Most software is a bus terminus - by Prasanth Janardhanan

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Most software is a bus terminus<br>…and what replaces it when the application disappears. A paradigm I've been calling Pliantware.

Prasanth Janardhanan<br>Jul 01, 2026

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The bus to Kollur was at 7:15. I reached the Bengaluru terminus at 7:00, which felt like plenty of time right up until the taxi left me at the wrong end of it.<br>It’s an enormous place. My bus was parked at terminal 2; I was standing in terminal 1. So now I had ten minutes and a question: how do you get from here to there. I asked a few people. Nobody knew. That’s the thing about a bus terminus, everyone in it is a stranger to the city, same as you. I found a policeman. He waved a hand in a direction and said it’s very close.<br>Thanks for reading Stack Optimist! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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He was right. From the top of one of the walk-over bridges I could actually see my bus. I just couldn’t find a way to reach it. The bridge didn’t come down anywhere near it. I ran down to the ground and went straight for where I’d seen it, and hit a long wall with locked gates. No opening. I doubled back through a knot of little paths, none of which went where I needed. The driver had my number and kept calling, and I kept trying to explain a thing I myself could not see.<br>Eventually some random person took pity and showed me the one narrow gap, a slot you’d never find on your own, and a thin path through it. I made the bus.<br>Here’s what stayed with me. That terminus had everything a government builds into a terminus. An enquiry counter. A website. A toll-free number. Signboards. Not one of those facilities could do the single thing I needed, which was to take me from the exact spot I was standing to the exact spot the bus was parked. Ten feet of wall beat the whole apparatus.<br>Most software I’ve used in twenty-odd years is that terminus.<br>There’s always a path from your situation to the thing you want. The software even has a feature for it, somewhere. But finding the path is on you: click here, no, back out, try that menu, file a request, wait two quarters. You do the random walk into walls. The software stands there with its enquiry counter and its signboards and watches you do it.<br>I didn’t set out to have a theory about any of this. I started using Claude because I was curious.<br>The slow climb

I’d tried the others too, OpenAI and Gemini when they showed up. I stuck with Claude for a reason I couldn’t name at the time: it just seemed to get what I actually meant. (I learned the word for that much later. Alignment.) At first I kept it on a short leash, unit tests and code review, I wrote the real code myself. Then it got good enough that it wrote the code. Then I noticed I was asking it things that had nothing to do with code.<br>Then MCP landed, and that’s the part that changed everything. The moment I could give the model real tools, I started building my own: a filesystem server, wrappers around APIs I used, a thing to drive FFmpeg, another for pandoc. The model wasn’t trapped in a chat box anymore. It could reach into my actual work. After that I stopped reaching for apps for a whole class of problems and just described what I wanted.<br>The small surprises

The first time it really landed was a GST invoice. (I’m in India; if you’ve dealt with GST you feel this already.) My accountant had chased me four times, the deadline was two days out, and I didn’t even know what a correct invoice looked like, the rate, the mandatory fields, the format. Normally that’s an afternoon lost to Google and a half-finished Word doc bouncing between us. Instead I had Claude pull the current rules through Perplexity, checked the rates against the source myself, and told it to generate the invoice as HTML. A few minutes later the accountant had a clean file with the math already right, and was almost suspicious of how fast it came back. What stuck with me wasn’t the speed. There was no invoicing app. I never bought one. There was my data, a couple of tools, and a conversation, and out the other end came exactly the artifact I needed.<br>The next one changed how I thought about it, because this time the useful thing wasn’t conjured out of nothing. It was already sitting in my own data, and I couldn’t see it. One month my credit card bill was higher than usual and I couldn’t say why. So I pulled a year of statements, and instead of squinting at twelve PDFs I had a script load all of them into a small SQLite database on my laptop. (By now I was driving the model through the API with my own MCP servers, so “load these into a database” is a sentence, not a project.) Then I just asked questions. “What’s recurring” turned up three streaming subscriptions I’d forgotten I was paying for and three SaaS tools I’d stopped using and never cancelled. None of it was hidden. It had arrived in my inbox every month for a year. I’d just never had a way to ask.<br>The...