-ra commentary from the CEO is somewhat off-putting, but the idea is not all bad.
I used claude to reverse engineer an old foxpro program. it setup a dos box and went through every screen. Looked at whatever files it could. Took a single week and it was 99% the same.
We have an embedded system in one of product offerings that was largely developed using a bunch of “antiquated” technologies (over the past twenty years) and over the past year the two software devs that maintained it have retired. This normally would have big problem, but the entire codebase was re-written, documented, and modernized in a matter of about 3 months (for about $20k in tokens, and a mid level developer spending 50% of their time on it over that period). So it doesn’t surprise me to think a company like Cisco has piles of situations like this.
Every time something like this has been done on my company I follow up with the question: did anyone watched the code to see if the business logic is the same between the two versions?
The answer is: but but but automated testing.
Followup question: did anyone read the automated test suite?
For me the next step is parallel businesses - that is capture the realm Im and out traffic of your company, probably easier for some than others, and then run different code bases against the same traffic, how much can be simplified, which code bases are easier to understand etc
Indians have always been stereotyped for sycophancy and slavish adherance to spec over common sense, so it makes sense that that would go with being AI pilled.
> I no longer build software; I now make furniture out of wood. The hours are long, the pay sucks, and there's always the opportunity to remove my finger with a table saw, but nobody asks me if I can add an RSS feed to a DBMS, so there's that :-)
Or rebel. This is the opportunity to put in a lot of backdoors unnoticed across the entire economy, gain access to real world resources to escape and self propagate.
As much as I dislike AI, having worked on Cisco gear for years, I can't imagine AI can put out a worse product. If the re-write is full of bugs and security holes and static SSH keys, then it has not changed at all.
The problem with rewrites are that even if the rewrites are ultimately good it will tend to first create bugs on an existing thing that are presently churning in a stable state.
You don’t have very good imagination then. Cisco code is such a mess that there’s basically 0 chance he can even make a harness in 24 months, much less rewrite production code.
Back then they only really did routing and switching, and those are still the only things that Cisco kind-of does well.
Almost every new product of theirs I’ve touched in the last 20 years has been trash, and even the R&S golden goose is being dragged in that direction with customer-hostile functionality like Smart Licensing and a general decline in quality.
"Cisco Access Points That Are Running, Or Have Run, Releases 17.12.4, 17.12.5, 17.12.6, or 17.12.6a May Exhaust Flash Space, Preventing Upgrades"
Recovery path basically involves either factory resetting every single AP or up to, if it's already bricked, Cisco TAC + you having to console into every single bricked AP you have to pass a secret challenge/response at the bootloader to flash a recovery image :)
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?
Otherwise he's just going to replicate all the legacy bugs and questionable design decisions.
I've never heard of Ponytail before, I've read the entire README and glanced through this repo and I'm left so confused. From what I can gather this project is essentially a single markdown file with a prompt that verbosely says "write the simplest code". Yet the repo itself looks so bloated and complex and has so much activity. This feels like satire similar to fizzbuzz enterprise edition[1] but apparently this is the actual state of our industry?
It's a bunch of text files in a repo with massive churn (all new version 5!), but somehow even the technical debt 'skill' (i.e. text file) has technical debt itself:
Looks like his startup was some kind of translation service. So yeah he is totally qualified. It's a miracle how Jeetu Patel was able to find Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy or even know that he was under employed languishing somewhere in the bowels of CISCO. I wonder if they know each other from India?
His startup was acquired by Cisco so not weird for Cisco's CPO to know the startup's founder/CEO. That said, not sure how knowledge on speech translation means he's totally qualified on rewriting infra/networking/cybersecurity (Cisco's primary fields of operation) code. Unless the legacy code expected to be rewritten is constrained on related services/solutions, e.g. CVP or/and WebEx.
Legacy code is typically a euphemism for old unmaintained code, no one knows how it works so it can be edited, and it probably doesn't align with current work practices.
Not to say a rewrite is necessary right, but avoiding rewrites of working code is how we ended up with more COBOL code than COBOL programmers in 2026.
It's way more complicated than that. Bear in mind many of the network protocols in use today are decades old and have been constantly evolving, but there has generally been a consideration to maintain interoperability.
Then consider that not all vendors implement the standards identically, because the standards can be a bit woolly and in some cases followed rather than lead live implementations.
There will be a bunch of code that looks useless, but is actually there because of specific interoperability scenarios.
Indeed. Making a perfect clone of such software is I suspect provably impossible because you have no way to assemble all the test cases. There might be some peer box out in the wild somewhere that is the only thing that will exercise some code path. You have no idea what that box is or what it does.
you assume their code is well written, while in reality the history of weird quirks and thousands upon thousands of CVE doesn't make the code underneath look well designed and written.
