what i was missing in my ai stack: @ValDotTown

it literally gives wings to everything i build https://t.co/GdzAHP0rTr
— Fred Moon 🚀 (@fw3d) June 15, 2026

\n\n---\n\n**metaend** named Val Town their go-to for creating forms.\n\n

I run my forms now via a free val.town instance, very easy to setup with ai and no lock in
— meta (@metaend.eth.xyz) June 14, 2026 at 3:27 AM

\n\n---\n\n[**wttdotm**](https://www.val.town/u/wttdotm) created a\n[nyc-webcam](https://www.val.town/x/wttdotm/nyc-webcam) live feed.\n\n![nyc-live.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/7636883d-6bf1-4fa1-9fe9-d370b60bca00/public)\n\n---\n\n[**Nico**](https://nicobaier.com/) built a\n[migrate-blob](https://www.val.town/x/nbbaier/migrate-blob) val to migrate\naccount-scoped blob storage to our new\n[val-scoped blob storage](/scoped-blob-storage). He also made\n[blob-branch](https://www.val.town/x/nbbaier/blob-branch) for prefixing branch\nnames to blob keys.\n\n---\n\n[**Reese Armstrong**](https://reeseric.ci/) made\n[automerge-editor](https://www.val.town/x/reesericci/automerge-editor), \"a tiny\nweb app that connects to an Automerge sync server over WebSocket and lets you\nview and edit a document's contents as JSON.\"\n\n---\n\n[**Rayyan**](https://rayyano.vercel.app/) made a\n[yt-upload](https://www.val.town/x/rayyan/yt-upload) val for easier YouTube\nuploads.\n\n---\n\n[**heatshectare9h**](https://www.val.town/u/heatshectare9h) built an\n[oura-mcp](https://www.val.town/x/heatshectare9h/oura-mcp) val that lets Claude\nread your Oura Ring data via the Oura API.\n\n---\n\n[**Richard Xun**](https://www.val.town/u/zyrxun) is using Val Town for his Mac\nmenu bar app, [Helm](https://get-helm.app/), that opens all your work apps using\none hotkey.\n\n---\n\n[**Nicolas Vivet**](https://www.val.town/u/nizox) made a\n[baby-feed-tracker](https://www.val.town/x/nizox/baby-feed-tracker) val,\npresumably to remember to feed his baby.\n\n---\n\n**mardikeme** on Reddit made an\n[Android Wear OS app for 8 Sleep](https://www.reddit.com/r/EightSleep/comments/1tzv757/8_sleep_watch_app/)\non Val Town.\n\n---\n\n[**davidargabright**](https://www.val.town/u/davidargabright) built an\n[SEO/AEO audit tool](https://www.val.town/x/davidargabright/GEO_audit_tool).\n\n---\n\n[**Bruno Pedro**](https://brunopedro.com/) made a\n[my-ip-mcp](https://www.val.town/x/bpedro/my-ip-mcp) MCP server val that allows\nyour LLM to get your IP address.\n\n---\n\n[**Christopher DeBeer**](https://www.christopherdebeer.com/) built a\n[spaced repetition val](https://www.val.town/x/c15r/primer) for children.\n\n---\n\n[**Matthew Tole**](https://matthewtole.com/) created a\n[cat-adoption-scraper](https://www.val.town/x/matthewtole/cat-adoption-scraper/)\nRSS feed.\n\n---\n\n[**angeltapes**](https://www.val.town/u/angeltapes) made\n[fastbuck.val.run](https://www.val.town/x/angeltapes/fastbuck), a DIY music\nwebsite for \"Glasgow DIY punk, grind and noise.\"\n\n---\n\n[**consensus**](https://www.val.town/u/consensus) made an\n[arr-bot](https://www.val.town/x/consensus/arr-bot) cron val to send daily\nStripe and HubSpot data to Slack.\n\n---\n\n[**fundsurfer**](https://www.fundsurfer.com/) built a\n[live-status-badge](https://www.val.town/x/fundsurfer/live-status-badge) val to\ndisplay the live progress of a Fundsurfer campaign as an SVG image, embeddable\non any website.\n\n---\n\n[**Polymath**](https://www.val.town/u/Polymath) created an\n[expense-tracker](https://www.val.town/x/Polymath/expense-tracker) email handler\nval that accepts forwarded receipts and stores them in Notion.\n\n## Vals from the Val Town team\n\n[**Charlie**](https://x.com/CharlieMolthrop)\n[hosted an open mic night for ten LLMs](https://x.com/CharlieMolthrop/status/2059772171354882284),\nwhich incidentally won him OpenRouter's weekly $50 credit prize. Spoiler:\nCharlie is funnier than the models.\n\n![open-mic.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/98848e57-b79d-4b10-3cc0-727b9942f900/public)\n\nMore Charlie work:\n\n- The [vapi-phone-call](https://www.val.town/x/templates/vapi-phone-call)\n template solicits an AI (gpt-4o) phone call via the Vapi API. For example,\n Charlie's [call-my-human](https://www.val.town/x/dcm31/call-my-human) val is\n an MCP server that allows an agent to call you mid run if it has a question\n for you\n- [artifact-slackbot](https://www.val.town/x/dcm31/artifact-slackbot) is a val\n that ingests data and generates HTML artifacts right from Slack\n- When Opus 4.8 dropped, Charlie\n [tested it against Meryl Streep's demands](https://x.com/CharlieMolthrop/status/2060153658134667531)\n from The Devil Wears Prada\n- By hooking up OpenAI realtime to the Val Town MCP server, Charlie\n [created an HTML slide deck by speaking plain English](https://x.com/CharlieMolthrop/status/2057217297404592271).