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Posted by taubek 2 days ago

Cisco gives engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite legacy code(fortune.com)
311 points | 382 commentspage 9
pupppet 2 days ago|
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tiffanyh 1 day ago||
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draw_down 1 day ago||
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marberal 1 day ago||
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whoanoway 1 day ago|
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causal 2 days ago||
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.
dboreham 1 day ago|
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.
pezgordo 1 day ago||
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.

raincom 2 days ago||
'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?
orthogonal_cube 1 day ago|
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.

polyterative 1 day ago||
It's all about process. If you have a good process in mind, you can build a system that can reliably do everything.Artificial intelligence is now the engine to do that. With the correct harnessing, you can do anything now
emtel 1 day ago|
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?
Lt_Riza_Hawkeye 1 day ago||
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...
anonymous908213 1 day ago|||
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*
lifeisloving 1 day ago|||
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.

emtel 1 day ago||
Your comment is nothing but supposition
lifeisloving 1 day ago||
So is any other hypothesis about why Claude can RE now... You just want to default to some worldview where AI isn't being gamed for certain outcomes, and is some evolving intelligent thing.

Thanks for the very thought provoking reply tho!!!!!!!!!!!

neuroelectron 13 hours ago||
lol