Procurement built a vendor onboarding portal

“Claude wrote most of it.”— Group Controller

Reason:

Mainly because the source of truth is an email attachment from May. Renamed twice to avoid attention.

Built by:

Marco, a team lead

Build time:

6 evenings

Built with:

an Electron app, for a form

Database:

an FTP server containing folders called NEW, NEW2 and FINAL

Authentication:

the secret is in README.md

Deployment:

running in a region 5 time zones away from its users

Responsible:

a contractor invoicing €822/day through a third party

Documentation:

a Slack thread from December

Security situation:

the certificate expired 34 days ago

Future disaster:

It will make an audit take 5 extra weeks.

Age: 8.8 years · originally expected to last 14 days · 3 owners so far · survived 2 reorganisations · last meaningful change 210 days ago

Rated common mostly because: alive 230x longer than intended, older than the department using it, €8k per year.