Legal built a certification expiry alerter

“Claude wrote most of it.”— Kevin, Legal

Reason:

Allegedly because the automation sends an email asking someone to do it manually. Quietly rolled out to three countries.

Built by:

Kevin, a warehouse supervisor

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

a Slack bot doing database writes

Database:

UUIDs stored as VARCHAR(255), just in case

Authentication:

Marco knows the password

Deployment:

running from a zip file called Leads_v2_use-this-one.xlsm

Responsible:

whoever still has the admin password

Documentation:

one README with 4 TODOs

Security situation:

the audit log also contains passwords

Future disaster:

It will get backups after the first data loss.

Age: 188 days · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 188 days ago · original builder left 37 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 5 departments depend on it, 92 users, €54k per year.