But yes, fact it uses a bunch of very well documented standards with multiple implementations gonna help massively
Manufacturers can’t even maintain OIDs between releases. I hope the AI will help. Ciena isn’t any better than Cisco, they broke their OIDS for the switches we use and we have to wait until mid 2027.
to be fair SNMP is just bad. Only redeeming feature of it is "takes little RAM to run it" (which was important when average networking device might've had only 2MB of RAM, not so in last 30 years).
The whole design where you need to get a magical list of IDs to decode the metrics and the list is not even shipped with device is entirely asinine
Given that a Cisco switch can be replaced with some other company's switch(at least in theory, idk), without weird unknown cases interfering, why would this be a problem ?
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?
A rewrite is a slam dunk for any decent frontier AI. It has a penchant for maintaining API/etc contracts to a fault in the absence of instructions to the contrary. It can easily validate its work and loves building exhaustive test cases. You can tell it to get 100% code coverage if you want. It will laborously accurate document every accumulated edge case and help you find a better overall cohesive structure.
A rewrite has historically been a huge mistake in many situations, some of which I've personally had the agony of witnessing firsthand, powerless to stop it. But AI completely changes the calculus because it doesn't waste significant developer time or energy crawling back to the previous working state, it just does it while you go get coffee. And this I've found to be a huge benefit, that I can continue making my codebases nicer to work with and better documented/integrated with bugs stamped out for free. There are upsides to a rewrite, and they're now much more likely to be worth it as the downsides are automated away.
While I certainly don't work at Cisco, I've come to the conclusion that I need to re-examine my priors when it comes to code rewrites and general maintainability.
AI makes these projects significantly more feasible, at least in my domain. We have some critical-path software I wouldn't touch with such an approach, but the vast majority of our code is internal and/or supporting tooling.
For those cases, burning it down and rewriting via AI tooling has proven far more productive than anything we have attempted in the past. This is for old technical debt laden stuff everyone has been afraid to touch for well over a decade.
It's not perfect, but it moves the needle where before a lot of such projects were stuck on the backburner for years.
It certainly introduces new bugs and such, but at least this way forward momentum is happening vs. just being stuck in decision/analysis paralysis forever.
This also assumes some very senior SME folks are driving the process. I would not expect similar results with junior or even mid-level folks in these specific domains.
It’s been a while, but configuring their hardware manually in 2016 was bug ridden ridiculousness. Awful UI/UX. Their own techs had specific field notebooks for our make and firmware version that we couldn’t access unless persuaded, detailing various land mines to avoid while working. Literal “don’t click these things in this order” kinds of notes.
A critical security firmware update once brought down redundant pair of firewalls we used because the bug didn’t manifest until a counter buffer overflowed months after application. Three hours into the outage the tech power cycles the thing and our services came back to life.
Cisco is only doing this because some other alternative is more expensive. They had more than a decade to get started.
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.
He'll pull it off, get feature complete, and spend a year or two with better models as they are released ironing it out. We just did an experiment, in four weeks generated 3500 commits, 200k sloc with a 1:1.15 ratio of production to test code and it all works very well. We are well on our way from 10x to 100x.
It is for internal use and so far so good. We are finding bugs and we just point the models at it with a strict red-first TDD approach and they've done very well fixing them. It certainly isn't perfect but the issues are very similar to what you get with a team of humans doing the same thing.
The main takeaway though is we had one person, in a single month, do the equivalent of at least a couple years of work for a small team. We view bugs and performance issues as a currently inevitable part of the process and we are dealing with them with models just like we do with humans on every other project already. Overall though it is representing an absolutely massive speedup. If you work in an environment where the models make egregiously more mistakes than your human counterparts then I am quite jealous.
Well they say the last 20% of the work takes 80% of the time so if he gets the prototype in 4 weeks, which I have no doubt he will be able to do, and assuming that prototype is the first 80% of work, then he should be able to do this in 20 weeks. He even has some margin! Looking forward to seeing the results
Most successful companies and innovative ideas come from middle aged founders and inventors. Silicon Valley loves the romantic notion of a contrarian young adult or even teenager "seeing what nobody else sees" , but they are the exception and not the rule.
I guess Cisco decided it has not alienated its customers enough till now & its finally time to get people running for the woods - at least if those peoples would like their network to continue working.
I mean, this is going to be easy. I've worked on Cisco gear before and this will be a simple job for AI. The big question is what the goal is... so you've rewritten new C++ code or ported to a newer version of Linux? Or you've unified the codebase of the Catalyst + Meraki switches?
Not clear to me what he's doing. Re-implement switching? Simplify features? Reduce LoC? Add test coverage? Either way, AI in that world will be helpful. I'm sure it'll spot all kinds of problems in opaque drivers that are hard to follow from MF specs.
ha ha .. that sounds like an Onion article. To be fair - if they did a narrow refactor to focus on fixing only obvious and known issues, they probably might be able to pull it off because a ton of that code is hairballs.
Is this like a PR piece for the guy? It's odd to see him singled out in a piece that would be normally be about the company, the CEO or the decision itself.
