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Illustrated AI Lab portrait of Walid EL KHOUKH
Walid AI LAB

AI experiments by Walid

MonÉlu turns French parliamentary archives into a public, queryable data product.

Writing about production data engineering, civic AI, and the architecture behind useful agents.

Claude Code / -87% tokens Slide-Hustle / 5 slides in 45 min MonÉlu / 645 deputies 5,106 roll-call votes 797K+ vote positions Claude Code / -87% tokens Slide-Hustle / 5 slides in 45 min MonÉlu / 645 deputies 5,106 roll-call votes 797K+ vote positions

AI Lab / Civic intelligence

MonÉlu

Evidence-first civic intelligence

MonÉlu treats AI as a governed interface to public data: deterministic questions route to SQL; semantic questions retrieve evidence from pgvector before a French-language answer is generated. Confidence comes from retrieval quality; answers identify PostgreSQL or RAG as their data source, and retrieved evidence is exposed when available.

3,741Indexed chunks
0.80+Keyword eval score
SQL + RAGQuery routing
Open product View source

Latest writing / 02

Field notes from the build

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I Cut My Claude Code Token Usage by 87%, Without Changing a Single Prompt

How building Slide-Hustle revealed that the bottleneck was never the prompt. It was the architecture.

Read on Medium Apr 09, 2026 / 10 min read

I Tried to Call a Government API. It Didn’t Exist.

Seven production bugs from building a civic data pipeline on French parliamentary data, and what each one taught me.

Read on Medium Medium / 02 stories

Field Notes from the Build

Cloud data engineering, MonÉlu, agent architecture, and the lessons that survived production.

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