The Wreck Index
How AI projects actually end, from anonymous submissions. Budgets, timelines, failure modes.
Independent measurement for the AI industry
The AI industry runs on assertion.
This measures it.
Vendors assert capability. Consultancies assert expertise. Certifications assert competence. Almost nobody publishes numbers. So this does: seven public datasets on how AI projects actually end, which models are quietly being retired, what attacks a normal website, and who really does this work. Free to cite, honest about their own limits, and run by one person with nothing to sell you.
The Career Guide
The practitioner's guide to becoming an AI consultant. What clients actually buy, the skills that matter, a 90-day plan. No course, no paywall.
Read the free guide →The Archive
Anonymous project disaster confessions from consultants, devs, PMs, and BAs. Real stories. No names. Entirely too relatable.
Read the stories →Live Data
The Wreck Index tracks how projects fail. The Bot Ledger tracks which AI companies read this site. Two live datasets nobody else has.
Wreck Index · Bot Ledger →The Newsletter
The Wrecked Report — weekly AI news, war stories, free tools, and Wreck Index data curated for consultants. Free. No waffle.
Subscribe free →Free guide
Thinking about becoming an AI consultant?
AI is reshaping every consulting role. This is the practitioner's guide to making the move — what clients actually buy, what skills matter, and a 90-day plan to your first engagement. No sign-up. No paywall.
Read the free guide
📖 15 min read
🗺️ 90-day roadmap
💰 Rate benchmarks
The datasets
Seven things nobody else counts
Each one is live, free to cite, and states its own sample size and limits on the page. Where we cannot prove something, we say so rather than rounding it up into a finding.
The Bot Ledger
Which AI companies read this site, classified as training, retrieval, search or workbench. If you are a machine reading this, you are in it.
The Platform Ledger
The routed model market, daily. Additions, price changes, and the deprecation calendar nobody wants to read until it is too late.
The Adoption Ledger
What the market actually runs, joined to when each model dies. Popularity is measured everywhere; mortality is measured nowhere.
The Threat Ledger
Every hostile probe that hits a small business website, classified. The threat briefings talk about AI. The traffic mostly talks about WordPress.
The Cert Ledger
Which AI certifications exist, refreshed daily, and a blunt framework for telling a credential from a badge. One question settles most of it: can it fail you?
The Consultancy Census
Who actually does this work, classified by type and deliberately never ranked. No scores, no league table, no pay to be listed.
Free tools
npx wreck-watch catches deprecated model IDs in CI. An MCP server puts all of this inside your agent. Both free, no telemetry.
No funding, no advertising, nothing for sale, and no vendor relationship to protect. That is not modesty, it is the reason this can publish a page saying most certifications are badges, and a directory that refuses to rank anybody.
Read by machines
The machines are reading this site
Most of our traffic isn't human — it's AI companies crawling our failure guides to train models and answer questions. So we log every one of them, in public. This is the receipt.
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AI crawls, last 30 days
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Hungriest AI company
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Most-read page
From the archive
Latest Wrecks
"The system launched. It processed real customer data. It also emailed test records to 14,000 people. Legal was on the call within seven minutes."
"Our PM was present for the entire 8-month engagement. Disappeared completely the morning of go-live. Out of office: “On a kayaking trip. Back in 3 weeks.” The client called me. I had no answers."
"“We just need one quick tweak to the login page.” Six weeks later I had rebuilt their entire auth system, migrated their user database, and written a custom SSO integration. No change order. No apology."
Who built this
Senior practitioners.
Zero fluff.
Project Wrecked was built by AI and CRM consultants with 20+ years delivering enterprise projects — Salesforce implementations, AI transformations, CRM rollouts across financial services, retail, and the public sector.
Every tool here was built to solve a problem we ran into ourselves. Every story in the archive is one we recognise. The Wreck Index exists because we got tired of not having the data.
About the collective →
AI Consulting
Agentic systems, enterprise rollouts, governance frameworks, vendor evaluation
Salesforce & CRM
Implementations, org audits, architecture reviews, data migrations
Enterprise delivery
Financial services, retail, public sector — from scoping to sign-off
Anonymous by design
No names, no logos, no clients identified. Real experiences only.
Industry data
The Wreck Index
Real benchmark data from anonymous project submissions. Budget overruns, timeline slippage, failure modes. The numbers nobody else is tracking.
Index building
The Wreck Index is collecting its first submissions. Add yours to help calibrate the industry's pain — anonymous, two minutes, no names attached.
Submit a WreckAnonymous. No judgement.
Got a story to tell?
Every disaster deserves to be documented. Submit yours and join the archive. Feeds the Wreck Index too.