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.
Yeah it means he’ll rack up a really high bill immediately on something stupid, and the board will pull the plug.
Don’t worry, guys. I am sure he adds “make no mistakes” to every prompt. No review necessary, push straight to prod.
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?
… and suddenly, overnight, claude or whatever will have very detailed, intricate knowledge around Cisco’s hardware, almost like it’s regurgitating internal documentation. Hm.
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.
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.
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! 🤮
“Claude, rewrite all of these repos but better”
Done, and done!
This should be entertaining
Oof, forgot to tell it to make no mistakes. That’s gonna cost another 6 months.
Holy shit, this really seems like something that you shouldn’t announce publicly
So your telling me someone only has to pay off 1 27 year old to ensure they have a backdoor into most enterprise networks?
LLMs will never take the job of the $5 wrench! Hit him with it til the back door is done.
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?
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.
“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…”
Future breaking news: Cisco hardware used in massive botnet attack.
It would genuinely be an actual achievement to make Cisco software less secure. Usually, letting AI fully write software is bad. But in this case, I expect the rewrite to be better just because of how abysmally low the bar is specifically at Cisco.
LOL! God’s honest I came in to say the exact same thing! Christ, the security on that kit is miserable. I ended up buying all new routers a few years ago and now use the old ones to run the Sonos speakers at my home and studio. Anyone hacks the networks and they’ll get no further than my iPods… Have fun guys!
Since I don’t stream from the internet, its perfect.
I’d be surprised if it could function well enough to even be compromisable.
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.
I suppose a 27-year-old is about to find that out the hard way - along with Cisco’s entire customer base. 🤷♂️
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”brother… insane
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.
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.
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.