Cisco president says dredging coding syntax from wetware memory wastes engineers' expensive synapses
(2025/06/11)
- Reference: 1749595822
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/06/10/cisco_wants_ai_coding_assistants/
- Source link:
Cisco Live Cisco president Jeetu Patel wants the company’s engineers to halve the amount of code they write.
Speaking at a media Q&A session before the Cisco Live conference, Patel said he wants to create an agentic AI companion for the biz’s 27,000-strong engineering corps to relieve them of programming scutwork.
Don’t apply 30 percent of cognitive load to syntax
“They should master orchestration and innovation, not syntax,” he said during the session. “I would rather our people are thinking about the next big thing, not syntax.”
Patel repeated that call the next day during the conference keynote, after OpenAI chief product officer and recently appointed Cisco board member Kevin Weil mentioned the 2016 film Hidden Figures, which depicts NASA workers of the early 1960s manually calculating rocket trajectories.
“Who does that now?” Weil asked, before predicting that within five years, developers who write all their own code will appear as quaint as the events in the film.
[1]
Weil called for developers to type less and use AI more.
[2]
[3]
As he would, given OpenAI will make money if developers adopt its products.
[4]Cisco Borgs all its management tools into a single Cloud Control console
[5]AI software development: Productivity revolution or fraught with risk?
[6]Microsoft: Why not let our Copilot fly your computer?
[7]AI can spew code, but kids should still suffer like we did, says Raspberry Pi
Patel seems willing to pay.
“Don’t apply 30 percent of cognitive load to syntax,” he said. “I think the brain cycles engineers have should be applied to bigger things.”
And Cisco needs those brain cycles, as Patel admitted during a post-keynote Q&A that the networking giant remains "constrained" on engineering resources and can't turn all its ideas into products.
[8]
“I am hoping that what Kevin’s team can do with Codex" - that's OpenAI's coding tool - "means we don’t have a constraint on resource and we can add more and more capacity.”
If that plan works, Patel thinks organizations beyond Cisco will feel the benefits as the tech giant becomes able to create products that its customers can use to more easily build their own AI infrastructure to accelerate work in other domains.
“Imagine what would happen with AI companies if infrastructure was not scarce,” he said.
[9]
Notably, Patel never hinted Cisco has given any consideration to job cuts in its engineering corps, although the switch slinger did make two rounds of cuts last year, shedding [10]five percent of workers in February and then [11]announcing another seven percent cut in August. The second round of cuts came as part of a plan to restructure the company to improve its AI capabilities. ®
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[4] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/10/cisco_live_cloud_control_news/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/01/ai_software_development_productivity_revolution/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/16/microsoft_copilot_computer_use/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/05/vibe_coding_raspberry_pi/
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[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/15/cisco_to_cut_5_of/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/15/cisco_cuts_workforce/
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Speaking at a media Q&A session before the Cisco Live conference, Patel said he wants to create an agentic AI companion for the biz’s 27,000-strong engineering corps to relieve them of programming scutwork.
Don’t apply 30 percent of cognitive load to syntax
“They should master orchestration and innovation, not syntax,” he said during the session. “I would rather our people are thinking about the next big thing, not syntax.”
Patel repeated that call the next day during the conference keynote, after OpenAI chief product officer and recently appointed Cisco board member Kevin Weil mentioned the 2016 film Hidden Figures, which depicts NASA workers of the early 1960s manually calculating rocket trajectories.
“Who does that now?” Weil asked, before predicting that within five years, developers who write all their own code will appear as quaint as the events in the film.
[1]
Weil called for developers to type less and use AI more.
[2]
[3]
As he would, given OpenAI will make money if developers adopt its products.
[4]Cisco Borgs all its management tools into a single Cloud Control console
[5]AI software development: Productivity revolution or fraught with risk?
[6]Microsoft: Why not let our Copilot fly your computer?
[7]AI can spew code, but kids should still suffer like we did, says Raspberry Pi
Patel seems willing to pay.
“Don’t apply 30 percent of cognitive load to syntax,” he said. “I think the brain cycles engineers have should be applied to bigger things.”
And Cisco needs those brain cycles, as Patel admitted during a post-keynote Q&A that the networking giant remains "constrained" on engineering resources and can't turn all its ideas into products.
[8]
“I am hoping that what Kevin’s team can do with Codex" - that's OpenAI's coding tool - "means we don’t have a constraint on resource and we can add more and more capacity.”
If that plan works, Patel thinks organizations beyond Cisco will feel the benefits as the tech giant becomes able to create products that its customers can use to more easily build their own AI infrastructure to accelerate work in other domains.
“Imagine what would happen with AI companies if infrastructure was not scarce,” he said.
[9]
Notably, Patel never hinted Cisco has given any consideration to job cuts in its engineering corps, although the switch slinger did make two rounds of cuts last year, shedding [10]five percent of workers in February and then [11]announcing another seven percent cut in August. The second round of cuts came as part of a plan to restructure the company to improve its AI capabilities. ®
Get our [12]Tech Resources
[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aEj_SBBCeO-dBT7NU2jMhgAAARc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
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[4] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/10/cisco_live_cloud_control_news/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/01/ai_software_development_productivity_revolution/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/16/microsoft_copilot_computer_use/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/05/vibe_coding_raspberry_pi/
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aEj_SBBCeO-dBT7NU2jMhgAAARc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aEj_SBBCeO-dBT7NU2jMhgAAARc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/15/cisco_to_cut_5_of/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/15/cisco_cuts_workforce/
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
It is amazing ...
jake
... how many CEO-types seem to have drunk the Kool-Aid when it comes to the Great AI Swindle. Scary, that.
Re: It is amazing ...
Androgynous Cow Herd
I read it as more as “Stodgy olde network company with 20th century business model struggles to remain relevant by spouting about AI”
Whether you love AI or not, is Cisco the first company that you think of as relevant to AI?
No…is it fifth? Probably not.
So, how about some Digs at open source. (assuming he meant SonicOS or that other one Mellanox also ships)…and bare metal manufacturers…you know, like the ones that get used to build the plumbing for any modern compute cluster, including all those fancy ones pumping AI…and handwaving about how AI can enable sloppy coding. Awesome messaging and spot on! Gee whiz, you even got mentioned in the Register!
Cisco products anre still egregiously expensive and playing catch up at this point. Nothing said here changes that margin rich business model….but the market has learned you can buy 24 ports of 400GbE for the price of 2 ports of almost as good Cisco ports with almost as good ASICs in them.
Work smarter not harder!
Or, do I have that backwards? So, now we know AI bro-speak for "work smarter, not harder." Now we just need to figure out the AI bro-speak for "if there's time to lean..."