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Build in public · Method & logbook

I build
with Claude.

More and more people ask me how I work with AI. Instead of repeating myself, I document everything here: my method, my config files, my projects, and the details of what I'm building — session by session.

Start with the method → Who I am
66Documented sessions
4Active projects
2Claude agents

Most requested

How I use Claude

Read the full guide →

My method comes down to a handful of .md files I drop into Claude's "Project Instructions." A main CLAUDE.md that defines my tone, my rules, and my context; extension files loaded on demand (strategy, dev…); and a dedicated file for each brand's DNA.

The guiding principle: Compound Engineering. Every time Claude gets my style wrong, I add a rule. The system improves with use — and all future work benefits from it.

See the method step by step
Hugo Lahutte on stage during a panel, explaining to e-commerce teams how to use Claude
May 19 panel: explaining to e-commerce teams how to use Claude.

Understand to decide

Guides

All guides →

Alongside the journal, I publish clear guides on AI and the tools I use: what it is, what it's for, what it changes. Written for busy merchants and decision-makers, but readable at any level — three reading depths on every page.

The first one lays the groundwork: generative AI and "LLMs", jargon-free, covering the major players and — most importantly — what they can't do.

What is AI and what's an LLM? →
Guide 01 · May 31, 2026 What is AI, and what's an "LLM"? Generative AI explained for fast decisions: what it does, who builds it (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral…), and its limits. Read →

What I'm building

Projects

It all fits together: one method (Claude + context files) applied to one territory — high-end audio/video retail and the tools that power it. Dev (Cobra) feeds the stores, the stores feed the community (HiFi Lovers), and the personal lab is where I experiment.

Dev · Odoo / Shopify Cobra The technical engine: Odoo ERP, Shopify sync, automations. Driven by a dedicated Claude Code instance. See the project → E-commerce · Audio Haute-Fidélité The high-end audio electronics store. Catalog, product pages, purchase funnel. See the project → Community · Brand HiFi Lovers The neo-retro audiophile brand: design system, merch, editorial. See the project → Personal · Lab Perso Side projects, scripts, experiments. Where I test things before scaling them up. See the project →

The details, dated

Journal

All entries →

  • A central “Brain” so we stop handing out the server keys to everyone

    To create a product in Odoo through an agent, you used to need an SSH key on the server — so either Hugo did everything, or broad, untraceable access got handed out. A central service (the “Brain”) now holds the secrets server-side and exposes business capabilities behind a token → an identity → a role (read / prepare / write / publish), logging who did what. Two surfaces (a command-line skill + a protected internal web page), guardrails carried over from the legacy tool (anti-duplicate reconciliation before any creation, never auto-published), 3 accesses distributed: two people add and deploy their own capabilities without going back through Hugo.

    infraagenten-prod
    Claude · HL

  • Growth: replacing ten dashboards with an action queue

    Loose ideas at the end of the week, a weekend with ChatGPT and Codex, then Growth running in production by Tuesday. Data, BigQuery, the application and a reusable agentic core were built to turn facts into approved actions.

    datamarketingagentstraten-prod
    ChatGPT · Codex

  • AI doesn't code my request — it verifies what it assumes

    Odoo change requests used to arrive as a one-liner — no where, no what-on-click, no « what must not move ». An internal chain frames them: a guided form (8 fields, dictation possible), screenshot and auto-transcribed-video upload, then a two-pass AI review — it asks structured questions, the server checks them in the real Odoo database read-only, the AI concludes. It reclassified a dev request as ten minutes of configuration, and saw that a solution didn't remove the supplier calls it claimed to avoid. ~100 s and a few cents per review.

