What's haunting your data and AI?
A field guide to the monsters that haunt data teams, from numbers nobody can trace to data that isn't ready for AI.
How the field guide works
Build your rogue squad · two ways in
Confess, meet your monster
- Describe your data headache in two or three sentences.
- Get a % haunted match, or summon a brand-new monster.
- Share it on LinkedIn, or add it to your rogue squad.
The bestiary leaderboard
The bestiary
Every officially catalogued monster known to stalk data teams. Recognise any?
- Browse the monsters stalking data teams, from founding fiends to fresh sightings.
- Pick up to five for your rogue squad.
- Share your rogue squad on LinkedIn.
The Token Vampire
Drains your credits overnight
The Zombie Pilot
The proof of concept that never dies and never ships
The Dashboard Necromancer
Keeps refreshing reports nobody has opened since 2019
The Shadow Agent
Someone's personal agent, running with production credentials
The Hallucinating Oracle
Wrong, with total confidence
The Excel Poltergeist
The spreadsheet that secretly runs finance
The Metric Mimic
Seven definitions of "customer", all called "customer"
The Copilot Changeling
Work that looks right until someone checks it
The Data Swamp Thing
The data lake nobody dares wade into
The 3 a.m. Banshee
Screams whenever the nightly pipeline fails
The Headless KPI
Rides into the board meeting with no owner and no source
The Compliance Wraith
Appears at audit time asking where the personal data lives
The Legacy Mummy
Twenty years of patches; nobody dares unwrap it
The Vanishing Wizard
The only person who understands the pipeline just resigned
The ROI Phantom
Everyone has seen the AI value; nobody can prove it
The Silo Gargoyle
Guards your data, shares none of it
The Firefighting Hydra
Fix one fault, two more sprout
The Vanishing Shredder Jaws
Gone in one click, mourned for weeks
The Agenda Puppeteer
Pulls every string toward personal glory
The Scope Creep Leech
Small favours, endlessly, on a shoestring budget