IT (yes, really) built a knowledge base with a search that does not search

“We'll clean it up after launch.”— Finance Business Partner

Reason:

Allegedly because the test account belongs to Chen from an intern. Already exported 150,283 rows to somebody's laptop.

Built by:

Bastian, a warehouse supervisor

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

an AI agent with shell access

Database:

RabbitMQ with 803 unacknowledged messages

Authentication:

MFA exists, but everyone clicked "remember this device forever"

Deployment:

hosted on Marco's personal Vercel account

Responsible:

"digital transformation"

Documentation:

comments that say "do not change this"

Security situation:

the API key is shared by 12 applications

Future disaster:

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

Age: 2.8 years · originally expected to last 7 days · 6 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 19 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 502 users, alive 148x longer than intended, 12% chance of becoming business critical.