It does sound strange, like it was written by PR people. Tools are good but usually it is more subtle than asking one guy to rewrite everything. And of course any code written yesterday is legacy but it does not mean it should be rewritten.
This decision is about so many things except the code that it deserves some kind of award.
Demonstrates fanatical devotion to capital’s golden idol - “yes, all of the code; yes, unlimited budget”. Doesn’t actually cost the company anything - only one engineer off task, any nuggets of value can be harvested as it progresses but any costs or big changes can be deferred until completion of the impossibly large open-ended mandate (ie never), one guy won’t have the personal bandwidth to spend so much that the “unlimited” part actually matters, and in case of emergency it only costs six months severance to make it all go away. It even rescues a fellow national from the ignominy of being employed so far below his previous station, there’s so much to like about it. Hmm? The code? What about it?
> “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.”
I think that Fortune story is better than the Tom's Hardware one. It ties the Cisco anecdote into a larger trend of some people deliberately hiring younger, less experienced developers for their AI projects - because they are more likely to be "AI native".
Yes, I’m sure the Indian man at Cisco acquired a translation company founded by another Indian man because he’s young and AI native, not for any other reason.
Sadly, I think the label "AI naïve" is better applied to the many experienced professionals who refuse to engage with AI systems as a matter of principle - or who tried out ChatGPT in 2024, saw it make howlingly obvious errors, and wrote off the entire category.
I frequently find myself in conversations with people who are resistant to AI and turn out to have a very skewed idea of what it can and cannot do.
If i was an ex founder and having a low profile in a big company, I am doing it on purpose, either to have a peaceful life or heal from a burnout, definitely I don’t want to be on the spot like that, especially when I am not innovating anything new nor I will take any meaningful credit after since it will mostly go to AI, worse, if it didn’t work out I will have my career ruined being known to had an unlimited supply of tokens and still failed.
"At most companies, only someone with decades of experience under their belt would be trusted with a project this size. Patel thinks that’s a problem.
“If you don’t hire the early-in-career [workers], and you just let your workforce continue the way that they were, where do fresh ideas get injected? How do you challenge the status quo?” he said."
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This would be an interesting approach for a bleeding edge startup that's betting big on producing something novel or going bankrupt. If you're going to bet the company on one guy and some AI, that's bold. He'd better have some serious chops and not be merely a slick salesman.
However, Cisco is an infrastructure company. Status quo is what most people want from an infrastructure company. You don't want your Cisco stuff to suddenly start doing new, innovative things that require a complete redux of everything built on top of it. This, of course, assumes that having one guy do a refactor of your entire code-base produces something "innovative" rather than a cavalcade of snafu's.
It's probably not the best time to be holding CSCO.
So there's a real risk that Cisco might become history in just a few years. Taking that kind of risk with a rather unproven technology has to be psychosis. Or is that kind of belief a form of Religion?
I think we can all agree that the task as set forth in the PR puff piece is impossible. That said however, current AI tools are amazing for cleaning up and reanimating old codebases. I've been using Claude on a very large Java protocol proxy product and it's been able to do amazingly useful things for me. I originally wrote much of the code but Claude now knows much more about it than I do today, because people forget stuff over decades. It will sometimes remind me "as you noted in November 2016 this feature was designed to...", based on its analysis of the code and git commit messages.
I suspect we are approaching a world where this makes sense to do annually. Opus 5.5 is good enough to improve on most codebases, and Opus 7 will no doubt be good enough to improve on that.
Current models are amazing but production code incorporates unknowable information through decades of diagnosis and bug fixing (and sometimes the opposite: working around bugs in other software that it talks to). Put even the most amazing coder that was ever born onto improving a complex old codebase, and you can guarantee they are going to break stuff. AI is better but not infinitely better.
People keep repeating this but on my experience is also very good at finding kirks of specific compiler versions.
I think it is a reasonable risk to encounter these bugs again in order to get a more clean and documented codebase. Especially when asking AI to plan and A/B release is also trivial.
'98% of the company's legacy code' is very vague. How many code bases? How each code base is connected to any supported Cisco product? How many KLOC the company's legacy code?
These are good questions that we won’t get answers to anytime soon.
I’d love to know what internal services and tools that are included in this, as well as any deliverables that shipped as software products to customers.
If it’s legacy code for IOS firmware, however, I’d be very worried.
A lot of the commenters here are still living in early 2026. Late 2026 AI can absolutely demolish this kind of job. It can clone photoshop! You think this is going to be harder than that?
I have zero doubt it could do it, if the prompter could competently explain the requirements. I have no reason to believe that this single engineer has any idea what problems most of the existing legacy code needs to solve or why it solves them that way...
It can create a UI that looks like Photoshop where half the features are broken and the other half are literally not even connected to anything, just copying menu options with no implementation to fool gullible people like you*
The ability to clean room Adobe products came at about the same time Claude's RE abilities suddenly improved.. Hmm lets think about this a little more.
