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!

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jlengrand 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

As 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 :).

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jianfenglin 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Fancy 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.

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cinntaile 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

On 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!

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nreilly 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Would 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.

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totallygeeky 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This teaches kids the wrong lessons about developing tools and making things that work for us.

Your child has made something, sure. Did they learn any of the concepts that go into making an approachable and usable tool? Programming and networking basics? Thought through the pros and cons of making something themselves vs. getting familiar with a more fleshed out product?

These AI tools shortcut the important friction of design and churn out lifeless things like this website.

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brandonmenc 2 hours ago | parent [-]

They'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.

	▲	pooloo an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> 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 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> 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.

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echoangle 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not 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?

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Chu4eeno 5 hours ago | parent [-]

from the screenshots it looks like manual data entry

	▲	echoangle 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		But do people really count 2400 ants manually?

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sudo_cowsay 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'll just ignore the em dash in the post description. Also, why does "Especies" on top right (next to sign in) appear in the English version as well. Adding onto that point, the translation doesn't work well. Just fix up the "Multilingual" feature and it should be pretty good.

	▲	zbaby 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's very clearly AI slop (Sorry kid). If it works for you, great! But for others.....

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tantalor 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Seems like something you could do in a spreadsheet with less time.

What's the advantage?

	▲	zbaby 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		A fancy ui? I don't know if it has a specific advantage besides organization.
	▲	jedimastert 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I 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

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ge96 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Damn... I just got that, Formic queen in Enders Game... ants

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matheusmoreira 5 hours ago | parent [-]

See also: formic acid, so named because it occurs in ants.

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mindfulmark 3 hours ago | parent [-]

also the french word for ants, fourmis

	▲	matheusmoreira 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Also the portuguese word for ant, formiga, which derives from latin, formica.

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hmartin 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Neat 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.

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watchdarkly 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Are these made up ant colonies?

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skeater15 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Any web devs that could me this style of UI?

	▲	dewey 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Claude Code or other AI agents produce that by default, usually also this hue of orange.

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donkey_brains 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

“Some help”

	▲	zbaby 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Nah I believe that. They just forgot to mention some other help (Claude).

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ljcoco 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

super impressive

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selfawareMammal 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Excuse me. Lasius what?!

	▲	loco5niner 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> black garden ant (Lasius niger) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_garden_ant Probably from Latin or Greek.
	▲	mark124mj 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I know right that one caught me off guard.