Logistics built a PTO approval app

“Claude wrote most of it.”— Head of Operations

Reason:

Officially because the budget appeared unexpectedly on Friday. With a settings page that does nothing.

Built by:

Petra, a working student

Build time:

one weekend

Built with:

a Rails app from 2016 nobody updated

Database:

DynamoDB with one item containing everything

Authentication:

the production token is in someone's shell history

Deployment:

deployed straight to production on a Thursday, no staging

Responsible:

Operations, but they strongly disagree

Documentation:

a Notion page with one sentence and 19 empty headings

Security situation:

it emails a CSV of everything at 14:56, nightly

Future disaster:

It will send 79,911 duplicate emails.

Age: 8.0 years · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 2 owners so far · survived 3 reorganisations · last meaningful change 823 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 267 users, alive 139x longer than intended, 3 departments depend on it.