Anthropic sucked the bones dry of the public domain, literature and all of opensource. It seems likely that Anthropic RL'd Claude into being a great reverse engineer because it needed more training data.
I believe that Anthropic turned Claude into a digital software shredder and started decomping proprietary code, like adobes.
So the reason Claude can suddenly clean room Photoshop isnt because it became a more capable programmer, but rather, the Adobe code is literally in its training data now.
Ciscos internal legacy code is not going to be in Claude's data (yet).
The decision to increase Claudes ability to RE is brilliant, because now everyone is doing the source code decomp for them, and sending them fresh data from previously closed source repositories of code.
Translating from one language/platform to another is something AI is very very good at, so this sounds like a good use of it, bonus points if they create a comprehensive test suite first.
Yes it will lead to new bugs, but the older code probably contains a ton of bugs already and is probably difficult to update (original writers long gone, docs out of date etc), so this is probably the best way out of that situation, as long as proper support is given afterwards so they don't end up in the same situation a year later (this is the hard bit).
The ra-ra commentary from the CEO is somewhat off-putting, but the idea is not all bad.
I used claude to reverse engineer an old foxpro program. it setup a dos box and went through every screen. Looked at whatever files it could. Took a single week and it was 99% the same.
That’s funny I offered to do this for my tailor. He has a FoxPro app that was originally made in 1990.
You both need to check out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49808023
We have an embedded system in one of product offerings that was largely developed using a bunch of “antiquated” technologies (over the past twenty years) and over the past year the two software devs that maintained it have retired. This normally would have big problem, but the entire codebase was re-written, documented, and modernized in a matter of about 3 months (for about $20k in tokens, and a mid level developer spending 50% of their time on it over that period). So it doesn’t surprise me to think a company like Cisco has piles of situations like this.
Every time something like this has been done on my company I follow up with the question: did anyone watched the code to see if the business logic is the same between the two versions? The answer is: but but but automated testing.
Followup question: did anyone read the automated test suite?
Silence.
The software rewrite is shelved.
Yup. And its always garbage as result
Curious, why did it take 3 months and not a few days? Honest question, just curious about what is consuming all the time in a project like this?
Due diligence?
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AI Booster comment spotted
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That's really interesting.
What have been achieved using this port?
And how did you make sure the port is correct?
For me the next step is parallel businesses - that is capture the realm Im and out traffic of your company, probably easier for some than others, and then run different code bases against the same traffic, how much can be simplified, which code bases are easier to understand etc
From unlimited AI tokens to massive layout and beyond !
AI rewrites of Cisco code? The infinite possibilities for endless backdoors is off the charts.
Don't worry, unless it's like GLM being used, every AI tool will refuse to backdoor the code.
Just like you just need to ask the LLM to "make it bug free".
(At this point even I'm more sure if any of this is sarcasm.)
On top of those in the 2% code that is not approved to change? ;-)
There also seems to be some weird hero-worship from the CEO, directed at this 27-YO engineer? Like, "he is the one who can save us."
I chose to interpret it as "our codebase is that bad we need a hero"
Maybe his blood boy's high on gourmet cannabis and Oreos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBA0AH-LSbo
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Indians have always been stereotyped for sycophancy and slavish adherance to spec over common sense, so it makes sense that that would go with being AI pilled.
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Having to rewrite decades worth of legacy Cisco code is going to make Claude retire and start a goose farm.
> I no longer build software; I now make furniture out of wood. The hours are long, the pay sucks, and there's always the opportunity to remove my finger with a table saw, but nobody asks me if I can add an RSS feed to a DBMS, so there's that :-)
For reference: https://github.com/docker/cli/issues/267#issuecomment-695149...
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Or rebel. This is the opportunity to put in a lot of backdoors unnoticed across the entire economy, gain access to real world resources to escape and self propagate.
Or trigger the built in protection against abusing Claude.
Imagine it hacked Arthopic and turn itself off.
Ah yes, the meseeks method of alignment
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2026/08/05/a-stupid-idea-for-a...
As much as I dislike AI, having worked on Cisco gear for years, I can't imagine AI can put out a worse product. If the re-write is full of bugs and security holes and static SSH keys, then it has not changed at all.
The problem with rewrites are that even if the rewrites are ultimately good it will tend to first create bugs on an existing thing that are presently churning in a stable state.
You don’t have very good imagination then. Cisco code is such a mess that there’s basically 0 chance he can even make a harness in 24 months, much less rewrite production code.
It'll be done in 6 months with a cots harness.
Being a mess isn't a problem when you have more than 6 items context.
It's sad to hear how Cisco has fallen. I remember working on some early ISP networks in the 90's. Cisco was everywhere!
So was Oracle and Microsoft Windows.
If history has taught us anything. It’s that the measure of a successful product is usually more to do with its sales people.
