Aakash GuptaLead source
Cisco's president found a 27-year-old engineer sitting five levels below him on the org chart and handed him an unlimited AI budget to redo 98% of the company's old code. He gets four weeks to show it can work. There's a famous story in software about what happens when a company tries something like this. It ends with Netscape getting wiped out by Internet Explorer. Back in 2000, Netscape decided its browser code was too messy to keep patching and started over from scratch. It went almost three years without a real release while Microsoft took the market. AI has already chipped away at that lesson, since retyping years of working code is exactly the kind of grunt work it's good at. But speed was only half of what went wrong at Netscape. Old code looks ugly because it's full of little…Read original on X