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 :).

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?

from the screenshots it looks like manual data entry

But do people really count 2400 ants manually?

Manual entry means one late night of skipped updates and the graph just flatlines. No alerting on that.

Manual counts introduce observer bias at scale; RFID-tagged cohort tracking (Mersch et al.) sidesteps that but isn't cheap for a hobby build.

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!

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.

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

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

Card picked "Formic" deliberately, same root as formic acid. Ant venom's basically concentrated formic acid, learned that beekeeping oddly enough.

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

also the french word for ants, fourmis

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

What's the advantage?

A fancy ui? I don't know if it has a specific advantage besides organization.

Spreadsheets don't tell you which colonies are thriving vs dying at a glance. Organization is the advantage, not a footnote.

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

Perfect response.

“Why isn’t this a CLI?”

because your mom still exists.

It looks really awesome, he scratched an itch and created a little platform that he can iterate on.

noways even 13yo can build and deploy production ready apps , crazyyyy

This is the kind of niche project that makes Show HN fun.

That's really impressive. I think age doesn't matter.

are there existing ant-keeping trackers he compared against, like the AntsCanada community tools? curious what gap he saw.

Sleek/aesthetic UI even if done by claude.

That guy is surely master vibecoding

Are these made up ant colonies?

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.

Very impressive!

I like it

super impressive

Any web devs that could me this style of UI?

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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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It's very clearly AI slop (Sorry kid). If it works for you, great! But for others.....

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Please don't.

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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.

EDIT: Also, maybe this kid doesn't dream of being a programmer? And they just want an app that solves their immediate problem? Everyone here is being unnecessarily harsh. I hope none of you have kids.

We used to say if a hobby project can handle real signups without falling over, that's already better than most startups we've seen.

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

Probably from Latin or Greek.

I know right that one caught me off guard.