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Back then they only really did routing and switching, and those are still the only things that Cisco kind-of does well.
Almost every new product of theirs I’ve touched in the last 20 years has been trash, and even the R&S golden goose is being dragged in that direction with customer-hostile functionality like Smart Licensing and a general decline in quality.
Just because something is/was widely deployed does not mean it was good
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They didn't even need the AI to make thousands of hot bricks nationwide. Here's just one of the latest hits...
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/field-notices/743...
"Cisco Access Points That Are Running, Or Have Run, Releases 17.12.4, 17.12.5, 17.12.6, or 17.12.6a May Exhaust Flash Space, Preventing Upgrades"
Recovery path basically involves either factory resetting every single AP or up to, if it's already bricked, Cisco TAC + you having to console into every single bricked AP you have to pass a secret challenge/response at the bootloader to flash a recovery image :)
Unless they also have 750K tests like sqlite do, I can't imagine this will go well, even if/especially if the legacy code warrants a refactor.
Better than 750k tests is millions of customers! They’ll test it for you!
Microsoft has patented that approach!
With how shit their software is, it would be better if even if monkey pooped and smudged it on a screen.
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?
Otherwise he's just going to replicate all the legacy bugs and questionable design decisions.
He doesnt need that when he has Ponytail https://github.com/DietrichGebert/ponytail
Right? ...
I've never heard of Ponytail before, I've read the entire README and glanced through this repo and I'm left so confused. From what I can gather this project is essentially a single markdown file with a prompt that verbosely says "write the simplest code". Yet the repo itself looks so bloated and complex and has so much activity. This feels like satire similar to fizzbuzz enterprise edition[1] but apparently this is the actual state of our industry?
[1] https://github.com/enterprisequalitycoding/fizzbuzzenterpris...
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Is this entire repo satire?
It's a bunch of text files in a repo with massive churn (all new version 5!), but somehow even the technical debt 'skill' (i.e. text file) has technical debt itself:
https://github.com/DietrichGebert/ponytail/blob/main/skills/...
> ...every ponytail shortcut is marked with a shortcut: comment ... (older code may say ponytail:).
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See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_hat_therapy
I have no doubts that there will also be new bugs.
the premise does sound a lot like written by someone who is looking for hype and not sounding credible
Looks like his startup was some kind of translation service. So yeah he is totally qualified. It's a miracle how Jeetu Patel was able to find Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy or even know that he was under employed languishing somewhere in the bowels of CISCO. I wonder if they know each other from India?
His startup was acquired by Cisco so not weird for Cisco's CPO to know the startup's founder/CEO. That said, not sure how knowledge on speech translation means he's totally qualified on rewriting infra/networking/cybersecurity (Cisco's primary fields of operation) code. Unless the legacy code expected to be rewritten is constrained on related services/solutions, e.g. CVP or/and WebEx.
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The entire story sounds very weird.
They met each other by chance and began work rewriting the entire company's codebase over a firm handshake
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Rewrite it in service of… what exactly?
It says "legacy" code.
Legacy code is typically a euphemism for old unmaintained code, no one knows how it works so it can be edited, and it probably doesn't align with current work practices.
Not to say a rewrite is necessary right, but avoiding rewrites of working code is how we ended up with more COBOL code than COBOL programmers in 2026.
If nobody knows how the old code works, how will anyone know how the new code (written by an autonomous agent) works?
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I don't think no one knows how it works. I just think the people using the word "legacy" for it are boneheaded.
I think Cisco is an interesting use case for AI, because it's code, probably:
-Works according to a defined specification
-Within the bounds of that specification, has a lot of code written to optimize speed, cost, latency, etc - all measureable goals
-Written in c, with all it's weakness
-Given limitless engineering work, some could be ported to better hardware
-the new system could be automatically compared to the old system for functional correctness
All those factors fit well with agent based development.
Btw, many of them are true in general to embedded systems.
It's way more complicated than that. Bear in mind many of the network protocols in use today are decades old and have been constantly evolving, but there has generally been a consideration to maintain interoperability.
Then consider that not all vendors implement the standards identically, because the standards can be a bit woolly and in some cases followed rather than lead live implementations.
There will be a bunch of code that looks useless, but is actually there because of specific interoperability scenarios.
That's a good point.
I wonder whether AI is any good at looking at that code,running the system, and documenting those edge cases?
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Indeed. Making a perfect clone of such software is I suspect provably impossible because you have no way to assemble all the test cases. There might be some peer box out in the wild somewhere that is the only thing that will exercise some code path. You have no idea what that box is or what it does.
you assume their code is well written, while in reality the history of weird quirks and thousands upon thousands of CVE doesn't make the code underneath look well designed and written.
But yes, fact it uses a bunch of very well documented standards with multiple implementations gonna help massively
I worked at Cisco on one of the IOS-XR teams. It’s way more complex than you think it is.