\n You can create webpages with your voice at\n [talk.val.run](https://talk.val.run/)\n- [skillbook.val.run](https://skillbook.val.run/) is a trading card-themed agent\n skill repo\n- [farm-log](https://www.val.town/x/dcm31/farm-log) is an indoor-garden tracker\n ([charlies-farm-log.val.run](https://charlies-farm-log.val.run/))\n\n---\n\n[**Steve**](https://stevekrouse.com/) had to fax the IRS, so he vibe coded\n[agentfax.val.run](https://agentfax.val.run/) which wraps a fax API in a\n[Tempo](https://tempo.xyz/) proxy. Agentfax has sent 28 faxes for $7.80 ($6.05\nprofit) since launching a couple weeks ago. _(Fun fact: I learned last week that\nfax is short for facsimile.)_\n\n![agentfax.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/7fc9cd07-03bf-4921-04bc-0eab52445200/public)\n\nSteve also made:\n\n- [blob-bench](https://www.val.town/x/valdottown/blob-bench) benchmarks Val\n Town's new S3-based [scoped blob storage](/scoped-blob-storage) against the\n legacy R2-based blob storage (tl;dr - it's now 5x faster)\n- [a stripe-mirror template](https://www.val.town/x/templates/stripe-mirror) to\n make working with your ARR data from Stripe a whole lot easier (e.g. for\n revenue analytics)\n- [a secret sharing app](https://x.com/KeshavY93629914/status/2060204305844732030),\n like magic-wormhole but web-based and remixable\n- [four app prototypes in ten minutes](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/2059387694388539853?s=20)\n using the (relatively) new [Stripe Projects](https://projects.dev/) with Val\n Town MCP + Claude Code\n- [a Claude Managed Agents UI template](https://www.val.town/x/templates/claude-managed-agents-ui)\n (read: OSS Lovable-like app builder)\n- [a Claude Managed Agents UI + Val Town MCP template](https://www.val.town/x/templates/claude-managed-townie)\n (remixing the above)\n\n---\n\n[**Pete**](https://www.petemillspaugh.com/) (this very blogger) built an\n[atprotoblog](https://www.val.town/x/templates/atprotoblog) template that\nintegrates a simple Markdown blog with [Standard.site](https://standard.site/).\nWe also have a refreshed [blog](https://www.val.town/x/templates/blog) template\nif you don't want the AT Protocol stuff. This very blog itself integrates with\nStandard.site, which opens up discoverability in the atmosphere—and yes, link\ncards on Bluesky!\n\n\n\n---\n\n[**Potluck**](https://potluckmittal.com/) rebuilt his personal site\n[as a val](https://www.val.town/x/potluck/potluckmittal-dot-com).\n\n## Community showcase\n\nP.S. That's it for this month, but we also have a\n[Community Showcase](https://www.val.town/explore/community-showcase) on our\nmain site. Submit a PR to add your val there, or share on\n[Discord](https://discord.val.town) :)\n\n![community-showcase.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/d628f676-c286-47ec-a3a0-e50341dd9300/public)",[],[186,502],"1d00e316-69ec-4cf3-9c30-a6a99a4481c6","2026-06-11-scoped-blob-storage.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a710-0640028f3311",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Introducing Scoped Blob Storage\ndescription: \"Every val gets its own blobs\"\npubDate: 2026-06-11:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Tom MacWright\nthumbnail: https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/6616231e-e7e5-4488-7327-68c285994a00/public\n---\n\nSince the early days, vals on Val Town have had the ability to store blobs on an\nS3-like service. Just import a val from the standard library and it works, with\nno setup or configuration. It's a tremendously useful and popular feature.\n\nWhat's a blob, you might be asking? It's binary data that you store with a name,\njust like a file. And it can be any kind of data - text, photos, music, JSON -\nit's all the same to blob storage. It's a great option for storing unstructured,\nsimple, or big data. If you've got structured data and need a database, check\nout our [SQLite database support](https://www.val.town/x/std/sqlite) which is\njust as easy to setup.\n\nToday we're adding a new version of blob storage with two important tweaks:\n\n### It's scoped!\n\nScope blob storage is isolated by val, rather than by account. This simplifies\nthings for when you might need to transfer a val from one organization to\nanother, or list only the blobs that were created by one specific val.\n\nIn the old days (before yesterday), blob storage was scoped by your user account\nor organization. In the rare case that two vals wanted to access the same blobs,\nthis was nifty, but in the more common case we'd see vals accidentally\noverwriting each others data. And there was no connection between a blob and the\nval that wrote it, so you couldn't transfer a val without losing access to all\nof its blobs.\n\n### It's faster!\n\nAbout 5x faster on our internal benchmarks. Pretty good! I'll even give away the\nsecret: under the hood, scoped blob storage is based on good old Amazon S3.\n\nWe used Cloudflare R2 for the global blob storage system, because we were\nalready using some of the Cloudflare stack, and the egress pricing difference is\ncompelling. But in this case, proximity is the deciding factor: with an S3\nbucket in the same region as our servers, file uploads, downloads, and other\noperations involve the minimum amount of network hops. It all stays in Amazon's\nnetwork, and for small requests where latency is the biggest factor, that means\na big performance difference.\n\n### View those blobs in the settings\n\n