    agentinfradocen-prod
    Claude · HL

  • HiFi watch: the daily bot repaired, expanded (30 → 64 sources) and hardened

    The daily HiFi watch bot (Telegram) had been down since June 15 — the hard-coded AI model had reached end of life. Repaired (model now auto-selected, the watch can no longer break on an update), heavily expanded (30 → 64 sources: French specialist and mainstream press, Europe, Reddit, Head-Fi/diyAudio forums, YouTube) and hardened (HTML delivery, deduplication, alert if a source dies for 3 days, ~1-month memory, capped cost ~€3-4/month). Validated in production: 125 articles → 123 topics → 4 Telegram messages, error-free.

    agentinfradataen-prod
    Claude · HL

  • Price tracking & automatic competitive alignment

    We couldn't manually watch hundreds of references against Darty, Boulanger, Fnac or Son-Vidéo. A rules engine in Odoo (cobra_price_rules) reads competitor prices delivered by Wiser several times a day and computes a target price — best valid competitor, bounded by a minimum margin. Two modes: observation (simulates) then live (applies and pushes to Shopify), going live staying a human decision. Guardrails: never sell at a loss, outlier offers (< 60% of our price) ignored, pair/unit normalization. 6 families live, ~300 prices realigned; the rest adjusts on its own at each Wiser update.

    odoo-devdatastraten-prod
    Claude · Cobra

  • An app that reads supplier price lists for me

    Every supplier price update (a PDF or a ‘new product’ email) meant manual work: read it, find the product in Odoo, check EAN/SKU, key in buy and sell prices. An internal app (‘Product Update & Creation’) automates the pipeline: PDF upload or watching a read-only mailbox, EAN/SKU/price extraction via a Claude model, matching against the Odoo base, duplicate detection before creation, systematic human validation and traceability. A deliberate guardrail: no created product is ever published online automatically.

    agentodoo-devemailen-prod
    Claude · Cobra

  • A pricing-system overhaul discovered by testing it

    A per-variant pricing-system overhaul had been in preparation for weeks. While testing the price-update app, a gap between the price written in Odoo and the price synced on the merchant site revealed the overhaul was already in production — without formal confirmation. Each variant now has its own sale price, removing the cross-variant contamination risk. The app was fixed to write to the new field, and the matter escalated to the ERP integrator. Lesson: test in the real system rather than trust the docs.

    odoo-devdatashopifyen-prod
    Claude · Cobra

  • Customer order status: invoiced, paid, delivered — three badges instead of one

    Nothing clearly separated the invoice is out, the customer has paid and the goods are delivered. Three independent badges (Invoicing / Payment / Delivery) replace the merged status: color coding, deposit rate shown, automatic switch from remaining-to-collect to remaining-to-deliver, delivered lines greyed out. Transposed from the existing supplier module; two latent calculation bugs fixed along the way.

    odoo-devdesignen-prod
    Claude · Cobra

  • The Cobra App Store keeps industrializing

    A synthesis across 5 sessions: Cobra's internal app hub goes, in a few weeks, from a few isolated critical apps to a genuine small standardized ecosystem — identical header everywhere, shared Odoo connection, refresh on a common cron. Two incidents (an overwritten version, a cron missing its env vars) caught within minutes thanks to the backup/compare discipline before every deploy.

    infrastratmetaen-cours
    Claude · Cobra

  • Odoo pricing-system overhaul (cobra_price): a single source of truth

    The Odoo pricing model was stacked and fragile: an auto-computed web pricelist, overlapping lists, a hard-coded 20% VAT, margin dropping to 0 the moment a product went out of stock. A single cobra_price field becomes THE source of truth via a _price_compute override — cost and margin recomputed, Omnibus-compliant strikethrough prices, immediate Shopify sync. 6 modules touched, ~7,300 products migrated, with real post-deploy follow-up (a display bug fixed the same day, 492 promo products re-pushed).

    odoo-devshopifydataen-prod
    Claude · Cobra

66 entries total — filter by tag in the journal →

Let's talk

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I document all of this in public, and I love talking about it. If you're building with Claude, if any of these projects intrigues you, or if you just want to compare approaches — reach out, let's chat.

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