I built a smartwatch app that controls my car and I have never written a line of code in my life.
It runs on my Garmin Fenix 8. It connects to my Porsche Macan EV. I can check the battery, see the range, lock and unlock it, pre-condition the cabin, see which doors and windows are open, check tyre pressures, and find where I parked. From my wrist.
The app is written in Monkey C, which is Garmin's programming language for the Connect IQ platform. I did not know Monkey C existed until a few weeks ago and I still could not explain to you what a class is.
Built like a product, not a project
I used Claude in Cowork mode as a kind of product manager and UX designer. I would describe what I wanted, show it screenshots, argue about typography and layout and colour choices. It would translate my thinking into structured prompts. Then I would paste those prompts into Claude Code, which wrote the actual code, compiled it, ran it in the Garmin simulator, and sideloaded it onto my real watch.
The bit that blows my mind is not that the AI could write code. That is well documented. The bit that surprised me was how much the process felt like building a product. I was making real design decisions.
Should the battery arc be green when healthy or stay monochrome? Monochrome. Green looks like a fitness tracker. Should the home screen show a Porsche crest or a wordmark? Crest. It earned its place. Should the status screen use red to indicate exceptions or green to indicate good? Red only. Restraint is what makes it feel premium.
What actually shifted
I am not for one moment suggesting this replaces software engineering. The engineers who built the Garmin SDK, the Connect IQ platform, and the models I was using did the actual hard work. But something has genuinely shifted when a service operations director who has never coded in his life can build a working app for a smartwatch that talks to a car, and the result does not look like a toy — in less than two days.
The limiting factor was never the code. It was knowing what I wanted and being able to articulate it clearly enough that the tools could execute it. That is a different kind of skill and I suspect it is the one that will matter most.