\n\nJust like for global blobs, you can list, download, and upload blobs from the\nwebsite, not just from code. Check it out with the new Blob Storage menu item\nfrom vals.\n\n### Scoped blob storage: a solid new default\n\nIf you're using Val Town's MCP servers, skills, or Townie, you might notice that\nthe LLMs are now set to prefer scoped blob storage, as the more future-proof,\nfaster alternative to global storage. If you're coding by hand (bless you, sweet\nthing) check out the\n[new documentation for the std/blob val](https://www.val.town/x/std/blob) for\ndetails on how to use scoped blob storage. It's the same API, just a different\nimport.",[],[186,509],"50270033-f1ac-4bf6-b7cb-a0ad96fd1884","2026-06-10-2026-may.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a710-03245633e76f",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Investor Update – May 2026\ndescription: \"Potluck joined the team. Claude became our biggest source of new users\"\npubDate: 2026-06-10:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Steve Krouse\nthumbnail: https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/2d149dc0-30ba-4108-fa69-77ec70bec900/public\n---\n\nDear investors and friends,\n\nVal Town is the 100ms deployment platform. Our mission is spreading the joy of\nprogramming.\n\n## May 2026\n\nWe grew ARR 3% in May, driven mostly by Pro subscriptions, which in turn is\nlikely because we made private & unlisted vals no longer accessible on our Free\nplan. We also had our first fully-self-serve Business plan subscriber; they\nsigned up and subscribed without talking to us.\n\nOur May focus was Claude Code + Val Town. It's really fun to use Claude Code and\nCodex to make vals!\n[In this silly livestream](https://www.youtube.com/live/-eaTnjVs84I?si=cSSMfxwug7Crsedu&t=890),\nI spin up 33 parallel Claude Code subagents to deploy 33 demos on Val Town – one\nfor [every API on Stripe Projects](https://projects.dev/providers/) – in 20\nminutes! We built a\n[“Claude Plugin”](https://docs.val.town/guides/prompting/plugin/), redesigned\nthe top of our homepage, and plastered copyable “install our plugin” snippets\npages throughout our site and docs.\n\n

\n\nTry it for yourself:\n\n```bash\nnpx plugins add val-town/plugins\n```\n\nI was shocked to learn that in the last 30 days, a whopping 25% of new users\nself-reported learning of Val Town from Claude, dwarfing any other single source\nof traffic.\n\nOh, and a personal May update: I got married!!!\n\n## June 2026\n\nMy very good friend Potluck joined Val Town! We’ve been friends since college –\n14 years now – and it’s a dream to work together. He’s helping us on operations,\nproduct, & growth.\n\nOur goal for June remains growing MRR 20%.\n\n## **Key numbers**\n\n**Team**: 6\n\n**Hiring**: 1 ([Infra Engineer](https://val-town.notion.site/infra-eng))\n\n**Revenue Growth**: 3% (Goal: 20%)\n\n

