Operations-first. Production-grade. Plain-spoken.
Swimlanes is an operations-first consultancy. We ship production-grade AI agents and ops automation rails for small teams that need the work done, not a deck about it.
The model is not the bottleneck. The operations layer is.
Most AI projects clear the demo bar and stall before production. Not because the model fails — the model usually works. They stall because nothing has been built around it: no eval harness, no runbook, no on-call, no drift detection, no rollback. The operations layer is missing.
That layer is unglamorous. It's queues, SLAs, golden sets, audit logs, supervised rollouts. It's the boring infrastructure that decides whether an agent runs for one demo or every Monday morning for two years.
Swimlanes exists to build that layer. We bring the agent and the rail it runs on. Then we hand you the keys.
Andrew Buckley · San Diego.
Swimlanes is led by Andrew Buckley — operator, engineer, founder. The shape of the firm is small and senior on purpose: every engagement gets a principal-level person on the build, not a sales team handing off to a delivery org. That's how we keep the four-week tempo honest and the handover real.
We work with US-based small teams across legal, finance, operations, and back-office surfaces. We're remote-first, San Diego-based, and we pick our engagements carefully so we can finish them.
Five principles. No exceptions.
Eval before live
Nothing reaches production without a regression harness in CI and a clean shadow-mode run. Every time.
Hand-over means hand-over
The client owns the system at the end. The code, the credentials, the runbooks, the eval set. We don't hold infrastructure hostage.
Maintenance is honesty
No system runs itself. We say so up front. The maintenance retainer is optional, but the need for maintenance isn't.
Boring tools ship
Postgres, cron, queues, plain HTTP. We use the LLM where the LLM earns its keep — not as plumbing.
Right-sized to scope
A four-week build runs the same rail as a four-month one. The discipline is the same; the loops just take longer.