alt Hacker NewsShow 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!
Comments
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 :).
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!
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.
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?
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.
Very impressive!
Damn... I just got that, Formic queen in Enders Game... ants
Are these made up ant colonies?
Seems like something you could do in a spreadsheet with less time.
What's the advantage?
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.
super impressive
[dead]
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.
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.