My 13-year-old built an ant colony tracker

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• Hacker News
• 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.
  by jianfenglin
• I like it
  by Masho_17
• Any web devs that could me this style of UI?
  by skeater15
• Claude Code or other AI agents produce that by default, usually also this hue of orange.
  by dewey
• super impressive
  by ljcoco
• Very impressive!
  by ben_indexlabs
• 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.
  by hmartin
• Are these made up ant colonies?
  by watchdarkly
• That guy is surely master vibecoding
  by VaradD09
• are there existing ant-keeping trackers he compared against, like the AntsCanada community tools? curious what gap he saw.
  by terekhindc
• Sleek/aesthetic UI even if done by claude.
  by dtaillie
• This is the kind of niche project that makes Show HN fun.
  by murats
• That's really impressive. I think age doesn't matter.
  by jongjinchoi
• your 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
  by exbice
• noways even 13yo can build and deploy production ready apps , crazyyyy
  by bytestrix
• It looks really awesome, he scratched an itch and created a little platform that he can iterate on.
  by Spooky23
• Seems like something you could do in a spreadsheet with less time.

  What's the advantage?

  by tantalor
• 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
  by jedimastert
• A fancy ui? I don't know if it has a specific advantage besides organization.
  by zbaby
• Thanks 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.
  by abelgvidal
• Damn... I just got that, Formic queen in Enders Game... ants
  by ge96
• See also: formic acid, so named because it occurs in ants.
  by matheusmoreira
• 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!
  by cinntaile
• 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?
  by echoangle
• from the screenshots it looks like manual data entry
  by Chu4eeno
• 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.
  by nreilly
• 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 :).
  by jlengrand