Manufacturing built an office lunch ordering tool

“The admin page isn't linked anywhere.”— Chen, Manufacturing

Reason:

Because Finance has a different spreadsheet. Forked from a tutorial at 11:48 and never cleaned up.

Built by:

Chen, a team lead

Build time:

5 evenings

Built with:

Claude, and no idea about coding

Database:

an S3 bucket called prod-new-really-final with public access "temporarily" enabled

Authentication:

security by obscurity, but without much obscurity

Deployment:

deployed 23 minutes before the builder went on holiday

Responsible:

a steering committee that has not met in 14 months

Documentation:

a photographed whiteboard from a workshop

Security situation:

security is handled by keeping the URL secret

Future disaster:

It will get an SLA before it gets a test suite.

Age: 5.5 years · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 4 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 823 days ago

Rated common mostly because: alive 95x longer than intended, older than the department using it, 18% chance of becoming business critical.