Tom Clancy

The Effect of Gas on a Marriage

I was well into my 30s before I realized my mother’s aphorism on relationships, “Fits find each other” had a positive meaning. Because my mother and her sister both taught in special education and because their side of the family is from the school of “If you have nothing nice to say and it’s funny, sit with us”, I’d assumed it only ever meant kids who couldn’t sit still wind up together later in life. It was the ‘80s, “fits” would have been one of the nicer terms that was au courant among educators back then.

I mention this because my wife and I describe this pattern (which Plato phrased differently, but we all know what he meant) pretty perfectly. A marriage counsellor (thank you Will!) described the dynamic as “Your Dance”. Michelle is the outgoing, friendly person in charge of ensuring we do things that actually make life worth living. I am the pragmatic, paranoid, hard-working Yankee puritan who bars the doors lest worse should befall us. Given this dynamic, it means I often start a car which tells me, Fuel low, would you like to search for a nearby gas station? The last time it happened, the Hyundai and I had seven miles together before things would have ended. I dread running out of gas. It’s happened maybe twice in a half century and neither time was my fault, but it drives me to distraction. I got the Hyundai to a station a couple miles away with 0.2 gallons left to my name.

Early on in my work as a developer, I decided, “There are no technological solutions to social problems”. I still believe that, but there is also no solution to this problem. In theory, I could not fill the tank to teach a lesson, but my daughter could be in tow at the time of the lesson and I would catch hell from both of them. And that’s assuming I could somehow endure the nearly physical pain of knowing the car needed gas.

So. Stopped at a light in front of the gas station this week, I remembered I’d played with a GitHub repository that lets you talk to the Hyundai/ Kia BlueLink API but lost interest when the problem I was sorting (automatically heating the car on winter mornings) solved itself (broken garage door got fixed). I turned the whole thing over to Claude, showed him there was a Docker version of the repo he could steal from if needed and we built a notification system for low fuel so I am less likely to be surprised in the future.

My fork is here. It has some of the hallmarks of vibe-coded slop, but even those are things I am finding ok-ish in these projects. It was a good fit for the approach as the API represents a solid set of defined options, I wrote up a light spec and then used Plan mode to elicit questions about things that were unclear and it was grunt work I could do but would never get around to because it represents a Busman’s Holiday to be doing unfun, non-greenfield coding for something no one is paying me for. This time around the surprise was in how quickly we were done. It’s not a huge process but I thought sending notifications would take more work. Again, here’s a place where AI shines: there’s a ton of code and documentation in the wild about how to use any notification system of even medium popularity, so steal from that via AI. The vibe-coded slop is 95% a result of the fact sending SMS messages programmatically got much harder (understandably given all the SMS spam) since the last time I needed to do it for work. It’s apparently ~$10-15 a month just for the privilege of a number and the ability to send SMS in the US from it. I tried the “email your cellphone number at the carrier address” as a workaround but it lasted for one message and one message only.

That’s probably something worth calling out about my experience in vibe coding: because I have been doing this a long time, in a lot of languages for a lot of different projects, some things come naturally as breathing. I worked in Django a lot a lot and came to appreciate the nature of pluggable backends. Suspecting notifications might turn out to be a pain in the ass, plus the fact I did this when I rebuilt the notification system at a recent job using Knock, I made the notifications pluggable because it’s a lot easier to develop with something spitting the notifications as logs in the console immediately than having to wait for a message to maybe show up in a dashboard seven levels deep in someone else’ site. So the commit history of my fork includes a bunch of aborted back-end attempts. I was tempted to keep them all for posterity but then I realized how wildly egotistical that sounded.

May you never have gas-related issues in your relationships again.

Tom Clancy

Other articles

Automate MP4 to GIF

Converting MP4 to GIF

Printing from Python on a Mac

Printing from Python on a Mac

Music This Week 11-02-2025

Music This Week

Music This Week 10-25

Music This Week

Brian Dunne, Clams Casino

Autocomplete in Python Shell on Windows

Autocomplete in Python Shell on Windows

Dear Josie: On Weasel Words

Dear Josie: On Weasel Words

Upgrading Django

Upgrading Django

Debugging a Vue.js Error

Debugging a Vue.js Error

Worst Pickup Line: A Play in One Act

Worst Pickup Line: A Play in One Act