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.
Also, Cisco knows that now you can still do that. The AI market is largely subsided with VC money, so the current pieces are a fraction what they should be charging. Try this move after the bubble pops and you’ll need to pay millions for rewriting each application. If you want to vibe some slop code, now is the time.
Yeah, I went networking to see if I could find a job. Some asshole was the keynote speaker, and his idea was that with AI, you can now just throw the requirements at the machine and have it work out perfect. And that way, at the end of the day, the artifact that’s created is no longer the code, it’s the product definition. That’s what you gotta guard. You can just throw the code away once you’re done, it’s all good.
Want to change that button’s colour? Just re-create the entire fucking system, and shove it to live. Who cares how many tokens it takes?
“you are an internet router. Your job is to route internet packets. Make no mistakes. Use
socatto read a stream of bytes from eth1 and forward them suitably usingsocaton eth0. Use best practices. Prevent all hacks and data leaks. Eth1 is the local trusted lan. Eth0 is the wider internet. Use Claude API when confused”I warned my fellow software engineering students that this was the future back in 2006. And they believed me, but they also got really pissed.
… I forgot to mention one teeny part of that…
What happens when the company providing the tokens decides that they now cost twice as much? ten times?
Also, it’s non deterministic. Good luck staying secure.
I don’t know… Have you provisioned Cisco equipment before? It feels like the quality can only go up.
(But no, obviously this will end terribly unless they’re incredibly careful. It’s possible, but unlikely.)
How does one managed to earn this level of trust?
Just be the son of an exec who wrote html for the neighbor once, so he’s a real code hacker guy
“Welcome back to another episode of the premier game-show of the 21st century: ‘What Could Possibly Go Wrong?’ Man, do we have a great one for you guys tonight…”
Don’t worry, guys. I am sure he adds “make no mistakes” to every prompt. No review necessary, push straight to prod.
Legacy code is better than vibe code code…
That is peak level CEO magic thinking
Isn’t Cisco gear running a lot of the Internet backbone? This should be interesting…
Time to short Cisco.
had founded a translation startup
Doesn’t Cisco know any networking and firmware experts, with extensive legacy code knowledge, who could vibe code through a well thought out plan?
Every single person who actually does work for a living at that company said no, so when the final decision maker found themselves isolated and ridiculed, they decided the collective experience of their employees was meaningless and did this.
time to buy cisco stock, just remember to dump in about 2 months when this inevitably goes to shit
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?
My boss did the same thing. A team of experts working on our SaaS applications for 20 years, constantly improving it to be more secure, more maintainable, more usable, more performant, better organized, better documented, more thoroughly tested, more accessible, more suited to what users needed, more adaptable, using the most appropriate technology stack, protected from various attack scenarios, fully standards compliant, efficient to deploy, etc., and we just found out he vibe-coded a total replacement in secret all on his own in a couple of months using Claude and all written in JavaScript, and he is putting it live and retiring what we built. He wasn’t even going to tell us until he had migrated the last customer over to his thing, so he’s been letting us all work on projects that he had no intention of using, just to buy time until his slop was done.
I don’t know. Everyday is the onion.
Is that why I’m crying ?
“Claude, rewrite all of these repos but better”
Done, and done!
This should be entertaining
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.
