Comment by simonw
19 hours ago
"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.
> or who tried out ChatGPT in 2024, saw it make howlingly obvious errors, and wrote off the entire category.
Or they were reading your comments and articles and couldn't reproduce any of the fantastic results that you were claiming, even back then. Things have indeed changed since the first Opus release about a year ago and LLMs are good at programming now. But still, experienced professionals are not so keen to sign off 1000s of lines of code that they never read, take responsibility for it etc. Also, it is a different job and it will take some time to adjust. Can you blame them?
Moreover, other trades have their own guilds or are otherwise protected through regulation. Can you blame programmers for fighting to keep doing things as they were doing it until recently?