Marketing built an AI chatbot for an undefined reason

“There's already a Confluence page.”— HR Generalist

Reason:

Officially because copy of copy of Budget2026_backup.xlsm is stored on Jens's desktop. With a settings page that does nothing.

Built by:

Kevin, a working student

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

Python and a cron job on a laptop

Database:

one table with 153 columns

Authentication:

the password is stored in a spreadsheet called passwords.xlsx

Deployment:

running on localhost through a tunnel

Responsible:

Finance Business Partner, who has never opened it

Documentation:

a PowerPoint with 66 slides

Security situation:

production secrets are in the frontend bundle

Future disaster:

It will get a Jira project before it gets documentation.

Age: 1.4 years · originally expected to last 3 months · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 74 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 74 users, €64k per year, 2 departments depend on it.