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!
Discussion Highlights (13 comments)
echoangle
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?
ljcoco
super impressive
ge96
Damn... I just got that, Formic queen in Enders Game... ants
skeater15
Any web devs that could me this style of UI?
jlengrand
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 :).
tantalor
Seems like something you could do in a spreadsheet with less time. What's the advantage?
watchdarkly
Are these made up ant colonies?
nreilly
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.
cinntaile
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!
jianfenglin
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.
hmartin
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.
ben_indexlabs
Very impressive!
Spooky23
It looks really awesome, he scratched an itch and created a little platform that he can iterate on.