Claude Code Turned Me Into a Character From The Goonies
Claude Code turned me into my favourite character from the 1985 children's classic, The Goonies.
Last week, looking for a festive throwback during our year-end break, I fired up The Goonies for the first time in more than three decades. And about twenty minutes in, I had one of those strange moments of recognition — the kind where your past and present collide and suddenly make sense.
My favourite character as a kid was Data — played by a baby Ke Huy Quan, long before his Oscar-winning comeback. Data's the nerdy Asian inventor who saves the gang with gadgets he's built himself. Slick shoes that spray oil. A boxing glove on a spring. Ridiculous contraptions held together with hope and duct tape that somehow saved the day when nothing else would.
I thought Data was the coolest.
Growing up, I loved to tinker. I'd take apart small household appliances — radios, tape recorders, mosquito repellant machines, anything I could get my hands on — poke around in them, and put them back together again. Data's life felt like my destiny. The inventor kid who always had a contraption ready. A gadget for every situation. That was the ultimate dream.
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Which is why Engineering College seemed like the road that would get me there.
If you grew up middle-class in India, you know this story. There's the thing you love — and then there's what you're supposed to study. The two rarely overlap. I loved tinkering and computers, so naturally, my parents enrolled me in Electronic Engineering. Finally, I thought. This is it. The path to becoming the inventor I wanted to be.
Two years later, I dropped out.
The dream had been systematically beaten out of me. The Indian education system has a real talent for taking something a kid loves and turning it into something they have to suffer through. Engineering College didn't make me the inventor and builder I wanted to be. So, like many young adults, I gave up on that dream and found another, in many ways equally fulfilling and exciting and maybe even a little similar, one.
I found my way into design and branding — a different kind of creative work, one I genuinely love. But that specific feeling of tinkering, of building a thing just to see if it would work? That stayed buried for a long time.
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Here's what I've realised: my choosing to rewatch The Goonies wasn't random.
For the last couple of years, I've spent a lot of my free time building and tinkering. Not design work. Not client projects. Personal and side-projects. Every time I have a thought that begins with "Oh, wouldn't it be cool if..." — I just build it now. A working prototype, ready to play with. Sometimes in an afternoon. Sometimes over a weekend.
I've now built 21 little projects, and counting. (More on those soon!)
The feeling is extraordinary. Joy and wonder and genuine amazement — at what I've made, at how quickly it came together, at the fact that it actually works. It's unlike anything else I've experienced professionally.
I'm talking about building with AI. Specifically with Claude Code.
Claude Code is the unlock that keeps on giving. I use it more than almost any other tool on my computer now. There's not a day that goes by when I'm not blown away by something Claude suggested — not in a "wow, tech!" kinda way, but in a "wait, I can just build this brain fart into a real thing" kinda way.
The distinction matters. I’m not rosy-eyed about AI — I understand it’s potential for catastrophic destruction. But I’ve seen first hand the greatness that AI could make possible. The ideas I used to shelve because they'd take too long to learn, or require skills I didn't have, or simply weren't practical to pursue — those ideas are suddenly buildable. Everything is within reach.
Here's the irony: I've learned more about code and engineering building these 21 projects with Claude in the last few months than I'd ever have learned in four years of Engineering College. Because I'm learning by doing. Building things I actually want to exist. No syllabus, no exams, no suffering-as-prerequisite. Just the pure joy of making something and watching it work.
You don't need an engineering degree to make cool shit. You just need curiosity, an idea, and — now — the right tool.
That's what Data had. A gadget for every situation. The ability to whip something together when it was needed. The inventor's instinct, backed by the tools to actually execute.
At 42, I'm finally living the inventor dream I had when I was 8. And it is just as fun as I'd always imagined.
