I’ve been shipping software since 1999.
I’m Daniel Willems. Lanier is the studio I run — a small shop that designs, builds, and operates production AI systems. Twenty-five 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 started writing software in 1999 — twenty-five years of building things. 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.
The flagship engagement
The longest thread is my work since 2014 with AIT — American Indigenous Tourism, the national association for tribal tourism (renamed in 2025). For over a decade I’ve operated both the public platform, destinationnativeamerica.com, and the internal hub that runs their membership, grants, and events — plus the AI-curated brief their leadership reads every Monday morning. It’s the deepest case study on the site and a good picture of what a long fractional-CTO engagement actually looks like. The full story is here.
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.