Finance built an AI chatbot for an undefined reason

“It's just a script.”— Chen, Finance

Reason:

Officially because the licence costs €14,000 per month, billed annually. Built in 43 minutes and demonstrated immediately afterwards.

Built by:

Chen, an analyst

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

a Notion database with automations

Database:

a backup called backup-final-October.zip

Authentication:

the current password ends in 5

Deployment:

deployed into production because staging was broken

Responsible:

nobody. It has no owner.

Documentation:

an email chain containing the phrase "see below" 10 times

Security situation:

the firewall rule is 0.0.0.0/0

Future disaster:

It will make an audit take 2 extra weeks.

Age: 7.5 years · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 2 owners so far · survived 3 reorganisations · last meaningful change 3 days ago · original builder left 619 days ago

Rated legendary mostly because: 840 users, alive 130x longer than intended, 36% chance of becoming business critical.