Cisco president says dredging syntax from wetware memory wastes engineers' expensive synapses

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.

"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.

Weil called for developers to type less and use AI more.

As he would, given OpenAI will make money if developers adopt its products.

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.

"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.

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 five percent of workers in February and then 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. ®