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?
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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
Well that is not entirely true, I recall trying to learn game development. A lot of the time I spent was searching posts on web forums or asking questions in DAL/EF/Free/etc net and getting told to learn how to ask a question... not only that but I had learned it was better to write games not engines. Though I still managed to find out about GDI, which led me to DirectX, OpenGL, and then SDL. Those were scary... This is also when I learned about modding games, specifically Half-Life modding, which for some reason led me to creating bots for Counter-Strike just because I could and that is when I learned ladders are really difficult.
Speak for yourself (re learning)? Lots of young ppl are curious and determined and willing to dig into the guts of a thing to understand how it works.
I agree re LLMs lowering the barrier of entry generally being a good thing, but I also find it disingenuous to present this as anyone's work at all, really.
All of the copy on the page (e.g. the "Made with <3 for X") reads to me as empty mimicry of 2018-era coastal tech, and not something a 13 year old would have much context for at all. The tech itself feels like a very simple CRUD app. There is nothing wrong with that and many useful and interesting applications are just that, but I also know that this app is borderline trivial to generate/vibe code in a handful of prompts nowadays
I am sorry to be a downer! To be clear, shipping alone is a hurdle, and that counts for something. Also, not every work needs to be novel or demonstrate outstanding creativity or copywriting skills
But one element of making things that's overlooked is taste. I think that's what is missing here for me -- it's not really transparent which choices were made by the LLM and which were made by the kid.
re: "taste" - whatever that even means here - you could say the same thing about any of the thousands of Bootstrap or Tailwind or whatever CRUD apps made over the years.
All I did was counter this weird narrative "When we were using Hypercard or BASIC to make dumb little programs, we weren't learning any of that stuff either, really."
Why did you presume I had taken a position on LLM usage?
So? It's 13 years, not months. They're perfectly capable of learning that stuff by now.
> Making apps is so complicated now
I haven't noticed. Why do you think it's so complicated? Making things with GTK, Qt, PHP etc. seems even easier now than it was two decades ago when I was 13 and learning this stuff. Browsers are picky with JavaScript from local files, but these days you can just launch a HTML file with Electron. There's even Lazarus if we wanted to closely replicate what I was learning with back then.
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?
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.
Damn... I just got that, Formic queen in Enders Game... ants
See also: formic acid, so named because it occurs in ants.
also the french word for ants, fourmis
Also the portuguese word for ant, formiga, which derives from latin, formica.
we call them "chiti"
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
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.
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
That's really impressive. I think age doesn't matter.
This is the kind of niche project that makes Show HN fun.
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!
super impressive
I like it
Any web devs that could me this style of UI?
Claude Code or other AI agents produce that by default, usually also this hue of orange.
[flagged]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48742447
Nah I believe that. They just forgot to mention some other help (Claude).
> some help from AI tools
You forgot to read the post.
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.
[flagged]
It's very clearly AI slop (Sorry kid). If it works for you, great! But for others.....
[flagged]
Please don't.
[flagged]
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.
> 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
Well that is not entirely true, I recall trying to learn game development. A lot of the time I spent was searching posts on web forums or asking questions in DAL/EF/Free/etc net and getting told to learn how to ask a question... not only that but I had learned it was better to write games not engines. Though I still managed to find out about GDI, which led me to DirectX, OpenGL, and then SDL. Those were scary... This is also when I learned about modding games, specifically Half-Life modding, which for some reason led me to creating bots for Counter-Strike just because I could and that is when I learned ladders are really difficult.
Speak for yourself (re learning)? Lots of young ppl are curious and determined and willing to dig into the guts of a thing to understand how it works.
I agree re LLMs lowering the barrier of entry generally being a good thing, but I also find it disingenuous to present this as anyone's work at all, really.
All of the copy on the page (e.g. the "Made with <3 for X") reads to me as empty mimicry of 2018-era coastal tech, and not something a 13 year old would have much context for at all. The tech itself feels like a very simple CRUD app. There is nothing wrong with that and many useful and interesting applications are just that, but I also know that this app is borderline trivial to generate/vibe code in a handful of prompts nowadays
I am sorry to be a downer! To be clear, shipping alone is a hurdle, and that counts for something. Also, not every work needs to be novel or demonstrate outstanding creativity or copywriting skills
But one element of making things that's overlooked is taste. I think that's what is missing here for me -- it's not really transparent which choices were made by the LLM and which were made by the kid.
re: "taste" - whatever that even means here - you could say the same thing about any of the thousands of Bootstrap or Tailwind or whatever CRUD apps made over the years.
Yes.
I learned heaps from making dumb VB6 winform apps I have no idea what you are talking about.
Part of what I learned was "Dont try and make games in dumb VB6 winform apps" but thats part of the process.
How do you know they're not learning by using an LLM?
You think just because they built something with an LLM they won't ever "view source" on the output?
Very presumptuous.
Where did I presume that?
All I did was counter this weird narrative "When we were using Hypercard or BASIC to make dumb little programs, we weren't learning any of that stuff either, really."
Why did you presume I had taken a position on LLM usage?
> They're 13.
So? It's 13 years, not months. They're perfectly capable of learning that stuff by now.
> Making apps is so complicated now
I haven't noticed. Why do you think it's so complicated? Making things with GTK, Qt, PHP etc. seems even easier now than it was two decades ago when I was 13 and learning this stuff. Browsers are picky with JavaScript from local files, but these days you can just launch a HTML file with Electron. There's even Lazarus if we wanted to closely replicate what I was learning with back then.