My Tech Stack

The Three-Tool Stack Running My Agency

I get asked a lot about how I work. Not the philosophy — the mechanics. What's open on my screen at 6am. What I reach for when a client drops a 200-page PDF and says "build me a database from this." What I use when I need to develop a web app.

The answer is three tools: Claude, Airtable, and Zite. I've tried a dozen others, used them for real work, and most are fine for what they do. But this combo is next level. It's become the core of how Milhoan Design runs, and increasingly, it's showing up in the ranches and ag businesses I work with.

Claude: The Technical Mind in the Room

Claude is the sharpest analyst I've ever worked with — one who never gets tired, doesn't need context repeated, and can switch from reading cattle markets to writing a database schema to building a full web interface without blinking.

I use it as my technical assistant. It does research, analyzes my Airtable bases, reads data structures, pulls meaning out of unstructured documents, and builds mockups. What's made it indispensable is how well it talks to Airtable through an MCP connection — a direct line between Claude and my data. I can show it a base, ask it to spot inefficiencies, and it'll come back with something I missed.

It's also the best tool I've found for building custom interfaces. I describe what I want — visually, functionally — and Claude generates it. For a rancher who needs a dashboard showing pasture rotations, cattle weights, and projected costs in one place, that speed matters. I'm not waiting weeks to piece this tech together anymore.

Airtable: Where the Data Lives

Airtable is my data foundation. I've tried other things. Notion is fine for notes. Spreadsheets are fine for small stuff. But when you need something fast to build, easy to modify, and connected to the rest of the world, Airtable is in a class by itself.

It's Excel if Excel had grown up and gotten serious. You can build a ranching database — animals, pastures, expenses, vendors, vet records — without writing a line of code, without hiring a developer, and without spending a month configuring software. The interface is clean enough to run from a phone signal and a tired brain at the end of a long day.

What I've been leaning on lately is Omni — Airtable's AI builder. I hand it a PDF (a grazing plan, a lease agreement, a vet spreadsheet), and it reads the document and builds the table. Seconds. Claude can look at that same PDF, pull out the structure, hand Omni the instructions, and by the time you've poured a second cup of coffee, you've got a working database. That kind of speed used to require a week of back-and-forth.

Airtable can also do its own web research, run AI agents to analyze large documents, read receipts and invoices automatically. It's not a dumb storage bucket. It thinks.

Zite: Where It All Becomes Something You Can Use

Zite is a web app builder that connects directly to Airtable. I've built two production web apps in the past week — not prototypes, not wireframes, working apps with real data flowing through them.

Here's what's different: Zite takes design inputs seriously. I give it brand guidelines, color systems, typography, and it builds to that spec. Not close. Not good enough for a prototype. Right. Anyone who's handed a mockup to an AI tool and gotten back something that looks like it was designed by someone who's never seen a website knows how rare that is.

Because it's built on React and its own component system, charts and data visualizations come from a prompt. No custom code. No SDKs. No API wiring. You describe what you want — a pasture utilization chart by month, a weight gain trend by lot — and it builds the component. Since it's pulling live from Airtable, the chart isn't a screenshot. It updates when your data updates, and users can interact with it directly.

For ranch management work, that matters. A client shouldn't need to export a spreadsheet, paste it into Excel, format a chart, and email it to themselves just to see how their operation is doing. They should open a page and see it. Zite makes that possible without a six-month development budget.

The Loop

The real value isn't any one tool — it's what they create together.

A client sends a PDF. Claude reads it, structures the data, and hands off instructions for building the Airtable base. Airtable stores the data cleanly, with the right fields and relationships. Zite pulls from that base and renders a dashboard the client can use — branded, dynamic, functional. From raw document to working interface in hours.

If you're a rancher looking to get your operation into a system, or a rural business owner tired of managing everything in spreadsheets that only you understand — these three tools are worth your time.