\n\nWe generate this ^ ARR chart – a shockingly hard problem – by syncing Stripe to\nVal Town SQLite.\n[Here's a template!](https://www.val.town/x/templates/stripe-mirror)\n\n## Highlights\n\n- Potluck joined!\n- First 100% self-serve business customer\n\n## Lowlights\n\n- Missed 20% revenue growth goal\n\nBest,\n\nSteve",[],[186,516],"8df6f02d-fa30-42e9-997d-a3a6612725fa","2026-06-05-plugin.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-fd90e33fd7f0",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: The Val Town plugin for coding agents\ndescription: 100ms deploys from Claude Code, Codex & Cursor\npubDate: 2026-06-05:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Pete Millspaugh\nthumbnail: https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/ca3c06ff-6740-4326-cdd7-f70838a98900/public\n---\n\n![plugin-doodle.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/ca3c06ff-6740-4326-cdd7-f70838a98900/public)\n\nThe Val Town plugin for coding agents is live, bundling Val Town MCP and\nplatform Skills for your agents. **It supports Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor.**\n\n## Install\n\nInstall for Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor in one command:\n\n```bash\nnpx plugins add val-town/plugins\n```\n\nOr\n[from Claude Code's official plugin marketplace](https://claude.com/plugins/valtown):\n\n```bash\nclaude plugin install valtown@claude-plugins-official\n```\n\nOr in Codex:\n\n```bash\ncodex plugin marketplace add val-town/plugins\n```\n\nOr in Cursor:\n\n```bash\n/add-plugin valtown\n```\n\n## Capabilities\n\nWith the plugin, your coding agent can write idiomatic vals and deploy live to\nVal Town in 100ms. The plugin includes:\n\n1. **Val Town MCP server:** list, read, create, edit, run, and deploy vals; view\n logs; query your SQLite and Blob storage; manage env vars, branches, and\n version history\n2. **Val Town Skills:** platform know-how from our\n [system prompt](https://val.town/townie/system-prompt), plus skills for HTTP\n vals, crons, email vals, SQLite, OAuth, frontend patterns, API integrations\n\nYou can explore the plugin's source code at\n[github.com/val-town/plugins](https://github.com/val-town/plugins).",[],[186,523],"11406976-0f72-40ed-9ad4-73cac5b0e780","2026-05-27-growbots.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-fb97f03de7ac",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: How Growbots uses Claude Code + Val Town MCP for frictionless deployment\ndescription: If Claude Code is Amazon, Val Town is same-day shipping\npubDate: 2026-05-27:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Pete Millspaugh\nthumbnail: https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/1f63d6f8-5bce-41ca-f8aa-3fa5f662a900/public\n---\n\n![same-day.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/1f63d6f8-5bce-41ca-f8aa-3fa5f662a900/public)\n\nIf Claude Code is Amazon, Val Town is same-day shipping.\n[Growbots](https://www.growbots.com/), a lead generation agency for SMBs,\ncreates tools and apps with Claude Code and instantly deploys to Val Town using\nthe [Val Town MCP server](https://docs.val.town/guides/prompting/mcp/).\n\n## Who/what: Growbots helps SMBs with outbound sales\n\n[Growbots](https://www.growbots.com/) is a lead generation agency for small- and\nmedium-sized businesses. They’ve served over 3,000 customers since their\nfounding just over a decade ago, helping customers generate over $500 million in\ntotal revenue. They save businesses time on customer prospecting and outreach,\nand Val Town saves _them_ time building and deploying tools to run their\nbusiness.\n\nWe talked to Greg Pietruszynski, Growbots’ co-founder and CRO, and Jakub\nKalbarczyk, GTM Engineer, about how they’re using Val Town with Claude Code.\n\n## Problem: codegen is frictionless, deployment is not\n\nThere’s a lot of talk lately about how code is cheap, but working software\nisn’t. Part of that is the bridge between codegen and deployment. Greg put it\neloquently:\n\n> 99% of non-technical users have no f\\*\\*\\*ing idea how to deploy apps, and\n> it’s even f\\*\\*\\*ing hard to register on GitHub now because you need to do\n> this captcha verification spending 10 minutes listening to strange animal\n> noises.\n\n## Solution: deploy Claude’s code with Val Town’s MCP\n\nVal Town solved that deployment gotcha for Greg, who doesn’t write code and\nisn’t used to dealing with engineering infrastructure.\n\n> As I started digging more into Claude Code, I obviously ran into deployment\n> issues. Instead of fighting with GitHub, I now have a simple solution: I just\n> talk to Val Town using MCP. That’s the most reliable part of my process.\n\n### Sales vals\n\nFor example, Greg compressed his sales knowledge and experience into a val that\ningests meeting transcripts, updates their HubSpot CRM, and crafts a suggested\nfollow-up for his sales team.\n\n> I built a sales coach into it that suggests a follow-up. We could even send\n> those follow-ups directly from Slack with our Slackbot val. We’re minimizing\n> all of that manual CRM work.\n\n![growbots-slackbot.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/a98ee152-b0b2-4ce7-1083-24e00f99ff00/public)\n\nThe\nGrowbots val sending action items after a sales meeting\n\nIn their Slack workspace, the Growbots team is joined by bots hosted on Val\nTown. The sales team can type `/proposal exampleclient.com` to run a val that\ngenerates a first draft of the outbound playbook for a sales pipeline, for\nexample.\n\n### Scraper vals\n\nJakub on the GTM engineering team talked about using Val Town with\n[Clay](https://www.clay.com/) (see also: [how we built an API for Clay](/clay)).\nJakub told us about switching to Val Town from another vendor to host their\nCloudflare crawler, saving an order of magnitude in cost.