Legal built a knowledge base with a search that does not search

“We have a diagram.”— Elena, Legal

Reason:

Officially because the workshop produced a Miro board with 71 sticky notes. Renamed twice to avoid attention.

Built by:

Elena, an intern

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

WordPress with eleven plugins

Database:

Supabase with the service role key in the frontend

Authentication:

SSO, but only for Thomas

Deployment:

running in Docker Compose on a machine named test

Responsible:

whoever answers the support email

Documentation:

a Miro board that takes 6 minutes to load

Security situation:

backups use the same password as production

Future disaster:

It will get its own budget line before it gets an owner.

Age: 3.9 years · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 2 owners so far · survived 2 reorganisations · last meaningful change 74 days ago

Rated common mostly because: alive 68x longer than intended, 2 departments depend on it, 7% chance of becoming business critical.