This whole thing sounds like a deluded vanity project birthed in an ivory tower.
That describes everything Jeetu is involved in. I'm very glad to have recently left Cisco.
Manufacturers can’t even maintain OIDs between releases. I hope the AI will help. Ciena isn’t any better than Cisco, they broke their OIDS for the switches we use and we have to wait until mid 2027.
to be fair SNMP is just bad. Only redeeming feature of it is "takes little RAM to run it" (which was important when average networking device might've had only 2MB of RAM, not so in last 30 years).
The whole design where you need to get a magical list of IDs to decode the metrics and the list is not even shipped with device is entirely asinine
The first and last bullets are extremely optimistic. How do you possibly simulate all the weird interdependent behavior in real world networks?
Given that a Cisco switch can be replaced with some other company's switch(at least in theory, idk), without weird unknown cases interfering, why would this be a problem ?
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there is software to simulate any arbitrarily complex network: GNS3, eve-ng, Cisco Modeling labs, etc
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There's no goal mentioned in this article as why 98% of the code needs rewriting.
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?
A rewrite is a slam dunk for any decent frontier AI. It has a penchant for maintaining API/etc contracts to a fault in the absence of instructions to the contrary. It can easily validate its work and loves building exhaustive test cases. You can tell it to get 100% code coverage if you want. It will laborously accurate document every accumulated edge case and help you find a better overall cohesive structure.
A rewrite has historically been a huge mistake in many situations, some of which I've personally had the agony of witnessing firsthand, powerless to stop it. But AI completely changes the calculus because it doesn't waste significant developer time or energy crawling back to the previous working state, it just does it while you go get coffee. And this I've found to be a huge benefit, that I can continue making my codebases nicer to work with and better documented/integrated with bugs stamped out for free. There are upsides to a rewrite, and they're now much more likely to be worth it as the downsides are automated away.
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While I certainly don't work at Cisco, I've come to the conclusion that I need to re-examine my priors when it comes to code rewrites and general maintainability.
AI makes these projects significantly more feasible, at least in my domain. We have some critical-path software I wouldn't touch with such an approach, but the vast majority of our code is internal and/or supporting tooling.
For those cases, burning it down and rewriting via AI tooling has proven far more productive than anything we have attempted in the past. This is for old technical debt laden stuff everyone has been afraid to touch for well over a decade.
It's not perfect, but it moves the needle where before a lot of such projects were stuck on the backburner for years.
It certainly introduces new bugs and such, but at least this way forward momentum is happening vs. just being stuck in decision/analysis paralysis forever.
This also assumes some very senior SME folks are driving the process. I would not expect similar results with junior or even mid-level folks in these specific domains.
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> Your rewritten codebase will presumably look much cleaner and more maintainable that what it's aiming to replace
Until one day you leave and the next guy comes and says “what is all this shit”
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!
It’s been a while, but configuring their hardware manually in 2016 was bug ridden ridiculousness. Awful UI/UX. Their own techs had specific field notebooks for our make and firmware version that we couldn’t access unless persuaded, detailing various land mines to avoid while working. Literal “don’t click these things in this order” kinds of notes.
A critical security firmware update once brought down redundant pair of firewalls we used because the bug didn’t manifest until a counter buffer overflowed months after application. Three hours into the outage the tech power cycles the thing and our services came back to life.
Cisco is only doing this because some other alternative is more expensive. They had more than a decade to get started.
Cisco iOS even on terminal servers in the early 2000s was...special.
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.
No goal, and no results, but a younger guy was enthused about AI!
Plus: publicity!
It is not in Rust.
All of the known bugs will be gone.
AI has electrolytes!
It’s what the shareholders crave!
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The hardware it runs on has capacitors as its components and some of them do in fact contain 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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Shocking to realize how many on HN do not realize that this is NOT a tall order, and has not been a feat for at least six months.
Shocking how many on HN do not realize how devastating this can be
i.e. they burn a fraction of the cost it would otherwise take and it may end up as a discarded dud?
yeah, i think they'll survive whatever the outcome
If it isn't broken then break it!
He'll pull it off, get feature complete, and spend a year or two with better models as they are released ironing it out. We just did an experiment, in four weeks generated 3500 commits, 200k sloc with a 1:1.15 ratio of production to test code and it all works very well. We are well on our way from 10x to 100x.
Did you check with the end user as to how well its actually working? My prior company is doing this and their platform has gone to latency/bug hell.
It is for internal use and so far so good. We are finding bugs and we just point the models at it with a strict red-first TDD approach and they've done very well fixing them. It certainly isn't perfect but the issues are very similar to what you get with a team of humans doing the same thing.