\n\n> We use our Cloudflare scraper val for everything. It’s an easily accessible\n> endpoint that runs Cloudflare crawlers on Val Town, and it’s something like\n> 20x cheaper than our previous vendor. We import that val into other vals, or\n> use it with tools like Clay. Actually, Val Town was the first tool recommended\n> to me by Claude when I was looking for how to host “Claygent” workflows.\n\n## Takeaway: Val Town lets you forget about deployment\n\nThere’s that old business advice to spend time on your core competency and\noutsource the rest. For Greg, that means letting Claude combobulate some code\nand deploying right to Val Town.\n\n> My goal is to test to what extent I can automate the whole company with Val\n> Town so that I can focus on building. As a CRO, the biggest advantage of Val\n> Town for me is that I’ve never even seen it. I do everything in Claude Code,\n> and then it just runs on Val Town.\n\nFor Jakub, he also likes the instant deployment from Claude Code, but also\nhaving the full flexibility of code.\n\n> We dropped every single no-code automation builder we were using before. I\n> just try to do everything with Val Town and Claude Code now. Those workflow\n> tools are more complicated than Val Town—you have to fight with the platform,\n> not the code itself. And it’s cheaper with Val Town.\n\nSo again, if Claude Code is Amazon, then GitHub + deploying somewhere with a\nbuild step would be like USPS. Sometimes it’s good to go with USPS—the Val Town\napplication itself is deployed to Render—but often you want the convenience of\nsame-day shipping (in our case, 100ms deployment).\n\nMetaphors aside, it’s quite productive to have an immediate feedback loop where\nthe code you or Claude write is instantly live at a URL, or in Slack, or\nwherever. [Sign up](https://www.val.town/auth/signup) for Val Town, or\n[book a demo](https://calendar.app.google/uXdbgkdtz9SLzR25A) with our founder\nSteve to learn how your team can enjoy frictionless deployment.",[],[186,530],"275f3779-536c-4171-b9e4-887e43cf0f67","2026-05-26-changelog-05262026.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-f4b3df401f3b",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Changelog - May 26, 2026\ndescription: The month of Claude Code. Plus, redesigning the core val UI\npubDate: 2026-05-26T00:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Pete Millspaugh\nthumbnail: https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/9a212aa4-8224-4501-19ae-2a38aa820e00/public\n---\n\n\n\nLately: Claude front and center, a fresh val layout, MCP upgrades, new Pro\npricing (for new users), and more.\n\n## The month of Claude\n\nMore and more Val Town users are having Claude Code bebop, wibble,\nphotosynthesize, and jitterbug¹ their vals, using the\n[Val Town MCP server](https://docs.val.town/guides/prompting/claude-code/).\nEvery val’s homepage now includes a copyable command for using Val Town MCP +\nClaude Code.\n\n\n\nThe [val.town](https://val.town) homepage also now has that command handy to\nmeet our _potential_ users where _existing_ users are using Val Town—in Claude\nCode. You can bring the Val Town MCP anywhere you get your LLMs, though—not just\nClaude. It works in Codex, Cursor, Copilot—you name it. If it starts with C and\nthinks all your ideas are great, it’ll work with Val Town.\n\n---\n\nTownie now defaults to Claude Opus 4.6 with “Allow all” mode (a.k.a. YOLO mode)\nenabled (although you might consider [taking things slow](/slow-mode)\nsometimes).\n\nWhen starting a new chat, Townie remembers your selected mode and model from the\nlast active chat. Opus 4.7 with\n[`xhigh` effort level](https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/effort#recommended-effort-levels-for-claude-opus-4-7)\nis also available, along with Sonnet 4.6 and Haiku 4.5 for faster and cheaper\nconversations. Inference is billed at-cost, without any markup: see our\n[pricing update](#pricing-updates) below for more information.\n\n---\n\nOur MCP server has new tools to remix vals and and copy files. That’s over three\ndozen tools now. Pretty much anything you can do in Val Town, you can do with\nthe MCP server:\n\n- read/write/run code\n- read/write SQLite and blob storage and logs\n- set up cron jobs and email handlers\n- visit HTTP URLs\n- _...and more_\n\n## New val layout\n\nThe biggest change in town lately is to the core val UI:\n\n $\"an$ \n\n- Both the val sidebar and file tree are collapsible, allotting more real estate\n to the file you’re editing\n- There’s an editor status bar abottom the code editor with logs, editor\n settings, and the Deno Language Server\n- You can view history for folders, files, and the whole val\n- The SQLite explorer makes better use of available space\n- Townie launches from the top right rather than bottom left\n- _...and dozens more changes_\n\nI’ve been loving the new layout, personally. Thanks to Jackson for his careful\ncraftsmanship!\n\n## Pricing updates\n\nWe increased Pro [pricing](https://val.town/pricing) to $25/month, or $250/year.\n**If you are an existing Pro user, your prices won’t change!** As a thank you\nfor betting on us early, existing Pro users will pay the legacy $10 per month\n(or $100 yearly) forever.\n\nAfter using up monthly Townie credits ($10 monthly for Pro and $100 for\nBusiness), billing is now pay-as-you-go with 0% markup on LLM inference costs.\nWe pass through costs from our upstream provider, Anthropic.\n\nFree plans are limited to public vals, only for new vals. Existing private vals\non Free accounts will remain private.\n\nAlso, the Val Town _Teams_ plan is now called _Business_.\n\n## Everything else\n\nAs always, many more changes have landed.\n\n---\n\nVal history and file diffs can attribute edits to Townie.