Dog Shelter Team built a 'temporary' inventory system

“The firewall should block it.”— Managing Director

Reason:

Officially because someone built a prototype during lunch. With dark mode and no error handling.

Built by:

Ravi, a recruiter

Build time:

3 evenings

Built with:

an AI agent with shell access

Database:

Redis, but used permanently

Authentication:

the password manager is someone's browser

Deployment:

running on Ubuntu 22.04 and nobody wants to upgrade it

Responsible:

Head of Operations, because their name appeared first in the meeting notes

Documentation:

a README containing 6 broken links

Security situation:

production secrets are in a Jira ticket

Future disaster:

It will send 120,627 duplicate emails.

Age: 9.3 years · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 6 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 823 days ago

Rated common mostly because: alive 161x longer than intended, €53k per year, older than the department using it.