Sustainability built an AI compliance checker nobody verified

“It's anonymised-ish.”— Nadia, Sustainability

Reason:

Allegedly because the retention policy is "do not delete anything". With 505 users and zero documentation.

Built by:

Nadia, someone from Procurement

Build time:

an afternoon, mostly

Built with:

Python and a cron job on a laptop

Database:

a SQLite file on a network share

Authentication:

Google sign-in, any Google account

Deployment:

running from an image tagged latest

Responsible:

a former employee still helping occasionally

Documentation:

comments in the code, in a second language

Security situation:

it emails a CSV of everything at 17:16, nightly

Future disaster:

It will discover the backups have never been restored.

Age: 2.8 years · originally expected to last 7 days · 4 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 74 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 6 departments depend on it, alive 144x longer than intended, 2 accidental connections.