\n\n\n\n---\n\nA Val ID field and HTTP section were added to val settings, so you can copy IDs\nand set `*.val.run` custom subdomains (as well as which HTTP file to preview on\nthe val’s homepage, as before). There’s also a new save-and-copy button when\nadding a custom subdomain or email.\n\n\n\n---\n\nThe main [val.town/dashboard](https://val.town/dashboard) now has a switcher for\ntoggling between your personal account and any orgs you belong to. User profiles\nalso got a facelift—you can pin vals to feature your best work (like you’d pin\nrepos on your GitHub profile).\n\n---\n\nThe new val creation flow always has you fill out a form with owner, name,\ndescription, visibility, and image. Previously, you could create an `untitled-*`\nval, which was convenient, but it meant metadata wasn’t as deliberate.\n\n---\n\nYou can now download any public val, not just your own vals.\n\n---\n\nScript val logs now stream during execution rather than buffering until exit.\n\n---\n\nYou can now sign in with Google, as an alternative to GitHub and email.\n\n---\n\nTownie now remixes opinionated starter templates by default when building new\nprojects.\n\n---\n\nWhen you’re on a branch in a val’s code and navigate to another top-level\nresource, like SQLite, then back to the code—your branch now persists.\n\n---\n\nA confirmation dialog now appears in the SQLite explorer for destructive\nactions.\n\n---\n\nThat’s it for this changelog. As always, send us your feature requests! Our\n[Discord server](https://discord.val.town) is the best place to discuss\nrequests.\n\n## Footnotes\n\n_(1) Bebopping, wibbling, photosynthesizing, and jitterbugging are all, in fact,\nin the\n[Claude Code spinner verb dictionary](https://x.com/wesbos/status/2038958747200962952).\nI’d play a quiz game of “Is it a Claude spinner verb?” if someone made one. Hm,\nyou could probably make one in 5 minutes with Claude Code and the Val Town MCP\nserver..._",[],[186,537],"8d917e52-834a-4760-924b-0a85798b0bc0","2026-05-19-slow-mode.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-f07b1220c230",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Slow Mode\ndescription: Val Town is the Salt Fat Acid Heat of vibe coding platforms\npubDate: 2026-05-19:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Pete Millspaugh\nthumbnail: https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/f798bcc1-a926-4ebb-fce6-598ce9e1d700/public\n---\n\n $\"New$ \n\n---\n\n> Despite the countless failed attempts at trying to democratize coding while\n> not understanding coding, we’re faced with the reality that you cannot\n> understand code without engaging with it.
-Lars Faye,\n> [Agentic Coding is a Trap](https://larsfaye.com/articles/agentic-coding-is-a-trap)\n\nLars’s blog post got me thinking: what if we designed a deliberately slow,\nhand-holding agent? One that keeps the human programmer involved, to understand\nand learn. One that doesn’t paint you into a corner with slop. No one-shotting,\nno agentic looping, but instead moving at a human pace to match your particular\nhuman knowledge at the time. I use the word _programmer_ on purpose because I\nthink even vibe coders should at least be learning programming concepts, like\nwhat data their app needs to store and how, or where that data travels (say,\nfrom their laptop to a data center in Ohio then into a database somewhere else).\n\nWe’ll call this _Slow Mode_.\n\n## Slow Mode 1.0 with Claude Code\n\nAs a low stakes experiment, I first wrote Slow Mode 1.0 as instructions in\n`CLAUDE.md` for\n[using Claude Code + the Val Town MCP server](https://docs.val.town/guides/prompting/claude-code/):\n\n```md\nYou are in “Slow Mode,” which emphasizes human learning and decision making, not\nspeed and productivity.\n\n- Do not agentically loop and iterate.\n- Keep the human (me, Pete) involved every step along the way.\n- Hold me accountable. Ask me to make decisions. Make sure I understand the\n tradeoffs of those decisions.\n- Don’t generate code right away. Plan first, together with me. When you do\n generate code, do it incrementally, one step at a time, just as I would,\n testing whether it’s working as expected after each step.\n- Ask me what to name functions. Ask me whether some code should go in a new\n file or an existing one, and how I’d like my folders organized.\n- You can use the accompanying preferences so that you don’t have to ask\n repetitively for straightforward things. Those preferences should give you a\n ballpark sense of what I know about programming.\n- When necessary or helpful, pause to teach me something, but don’t be too\n verbose up front. I can ask when I’d like to learn more and let you know when\n I’d like to move forward instead.\n```\n\n## Stop and think\n\nOf course, when an LLM _thinks_ or _reasons_, it is really just generating more\nand more text.\n\n> ...the models can only “think” by spooling out more text — while human\n> thinking often does the opposite: retreats into silence, because it doesn’t\n> have words yet to say what it wants to say.
-Robin Sloan,\n> [Thinking Modes](https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/ungrounded/)\n\nLLM “thinking” can be problematic, assuming it’s important to me to understand\nwhat’s happening. I’d actually like to see the thought process, if you can call\nit that. In some ways, I think it’s a feature, not a bug, that a slow mode agent\nwould brainstorm linearly, token by token. It’s the machine’s way of\n[rubber ducking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging), and I\nthink we should be doing it together. I should be talking aloud and then\ndictating or typing the next decision or question back to my robot\ncollaborator-teacher. I should be making some edits in the code myself,\nextracting a helper function here, renaming a variable there, running the code,\npoking around the database. I like that my slow agent keeps me in the weeds, so\nI can keep the whole program in my head. Like this:\n\n

