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

(formicarium.es)

32 points | by abelgvidal 7 hours ago

15 comments

  • nreilly 1 hour 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.
  • jianfenglin 40 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.
  • jlengrand 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 :).
  • cinntaile 44 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!
  • tantalor 1 hour ago
    Seems like something you could do in a spreadsheet with less time.

    What's the advantage?

    • zbaby 8 minutes ago
      A fancy ui? I don't know if it has a specific advantage besides organization.
  • sudo_cowsay 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.
    • zbaby 6 minutes ago
      It's very clearly AI slop (Sorry kid). If it works for you, great! But for others.....
  • echoangle 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 2 hours ago
      from the screenshots it looks like manual data entry
      • echoangle 1 hour ago
        But do people really count 2400 ants manually?
  • hmartin 33 minutes ago
    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.
  • ge96 2 hours ago
    Damn... I just got that, Formic queen in Enders Game... ants
    • matheusmoreira 2 hours ago
      See also: formic acid, so named because it occurs in ants.
  • watchdarkly 1 hour ago
    Are these made up ant colonies?
  • skeater15 2 hours ago
    Any web devs that could me this style of UI?
    • dewey 2 hours ago
      Claude Code or other AI agents produce that by default, usually also this hue of orange.
  • donkey_brains 1 hour ago
    “Some help”
    • zbaby 7 minutes ago
      Nah I believe that. They just forgot to mention some other help (Claude).
  • selfawareMammal 2 hours ago
    Excuse me. Lasius what?!
  • ljcoco 3 hours ago
    super impressive