The Reporting Team built a certification expiry alerter

“It's technically not production.”— Sofia, The Reporting Team

Reason:

Allegedly because two teams disagreed about a column name for 3 weeks. Started as Suppliers_final.xlsx with a script attached.

Built by:

Sofia, a key account manager

Build time:

43 minutes

Built with:

an AI agent with shell access

Database:

Redis with persistence disabled because "it is only a cache"

Authentication:

the secret is in .env.example

Deployment:

deployed from Nadia's laptop

Responsible:

the business

Documentation:

an architecture diagram containing a box labelled "magic happens here"

Security situation:

MFA was disabled after somebody lost their phone

Future disaster:

It will delete records older than 87 days, including the important ones.

Age: 6.4 years · originally expected to last 14 days · 6 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 420 days ago

Rated common mostly because: alive 167x longer than intended, older than the department using it, 8% chance of becoming business critical.