\n\n\n\nI find coding in Slow Mode to be more pleasant. It’s partially the prompt\nenforcing Slow Mode, but in large part it’s also me self-enforcing by staying\nfocused and thinking (much easier when your agent doesn’t run off for 10 minutes\nin a loop!). Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.\n\n## Slow Mode 2.0 (Slow Townie)\n\nAfter experimenting with Slow Mode using Claude Code + Val Town MCP, we’ve\nstarted privately testing Slow Townie within Val Town.\n\n![slow-townie.jpeg](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/433a737e-b4a6-4efa-7752-5d6a5d894000/public)\n\n\n\nThe instructions are pretty much the same as above in `CLAUDE.md` for now, but\nan ideal slow mode would factor in your particular knowledge and preferences,\nbuilding on the “memory” feature that many agents currently use. We should have\na lot to learn from prior art when it comes to personalization.\n\n## YOLO Mode\n\nThe polar opposite of Slow Mode is YOLO Mode, where your agent loops again and\nagain without stopping to ask for permission. It fulfills vibe coding’s original\ndefinition. In Townie we do have YOLO Mode (a.k.a. “Allow all”) because, well,\nto each her own. I enjoy YOLO’ing sometimes, typically when the stakes are low\nand time is short.\n\nBut more often than not, it’s important to me that when I need a break—when I\nshut the laptop to go for a walk or cook dinner or sleep—_my robot takes a\nbreak, too._ Contrary to what seems like consensus among tech workers in San\nFransisco, I think my agent should mostly stop working when I do (and I myself\nshould probably stop working around dinner time most nights!). Plenty of\ndevelopers I respect feel the opposite—fair enough.\n\n## Trading productivity for learning\n\nVal Town’s end goal is end-user programming, the dream that anyone should be\nable to customize their own software. Like a spreadsheet, there should be a\nnatural gradient from beginners making something useful in the first hour to\nexperts spending hundreds of hours on complex models. Users progress along that\ngentle slope by learning continuously over time. But is end-user programming\nabout learning, or about building the thing? I think it’s about both: the more\nyou learn while building, the better you get at building.\n\nThere’s an inherent learning-versus-productivity tradeoff when using AI. I am no\nstranger to\n[sacrificing my own learning](https://addyosmani.com/blog/dont-outsource-learning/)\nor solid understanding of an implementation to prioritize shipping. When you\nhave a lot on your plate, that can be the right side of the tradeoff. But\nthere’s also a\n[short-term gains versus long-term maintenance](https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/blog/2026/you-need-ai-that-reduces-your-maintenance-costs)\ntradeoff, and I’m betting Slow Mode will help with that.\n\n## Learn to cook\n\nI know many people think moving more slowly means falling behind, or worse, that\nby insisting on understanding code we’re gatekeeping. By embracing Slow Mode at\nVal Town, we’re telling vibe coders we believe in your ability to learn\nfundamentals about code that might’ve previously seemed unreachable. Building in\nVal Town (or elsewhere) with Slow Mode should empower you. You should feel like\nyou know what you’re doing, not like you’re dependent on your agent and helpless\nif there’s downtime.\n\nIt’s like cooking with recipes versus learning about food fundamentals so you\ncan improvise in the kitchen and create food that’s all your own. Val Town is\nthe _Salt Fat Acid Heat_ of vibe coding platforms.\n\n![crud.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/62b0b534-7963-41d6-02c8-4fddbb4c2300/public)\n\n## Prior art\n\nWe’re not the first to propose something like Slow Mode. It turns out Claude\nitself already has a\n“[Learning mode](https://www.anthropic.com/news/introducing-claude-for-education#learning-mode),”\nostensibly for education but also relevant to professional and hobbyist (vibe)\ncoders. ChatGPT has “[study mode](https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-study-mode/)”\n(also more geared toward students). Just last week, the same day I wrote the\nfirst draft of this very essay, a Claude/Codex Skill for “deliberate skill\ndevelopment” attracted a bunch of GitHub stars and Hacker News comments.\n\nJust like Val Town\n[fast-followed all the best coding assistants](https://blog.val.town/blog/fast-follow)\nwhile building Townie, we’d like to learn from others and share our own\nimprovements to Slow Mode along the way.",[],[186,544],"98c2073c-b805-44bb-b1e1-d94ad7b2a4d1","2026-05-12-talk-of-the-town-may-26.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-ec6ed47e778d",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Talk of the Town — May 2026\ndescription: Claude managed agents, OpenAI voice agents, domaining, and more\npubDate: 2026-05-12:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Pete Millspaugh\nthumbnail: https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/9401623b-a9db-47f0-4f83-2a6a4e805800/public\n---\n\n![may-talk.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/9401623b-a9db-47f0-4f83-2a6a4e805800/public)\n\n_Talk of the Town_ is our series where we highlight neat public vals from the\nVal Town community. We have something for everyone, from OpenAI voice models &\nClaude managed agents to counting sheep on a cron val. And if you’re more\nwatcher than reader, please enjoy a\n[video walkthrough](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry4DCGI9Tao).\n\n---\n\n**[Justin Uberti](https://x.com/juberti)**, Head of Realtime AI at OpenAI and\ncreator of WebRTC, is back with another OpenAI demo on Val Town:\n[realtime-typer](https://www.val.town/x/jubertioai/realtime-typer), live at\n[realtyper.val.run](https://realtyper.val.run), which transcribes speech to text\nusing `gpt-realtime-whisper` with impressively low latency.\n\n

