The SAP Team built a RAG pipeline for twelve documents

“It's basically Airtable.”— Kevin, The SAP Team

Reason:

Allegedly because the workflow has 101 steps and nobody wants to open it. Already exported 27,278 rows to somebody's laptop.

Built by:

Kevin, a product owner

Build time:

one weekend

Built with:

a browser extension that somehow became business critical

Database:

filenames. The filenames are the database.

Authentication:

the password is stored in a spreadsheet called passwords.xlsx

Deployment:

hosted in Chen's Azure subscription

Responsible:

Ravi, because they clicked "create project" first

Documentation:

a PDF containing screenshots of the old UI

Security situation:

backups use the same password as production

Future disaster:

It will acquire its own workaround.

Age: 150 days · originally expected to last 2 months · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 150 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 86% chance of becoming business critical, 46 users, alive 3x longer than intended.