Show HN: My 13-year-old built an ant colony tracker

aabelgvidal about 7 hours ago 19 commentsRead Article on formicarium.es

HI version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

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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Discussion (19 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

jianfenglin•5 minutes ago

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.

cinntaile•10 minutes ago

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!

nreilly•29 minutes ago

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.

jlengrand•about 1 hour ago

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 :).

sudo_cowsay•about 1 hour ago

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.

tantalor•41 minutes ago

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

What's the advantage?

echoangle•about 3 hours ago

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?

Chu4eeno•about 2 hours ago

from the screenshots it looks like manual data entry

echoangle•about 1 hour ago

But do people really count 2400 ants manually?

watchdarkly•34 minutes ago

Are these made up ant colonies?

ge96•about 2 hours ago

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

matheusmoreira•about 1 hour ago

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

skeater15•about 2 hours ago

Any web devs that could me this style of UI?

dewey•about 1 hour ago

Claude Code or other AI agents produce that by default, usually also this hue of orange.

selfawareMammal•about 1 hour ago

Excuse me. Lasius what?!

loco5niner•about 1 hour ago

> black garden ant (Lasius niger) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_garden_ant

Probably from Latin or Greek.

mark124mj•about 1 hour ago

I know right that one caught me off guard.

donkey_brains•about 1 hour ago

“Some help”

ljcoco•about 3 hours ago

super impressive