Don’t worry, guys. I am sure he adds “make no mistakes” to every prompt. No review necessary, push straight to prod.
So they’re replacing battle-tested unmaintainable old code written by humans with bad unreleased unmaintainable new code written by ai.
Both are unmaintainable. What’s the punch line?? Is this not the onion?
… and suddenly, overnight, claude or whatever will have very detailed, intricate knowledge around Cisco’s hardware, almost like it’s regurgitating internal documentation. Hm.
Ignore, for a second, the use of AI here.
How huge a screw up is it just to send a guy off to work on a project alone for 2 years. Can you imagine the amount of time that should be spent in code reviews looking at something someone has spent a full 2 years on? You’re now going to be asking senior devs to spend months of their lives doing nothing but code reviews. And, if you skip the code reviews that’s suicide.
We all know that in 2 years Cisco is still going to be using their legacy codebase. There’s not a chance in hell this will work. Just announcing this like it is a sane thing to do advertises their dysfunction.
It’s possible that he will find some low-hanging fruit and be able to rewrite some library code. But, really, when rewriting something old and bloated, the main thing you can do to add value is to remove code. And, AI agents are famous for their ability to generate vast amounts of code, not to get rid of it.
The absolute best case here is that this guy wastes 2 years of his life, and Cisco has some kind of deal where these “unlimited AI tokens” come at some fixed price so that this project costs Cisco only $1m or so. Then, the project’s a failure, they only lose a bit of money, and they can maybe learn from the experience. But, do you really make an announcement about a project that’s only going to run you $1m in costs? I doubt it. This is probably Cisco setting fire to $50m or more. And, given that they announced the project like it was a good idea, can they afford to just admit it failed? With that kind of sunk cost, they’re probably going to feel a lot of pressure to achieve something positive with the stunt… so something here is going to be integrated into their codebase.
Hey I’m rooting for the guy. If in two years they release this mostly generated code it should be entirely public domain. Public domain slop is better for me then hostage making spyware.
Legacy code is still around for a reason. It’s not usually just a matter of refactoring it, but the business logic tied around it all.
Good luck lmao. Cisco will be underwater in years if they actually commit to this.
“Claude, rewrite all of these repos but better”
Done, and done!
This should be entertaining
Oof, forgot to tell it to make no mistakes. That’s gonna cost another 6 months.
Cisco just handed a 27 year old unlimited AI tokens and the keys to 98% of its codebase. Somewhere, a senior engineer is quietly updating their resume. Rewriting code is easy. Discovering why that horrifying 1998 workaround exists is the actual final boss.
I suppose a 27-year-old is about to find that out the hard way - along with Cisco’s entire customer base. 🤷♂️
time to buy cisco stock, just remember to dump in about 2 months when this inevitably goes to shit
Isn’t Cisco gear running a lot of the Internet backbone? This should be interesting…
I think the 24 months is the scariest part. If the Eng is starting now & has 24 months, that’s one can of worms.
If they’ve been rewriting over the last 2 years… AI has changed a lot for code writing in that time… 😬
