I’ve been shipping software since 2013.
I’m Daniel Willems. Lanier is the studio I run — a small shop that designs, builds, and operates production AI systems. Thirteen years of senior engineering, the last five building with AI every day. Almost everything on this site is running in production right now, and most of it I still ship to.
The work, in one breath
I first wrote software in 1999, stepped away from it for a stretch, and came back for good. Early on at Turner Broadcasting, making internal tools for their teams. Then a long stretch running engineering for a digital agency, shipping platforms for healthcare, fundraising, and consumer companies. Along the way, senior engineer or tech lead at a handful of startups — each one is a case study on this site.
What I do now is narrower and deeper: I run a studio that takes one or two new engagements a year and ships the actual system a company runs on. Not a chat widget bolted onto someone else’s CRM — the platform itself. Some of that work is for clients. A growing share of it is our own products: a language-learning app (PollyStop), a children’s education platform (Train Your Brain), a marketing OS that runs on scheduled agents (Daily Neon). All in market, all running today.
We use the things we sell
The studio runs on its own agents. A small fleet — Pax, Mebo, and Clyde — handles real production work against our own platforms: scheduled jobs, content pipelines, outreach, the weekly briefs. They claim work race-safely, run skills, and report back. It’s the same shape of system I build for clients, pointed at our own operation. Almost no consultant can credibly say that in 2026 — so when I tell you a system can run unattended and report for itself, it isn’t a slide. It’s how my own shop works. There are short writeups in the lab.
The easiest first step is a short call.
A free AI consult will tell us both if there’s something here — whether you’ve got a system eating your team’s time or a product idea you can’t get into market.