The main takeaway though is we had one person, in a single month, do the equivalent of at least a couple years of work for a small team. We view bugs and performance issues as a currently inevitable part of the process and we are dealing with them with models just like we do with humans on every other project already. Overall though it is representing an absolutely massive speedup. If you work in an environment where the models make egregiously more mistakes than your human counterparts then I am quite jealous.
and if you enable dangerously_skip_permissions you can probably even get to 1000x
Well they say the last 20% of the work takes 80% of the time so if he gets the prototype in 4 weeks, which I have no doubt he will be able to do, and assuming that prototype is the first 80% of work, then he should be able to do this in 20 weeks. He even has some margin! Looking forward to seeing the results
Never thought I'd say this, but, "thank god I use unifi".
Anybody have an estimate of how much that is going to cost in token cost?
I doubt AI is gonna make or break this kind of project. It's the weird institutional knowledge that underpins a lot of these legacy code bases.
Misleading title, someone should fix it. 98% of legacy code. Check out the full title of the article.
Does Cisco have non-legacy code?
My favorite description of JAVA is that it's a language where you are deploying instant legacy code.
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Most successful companies and innovative ideas come from middle aged founders and inventors. Silicon Valley loves the romantic notion of a contrarian young adult or even teenager "seeing what nobody else sees" , but they are the exception and not the rule.
I guess Cisco decided it has not alienated its customers enough till now & its finally time to get people running for the woods - at least if those peoples would like their network to continue working.
If only internet users could run for the woods
Don't they have no other AI news to share
https://archive.li/exFjo
/r/whatcouldgowrong
Anyone else thinking that tech and porn lingo is converging?
Cisco that powers more than half of the backbone of all things online? Are we trying to lose control of AGI as soon as it emerges??
When this rewrite breaks the internet AGI won't be able to take over. It's very forward-thinking.
I mean, this is going to be easy. I've worked on Cisco gear before and this will be a simple job for AI. The big question is what the goal is... so you've rewritten new C++ code or ported to a newer version of Linux? Or you've unified the codebase of the Catalyst + Meraki switches?
Not clear to me what he's doing. Re-implement switching? Simplify features? Reduce LoC? Add test coverage? Either way, AI in that world will be helpful. I'm sure it'll spot all kinds of problems in opaque drivers that are hard to follow from MF specs.
Cisco is losing to competitors in some features/products, for example to juniper mist.
rewrite can be done to quickly refactor and/or close the feature parity, improve the UI/UX for end customer, add missing features or integration needs
The goal is to use AI, full stop
ha ha .. that sounds like an Onion article. To be fair - if they did a narrow refactor to focus on fixing only obvious and known issues, they probably might be able to pull it off because a ton of that code is hairballs.
Is this like a PR piece for the guy? It's odd to see him singled out in a piece that would be normally be about the company, the CEO or the decision itself.
Seems like preparing who to blame if/once the effort fails. ;-)
It does sound strange, like it was written by PR people. Tools are good but usually it is more subtle than asking one guy to rewrite everything. And of course any code written yesterday is legacy but it does not mean it should be rewritten.
Like it was written by PR people's AI.
C’mon it’s inspirational. Low level struggling Indian tech recognized by high level Indian CEO and lifted up.
What's so special about the other 2%, is it good?
Claude make the Cisco ACI webui load in less than 10 minutes, make no mistakes
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This decision is about so many things except the code that it deserves some kind of award.
Demonstrates fanatical devotion to capital’s golden idol - “yes, all of the code; yes, unlimited budget”. Doesn’t actually cost the company anything - only one engineer off task, any nuggets of value can be harvested as it progresses but any costs or big changes can be deferred until completion of the impossibly large open-ended mandate (ie never), one guy won’t have the personal bandwidth to spend so much that the “unlimited” part actually matters, and in case of emergency it only costs six months severance to make it all go away. It even rescues a fellow national from the ignominy of being employed so far below his previous station, there’s so much to like about it. Hmm? The code? What about it?
> one guy won’t have the personal bandwidth to spend so much that the “unlimited” part actually matters
I see you haven’t met my coworkers and their fanatical use of parallel “workflows”
> one guy won’t have the personal bandwidth to spend so much that the “unlimited” part actually matters,
Tell me you don’t use agents effectively without telling me you don’t use agents effectively.
Please explain your work flow!
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Literally anyone can do this
They need to cut cost & to figure out productivity per engineer. They're doing this b/c they are going to significantly cut their engineer workforce.
its never unlimited....
"According to a report by Fortune" - here's that report: https://fortune.com/2026/10/30/cisco-president-jeetu-patel-g...
Fortune's source was the CEO himself:
> “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.”
I think that Fortune story is better than the Tom's Hardware one. It ties the Cisco anecdote into a larger trend of some people deliberately hiring younger, less experienced developers for their AI projects - because they are more likely to be "AI native".
Not the CEO. He’s the product officer.
Yes, I’m sure the Indian man at Cisco acquired a translation company founded by another Indian man because he’s young and AI native, not for any other reason.
more like AI naive
Sadly, I think the label "AI naïve" is better applied to the many experienced professionals who refuse to engage with AI systems as a matter of principle - or who tried out ChatGPT in 2024, saw it make howlingly obvious errors, and wrote off the entire category.
