The CFO's Assistant built an AI chatbot nobody asked for

“It's just a cron job.”— Thomas, The CFO's Assistant

Reason:

Officially because the vendor quoted 6 months and one workshop. With 2 tests, all skipped.

Built by:

Thomas, the management assistant

Build time:

12 minutes

Built with:

Lovable, plus one emergency GitHub edit

Database:

Notion, with one row per customer

Authentication:

Marco is still an admin because removing access felt risky

Deployment:

hosted on a free trial using Sarah's credit card

Responsible:

Miriam, who has never seen the source code

Documentation:

comments that say "do not change this"

Security situation:

the API key is called PUBLIC_API_KEY

Future disaster:

It will stop working after someone renames a column.

Age: 7.0 years · originally expected to last 3 months · 3 owners so far · survived 2 reorganisations · last meaningful change 210 days ago

Rated rare mostly because: 160 users, 51% chance of becoming business critical, 4 departments depend on it.