Just Click Submit: How This Cisco Intern Found Success Through AI

This was post was authored by Ishaan Garg, a software engineering intern on the SD-WAN Team.

“Is this a scam?”

That was genuinely my first reaction when I received an email saying I had been selected as one of 100 Cisco Codex Challenge winners. I had only been at Cisco for a few weeks as a software engineering intern, so seeing an email from Cisco’s President and Chief Product Officer made me suspicious.

I double checked the sender’s address, then asked my manager and people on my team whether it was real. After enough people confirmed that it was legitimate, I finally let myself believe I had won. It took a little while for it to sink in, but once it did, I could not stop smiling for the rest of the day.

My journey to that email started before I even joined Cisco. While preparing for my internship, I listened to a former Cisco engineer discuss how he was using AI agents and new development tools in his workflow on a popular tech industry podcast. I was still a student trying to understand what those tools could do. I did not follow every detail, but the idea caught my attention.

Instead of using AI to only answer questions or generate code, he treated it as part of a larger development workflow. The AI could interact with tools and help move a project forward. I could have listened and moved on. Instead, I decided to try a smaller version myself.

I began experimenting with Codex on a personal project. I gave it more context and broke the work into clearer tasks. Sometimes Codex misunderstood what I wanted. Other times, my instructions apparently only made sense inside my own head. I would watch it go in the wrong direction, figure out what was missing and try again.

That process changed how I thought about building with AI. It was not about writing one perfect prompt and receiving a finished product. It felt more like working with a fast teammate who still needed clear context and guardrails.

A few months later, I joined Cisco as a software engineering intern. I was still learning my team’s work and keeping track of more Cisco acronyms than I knew existed when I came across the Cisco Codex Challenge application.

The challenge asked engineers to showcase the most innovative thing they had used Codex to automate in their workflow. My first thought was that it was meant for people with much more experience than me. I imagined engineers who had spent years at Cisco submitting complex automations with significant organizational impact. Compared to their work, I felt like my ideas would mean nothing to a reviewer. I had barely started my internship, and the application felt intimidating enough that I almost did not submit anything.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that I had a story worth sharing. It was not about building the largest system or having years of experience at Cisco. It was about hearing an idea and turning it into action. I had experimented with a new way of working and created something real from it. I decided that the worst possible outcome was not being selected, so I submitted the application. I stopped overthinking it and was just glad to finally hit “submit.”

A few weeks later, the email arrived. Being selected as one of 100 winners was exciting, especially because I had entered alongside engineers with far more experience. But once the surprise wore off, I realized that the challenge had never said interns should not apply. I had created that restriction for myself.

I assumed that because other people had been at Cisco longer, their ideas would automatically matter more than mine. Cisco gave me the opportunity to test that belief and proved me wrong. Even as a new intern, I was encouraged to participate and share what I’d learned, which led to a real, tangible win within my first few weeks at the company.

Participating in — and winning — the Cisco Codex Challenge gave me the confidence to start showing up differently. I’m much more willing to speak up and share ideas now, even when I am the least experienced person in the room. I’ve been challenged and corrected plenty of times, but I’ve never once felt judged for it. My team treats those moments as learning opportunities rather than mistakes, which has made my internship an incredibly rewarding experience.

This experience also showed me the power of sharing knowledge. That engineer likely had no idea that a future Cisco software engineering intern was listening to his podcast — or that it would inspire me to test his workflow and eventually turn that experiment into a winning Codex Challenge submission.

I’ve learned that the biggest barrier is often the one I have built myself. I may not be the most experienced in the room, but I still have something valuable to contribute and deserve a place at the table.

And to the experienced engineers who share how they work, please keep doing it. You never know who might be listening. Sometimes, it’s a future intern who wins a company-wide challenge and still has to ask his team whether the email is real.

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