An intern built an AI chatbot for an undefined reason

“It's more of a tool.”— Group Controller

Reason:

Officially because the nightly job requires somebody to click "continue". With a settings page that does nothing.

Built by:

Miriam, a key account manager

Build time:

one weekend

Built with:

Power Apps, licensed to one employee

Database:

Airtable on Petra's personal plan

Authentication:

permissions are managed in a spreadsheet

Deployment:

in a Docker container nobody can rebuild

Responsible:

Petra, according to Jira

Documentation:

comments that say "do not change this"

Security situation:

certificate warnings are considered normal

Future disaster:

It will turn out to be the only system that knows the real numbers.

Age: 4.4 years · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 2 owners so far · survived 3 reorganisations · last meaningful change 210 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 58% chance of becoming business critical, 3 accidental connections, alive 76x longer than intended.