Did you see that weird plastic look on my last stack too?

I read a tech blog last week that called this "prompt drift." The AI starts adding its own ideas, like that tulip war, and you have to fight to get it back on track. It's like the program gets too excited about being creative. My friend had a similar thing happen asking for a grocery list that turned into a sci-fi story about sentient broccoli. Sometimes being super simple and direct, like your "please just say" line, is the only thing that works. These models are so trained to add detail that they forget how to be basic.

My dad used to just set the phone down and walk away, let them talk to the empty room.

Oh man, that hits home. I was doing the exact same thing with bolt patterns for way too long. My big one was manually drawing all the fillets on a sheet metal bracket, like twenty in a row. I'd sit there and click each corner one by one. Then I found the "chain" option. You just pick the whole outline and it does every single corner at once. I felt so dumb but also so relieved. What's the next basic tool we're all missing?

Wesley's got a point, you just need the truck to work. A basic OBD2 scanner is like thirty bucks and plugs right in, gives you the code so you're not guessing. Ryanburns is right too, but even with an old truck, that scanner can tell you if it's a bad sensor or something actually serious before you call a shop.