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Cisco gives 27-year-old engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite 98% of the company's legacy code in 24 months — president plucks former startup founder, telling him to 'go nuts'. (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 3 days ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] [S] 196 points 3 days ago (11 children)

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.

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  • [–] 54 points 3 days ago* (9 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 46 points 3 days ago (8 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 26 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    "you are an internet router. Your job is to route internet packets. Make no mistakes. Use socat to read a stream of bytes from eth1 and forward them suitably using socat on 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"

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  • [–] 6 points 3 days ago

    Oh wow. That's about as wasteful as burning oil to make electricity.

    And speaking of the prompt, if you want something as simple as a hello world application or Fibonacci sequence calculator, you're going to need like 10-20 sentences to explain precisely what you want. If you're also going to look at the code yourself, add another 20 lines to tell the LLM exactly how the code should look like to make maintenance easier.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 days ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 19 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    ... 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.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    Doesn't matter, the future of software engineering is always going to be "your boss saying into a machine what he wants", one way or another. He'll pay for it, and he'll pay for the mistakes, too, because it's always cheaper than human labour.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 days ago

    Yeah, absolutely. That's why when people use salesforce's easy to use flows to define business logic, they just get the business guys to do it, and they don't manage it with fleets and fleets of programmers.

    Source : Worked with salesforce as a developer, and the preference was "declarative programming" (read : flowchart diagrams) over writing Apex code,because at some point, an administrator could maintain it.

    Right? RIGHT?!

    No. At the end of the day, you're going to get a technical person to manage whatever fucking mechanism you invent, otherwise it's going to fall to pieces because some asshat can't figure out what happens on the 29th of February.

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