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Show HN: My 13-year-old built an ant colony tracker
He's 13 years old. He wanted to track his own ant colonies — growth, feeding, humidity, and other metrics. He built the whole app himself with some help from AI tools; I just helped him deploy it to a server. Would love to hear your feedback!
- echoangle 3mo agoNot closely related to the app itself, but how does the worker count graph work? Do you count them visually and put in the data? Or how do you know how many ants you have?
- ljcoco 3mo agosuper impressive
- ge96 3mo agoDamn... I just got that, Formic queen in Enders Game... ants
- matheusmoreira 3mo agoSee also: formic acid, so named because it occurs in ants.
- mindfulmark 3mo agoalso the french word for ants, fourmis
- matheusmoreira 3mo agoAlso the portuguese word for ant, formiga, which derives from latin, formica.
- chaitralikakde 3mo agowe call them "chiti"
- skeater15 3mo agoAny web devs that could me this style of UI?
- dewey 3mo agoClaude Code or other AI agents produce that by default, usually also this hue of orange.
- selfawareMammal 3mo ago[flagged]
- loco5niner 3mo ago> black garden ant (Lasius niger) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_garden_ant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_garden_ant Probably from Latin or Greek.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- mark124mj 3mo agoI know right that one caught me off guard.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- sudo_cowsay 3mo ago[flagged]
- zbaby 3mo agoIt's very clearly AI slop (Sorry kid). If it works for you, great! But for others.....
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- jlengrand 3mo agoAs a 40 year old who has had colonies since he's your kiddo's age, please thank him for me! I've created an account :).
- donkey_brains 3mo ago[flagged]
- tantalor 3mo agoSeems like something you could do in a spreadsheet with less time. What's the advantage?
- zbaby 3mo agoA fancy ui? I don't know if it has a specific advantage besides organization.
- jedimastert 3mo agoI mean you could probably say that for most crud applications, the difference is somebody else is already done the work of setting everything up and it looks nice
- DANmode 3mo agoPerfect response. “Why isn’t this a CLI?” because your mom still exists.
- watchdarkly 3mo agoAre these made up ant colonies?
- nreilly 3mo agoWould be good if you can set a hemisphere (I assume nuptial flights are different in northern vs southern hemisphere. Adding more ant species would be helpful too. Camponotus consobrinus, iridomyrmex purpureus and aphaenogaster longiceps are pretty common in Australia.
- cinntaile 3mo agoOn mobile the site is not properly scaled, I need to horizonally scroll. I'm not into ants so I won't register but this is what I like to see. An expert within a specific field that thanks to AI can now build niche tools that are helpful. Keep it up!
- jianfenglin 3mo agoFancy vibe coded UI, but who doe the counting? Even AI can't count ants with just a single photo as majority of them are underground.
- hmartin 3mo agoNeat to see, brings back some great memories! And sorry on behalf of the decent people of HN for the weird haters who don't know ant species names or want to crap on the AI-ness.
- totallygeeky 3mo ago[flagged]
- brandonmenc 3mo agoThey're 13. When we were using Hypercard or BASIC to make dumb little programs, we weren't learning any of that stuff either, really. Making apps is so complicated now that without a little bit of help from LLMs, most kids would probably just give up. Heck, lots of professional software developers are using LLMs to get over that hump on their side projects for the very same reason. It's hard to even get started nowadays, and LLMs lower the barrier of entry. This is a good thing. EDIT: Also, maybe this kid doesn't dream of being a programmer? And they just want an app that solves their immediate problem? Everyone here is being unnecessarily harsh. I hope none of you have kids.
- pooloo 3mo ago> When we were using Hypercard or BASIC to make dumb little programs, we weren't learning any of that stuff either, really. > Making apps is so complicated now Well that is not entirely true, I recall trying to learn game development. A lot of the time I spent was searching posts on web forums or asking questions in DAL/EF/Free/etc net and getting told to learn how to ask a question... not only that but I had learned it was better to write games not engines. Though I still managed to find out about GDI, which led me to DirectX, OpenGL, and then SDL. Those were scary... This is also when I learned about modding games, specifically Half-Life modding, which for some reason led me to creating bots for Counter-Strike just because I could and that is when I learned ladders are really difficult.
- seba_dos1 3mo ago> They're 13. So? It's 13 years, not months. They're perfectly capable of learning that stuff by now. > Making apps is so complicated now I haven't noticed. Why do you think it's so complicated? Making things with GTK, Qt, PHP etc. seems even easier now than it was two decades ago when I was 13 and learning this stuff. Browsers are picky with JavaScript from local files, but these days you can just launch a HTML file with Electron. There's even Lazarus if we wanted to closely replicate what I was learning with back then.
- nullsanity 3mo ago[dead]
- ben_indexlabs 3mo agoVery impressive!
- Spooky23 3mo agoIt looks really awesome, he scratched an itch and created a little platform that he can iterate on.
- syspec 3mo ago[flagged]
- dang 3mo agoPlease don't.
- sanju3026 3mo ago[dead]
- bytestrix 3mo agonoways even 13yo can build and deploy production ready apps , crazyyyy
- jongjinchoi 3mo agoThat's really impressive. I think age doesn't matter.
- Masho_17 3mo agoI like it
- murats 3mo agoThis is the kind of niche project that makes Show HN fun.
- cavan1977 3mo ago[dead]
- dtaillie 3mo agoSleek/aesthetic UI even if done by claude.
- sjyotis 3mo ago[dead]
- abelgvidal 3mo agoThanks everyone for the feedback, it really means a lot to him. Wasn't trying to start a debate about using AI to learn to code; I just want him excited about building things, and this was one way to do that. He's already looking at some of the suggestions here (hemisphere setting, more species) for the next version.
- terekhindc 3mo agoare there existing ant-keeping trackers he compared against, like the AntsCanada community tools? curious what gap he saw.
- VaradD09 3mo agoThat guy is surely master vibecoding
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- exbice 3mo agoyour kid have hands-on ability. If there is a first time, there will be a second time. Looking forward to making more products in the future