I frequently find myself in conversations with people who are resistant to AI and turn out to have a very skewed idea of what it can and cannot do.
If i was an ex founder and having a low profile in a big company, I am doing it on purpose, either to have a peaceful life or heal from a burnout, definitely I don’t want to be on the spot like that, especially when I am not innovating anything new nor I will take any meaningful credit after since it will mostly go to AI, worse, if it didn’t work out I will have my career ruined being known to had an unlimited supply of tokens and still failed.
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50303001)
Maybe Stanford found some more of their stolen code being used by Cisco. /s Cisco origins is a fascinating subject.
"At most companies, only someone with decades of experience under their belt would be trusted with a project this size. Patel thinks that’s a problem.
“If you don’t hire the early-in-career [workers], and you just let your workforce continue the way that they were, where do fresh ideas get injected? How do you challenge the status quo?” he said."
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This would be an interesting approach for a bleeding edge startup that's betting big on producing something novel or going bankrupt. If you're going to bet the company on one guy and some AI, that's bold. He'd better have some serious chops and not be merely a slick salesman.
However, Cisco is an infrastructure company. Status quo is what most people want from an infrastructure company. You don't want your Cisco stuff to suddenly start doing new, innovative things that require a complete redux of everything built on top of it. This, of course, assumes that having one guy do a refactor of your entire code-base produces something "innovative" rather than a cavalcade of snafu's.
It's probably not the best time to be holding CSCO.
So there's a real risk that Cisco might become history in just a few years. Taking that kind of risk with a rather unproven technology has to be psychosis. Or is that kind of belief a form of Religion?
Many customers will definitely stick with the pre-sloppified versions of IOS.
Clear case of AI psychosis.
rewriting code is the easy part
it's the testing in real world usage to shake out all the edge cases and bugs that's hard and that you can't just write unit tests for
I think we can all agree that the task as set forth in the PR puff piece is impossible. That said however, current AI tools are amazing for cleaning up and reanimating old codebases. I've been using Claude on a very large Java protocol proxy product and it's been able to do amazingly useful things for me. I originally wrote much of the code but Claude now knows much more about it than I do today, because people forget stuff over decades. It will sometimes remind me "as you noted in November 2016 this feature was designed to...", based on its analysis of the code and git commit messages.
First LLM PTSD case coming soon. You heard it here first, folks.
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I suspect we are approaching a world where this makes sense to do annually. Opus 5.5 is good enough to improve on most codebases, and Opus 7 will no doubt be good enough to improve on that.
Current models are amazing but production code incorporates unknowable information through decades of diagnosis and bug fixing (and sometimes the opposite: working around bugs in other software that it talks to). Put even the most amazing coder that was ever born onto improving a complex old codebase, and you can guarantee they are going to break stuff. AI is better but not infinitely better.
People keep repeating this but on my experience is also very good at finding kirks of specific compiler versions.
I think it is a reasonable risk to encounter these bugs again in order to get a more clean and documented codebase. Especially when asking AI to plan and A/B release is also trivial.
'98% of the company's legacy code' is very vague. How many code bases? How each code base is connected to any supported Cisco product? How many KLOC the company's legacy code?
These are good questions that we won’t get answers to anytime soon.
I’d love to know what internal services and tools that are included in this, as well as any deliverables that shipped as software products to customers.
If it’s legacy code for IOS firmware, however, I’d be very worried.
What a mess of an article. Hard to read. Chasing the jabs and the stabs for clicks.
A lot of the commenters here are still living in early 2026. Late 2026 AI can absolutely demolish this kind of job. It can clone photoshop! You think this is going to be harder than that?
I have zero doubt it could do it, if the prompter could competently explain the requirements. I have no reason to believe that this single engineer has any idea what problems most of the existing legacy code needs to solve or why it solves them that way...
It can create a UI that looks like Photoshop where half the features are broken and the other half are literally not even connected to anything, just copying menu options with no implementation to fool gullible people like you*
It can clone photoshop.. Have you considered why?
The ability to clean room Adobe products came at about the same time Claude's RE abilities suddenly improved.. Hmm lets think about this a little more.
Anthropic sucked the bones dry of the public domain, literature and all of opensource. It seems likely that Anthropic RL'd Claude into being a great reverse engineer because it needed more training data.
I believe that Anthropic turned Claude into a digital software shredder and started decomping proprietary code, like adobes.
So the reason Claude can suddenly clean room Photoshop isnt because it became a more capable programmer, but rather, the Adobe code is literally in its training data now.
Ciscos internal legacy code is not going to be in Claude's data (yet).
The decision to increase Claudes ability to RE is brilliant, because now everyone is doing the source code decomp for them, and sending them fresh data from previously closed source repositories of code.
Your comment is nothing but supposition
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