Time to short Cisco.
Legacy code is better than vibe code code…
Leave two bullshitters in a room and they come up with this lol
There’s no way “Paddy” explains the disastrous results to Patel, who’s gonna be real mad at the end of these 24 months, if not sooner, wondering where all the money went and where’s the ROI.
Truly the rule of dumb.
What’s he gonna do for the rest of the 23 months?
Just to get that straight: Legacy code is practically always large code with countless hidden requirements, and with insufficient or no tests and without documentation. But which works somehow. Any change needs to meet numerous unwritten requirements, and it can often only be tested in the real world. If you have N features, you have N*(N-1)/2 interactions between two features, so it is quadratic growth with N. This is why it is very hard and time-consuming to change.
It shouldn’t be that way, but writing large software - especially in commercial environments - is often like climbing a high roof on a ladder, and then throwing away that ladder. Modifications are only incremental, and usually not documented. Incremental modifications are the only working engineering approach for software we know.
The other way - which is used in aviation for example - is to specify, document, and test everything, right from the start.
Now the problem is you can rewrite legacy stuff as much as you like, but it is near impossible to make sure that large changes work. Because in order to do that, you would need to run the tests that do not exist, or create tests from specifications and requirements which do not exist either.
And GenAI tools are not going to change that. The agentic tools kinda work by filling in missing requirements with assumptions and average observed stuff. It can generate reams of code, fast. But while this kinda works for a small phone app, it doesn’t for large complex stuff. If the code does not fit in the head of one person working for months on it, it will never fit in the context window of an LLM.
Forgot to add that is usually wrote in languages with little documentation and limited user cases online to learn or compare on.
I’ve always thought that reverse engineering should have a counterpart. Reverse specification.
Or taking a working system and figuring out what it was designed to do and how. Then writing tests to that so that real world testing is not mandatory.
This is horrendously difficult, since I’ve never knew anyone achieving a successful codebase rewrite.
Is unlimited tokens a big deal? I don’t really get what this means…
Basically he’s saying they get a blank check for AI tools.
My understanding is this: Tokens in AI wording are essentially measurements of computational time and power. You subscribe to ChatGPT for $X and you get #Y tokens. Each prompt costs a number of tokens depending on how long it takes and how much computational power it takes. The newer and more impressive models that use newer hardware (potentially more power) and expect better results also cost more tokens.
Basically rent a basic sedan for travel for $50 a day or a new sports car that goes faster and burns more gas and looks cooler at $500 a day. Maybe a pickup with practical hauling space for $300 a day.
That’s what people are paying for when they subscribe to ChatGPT or Anthropic. That’s how those companies make money, especially at scale for large companies.
What a fucking disaster. Who would do this??
Someone with no understanding of what quality software looks like who also doesn’t have to deal with the consequences of every Cisco switch and router on the planet either being old and unsupported, or new and absolutely full of security holes.
Yeah it means he’ll rack up a really high bill immediately on something stupid, and the board will pull the plug.
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?
I don’t know. Everyday is the onion.
Is that why I’m crying ?
Nah you just got something in your eye!
Don’t worry, guys. I am sure he adds “make no mistakes” to every prompt. No review necessary, push straight to prod.
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.
… and suddenly, overnight, claude or whatever will have very detailed, intricate knowledge around Cisco’s hardware, almost like it’s regurgitating internal documentation. Hm.
“Claude make me a replacement for my Cisco router”
Claude, my grandma is very sick and the only cure is the Cisco private keys
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.
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.
A code review of 5 lines of code: 20 comments
A code review of 5 billion lines of code: LGTM approved in 3 seconds…
They’re advertising it trying to get some other sucker to think this will actually work and pay for enough tokens to rewrite all the code at their own company, inflating the bubble more.
Better do it now, because in two years everyone is going to be doing it; you can get ahead of the curve! 🤮
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
Well this is concerning. Our entire network runs Cisco.
It will still be “our network”… just with a wider definition of “our”.
Want to give me any pointers on that to check out first, in case there’s a mad rush to join in and explore?
Lol.