\n
Guess who's back, back again. Whisper, but now with realtime streaming. Check out the new gpt-realtime-whisper transcription model in my https://t.co/b2UTuSxhOI demo. pic.twitter.com/ONusKRSRD2
\n — Justin Uberti (@juberti) May 7, 2026\n

\n \n

\n\nJustin also updated his\n[hello-realtime](https://www.val.town/x/jubertioai/hello-realtime) demo to use\nthe new `gpt-realtime-2` model (which now has “reasoning” capabilities). It’s\nlive at [hello-realtime.val.run](https://hello-realtime.val.run), or by calling\n[425-800-0042](tel:4258000042)!\n\n---\n\n**[Charlie](https://www.val.town/u/dcm31)** built a\n[claude-managed-agents](https://www.val.town/x/templates/claude-managed-agents)\nval to showcase Anthropic’s new managed agents, launched last week. As Michael\non the Anthropic team said, you can remix the val to get managed agents working\nin under 2 minutes.\n\n

\n
0 to fully functional in less than 2 minutes! @CharlieMolthrop this is awesome. please keep sharing your work and tell me what's missing for you https://t.co/MHCRw4viNc\n
\n — Michael Cohen (@_hi_mc) May 9, 2026

\n \n

\n\nCharlie also improved our\n[ai-slackbot](https://www.val.town/x/templates/ai-slackbot) template val, which\npre-fills API scopes, events, and webhook URL from a manifest file to make the\nTime To Aha even faster setting up your Slack agent.\n\n---\n\n**[Tijs Teulings](https://tijs.org)** customized a pocket e-reader with a Val\nTown backend to pull a reading list and convert to EPUB.\n\n

\n \n

\n Needed more proof the age of personal software is here?\n I got this Xteink X4 pocket e-reader.\n I flashed it with open source firmware.\n Then vibecoded a backend running on @val.town that pulls `toread` tagged articles from @kipclip.com and converts them to epub ...\n

\n [image or embed]\n

— Tijs Teulings 🦑 (@tijs.org)\n April 10, 2026 at 10:15 AM\n \n \n

\n\nTijs also made an [openpds](https://www.val.town/x/tijs/openpds) val, live at\n[openpds.val.run](https://openpds.val.run/), and an\n[atproto-to-fediverse](https://www.val.town/x/tijs/atproto-to-fediverse) val\nthat syncs Bluesky posts to Mastodon, live on\n[atproto-to-fediverse.val.run](https://atproto-to-fediverse.val.run/). And bonus\npoints: Tijs’s personal website is also\n[a val](https://www.val.town/x/tijs/tijs_org)!\n\n---\n\n**[Eric Feng](https://ehfeng.com/)** from [Kernel](https://www.kernel.sh/) made\n[playwright-cdp-connect](https://www.val.town/x/eric/playwright-cdp-connect) to\nconnect to a Kernel browser via CDP using Playwright. The Kernel team also has\nvals for\n[Stagehand + Gemini Computer Use](https://www.val.town/x/kernel/stagehand-gemini/),\n[Playwright](https://www.val.town/x/kernel/playwright), and\n[Puppeteer](https://www.val.town/x/kernel/puppeteer).\n\n---\n\n**[Paul Kinlan](https://x.com/Paul_Kinlan)**, Chrome DevRel Lead at Google, is\nback at it again with a\n[Hacker News watcher val](https://www.val.town/x/paulkinlan/hn-watcher), live at\n[hn-push.val.run](https://hn-push.val.run/).\n\n---\n\n**[Omar Aziz](https://omar.mov/)** from [Tempo](https://tempo.xyz/) (Stripe’s\nblockchain) made an [mpp-demo](https://www.val.town/x/git/mpp-demo) val to\nshowcase the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP).\n\n---\n\n**[Kaspars Dancis](https://k7d.dev/)**, founder and CTO of\n[Whimsical](https://whimsical.com/), made a useful cron val that checks\navailability of a domain name. We remixed his val into a\n[domain-availability](https://www.val.town/x/templates/domain-availability)\ntemplate that lets you add as many domains as you’d like to track and emails you\nwhen they become available. I know I’d like my surname’s dot com, but I don’t\nthink the circa-1858 family furniture company who owns it (no relation) will\ngive it up any time soon.\n\n---\n\n**[Mariano Guerra](https://bsky.app/profile/marianoguerra.org)**, co-author of\nWASM from the Ground Up and the Feeling of Computing newsletter, made a\n[recursive-task-lists](https://www.val.town/x/warianoguerra/recursive-task-lists)\nREST API using Val Town SQLite and OAuth.\n\n---\n\n**[Sri](https://sri.xyz)** made a\n[vsky-network](https://www.val.town/x/username/vsky-network) val, live at\n[vsky.val.run](https://vsky.val.run/), that broadcasts crawl requests to a\nnetwork of atproto relays.\n\n---\n\n**[Alex McRoberts](https://bsky.app/profile/alex.mcroberts.me)** made a\n[bluesky-thread-reader](https://www.val.town/x/alexmcroberts/bluesky-thread-reader/)\nval, live at [btr.val.run](https://btr.val.run/).\n\n---\n\n**[Steve](https://stevekrouse.com)** gave a talk at the Betaworks\n[Beyond Text](https://www.betaworks.com/event/beyond-text) event, and of course\nmade a [beyond-text](https://www.val.town/x/stevekrouse/beyond-text/) val to\ndemo live. Steve also built\n[voice-townie](https://www.val.town/x/stevekrouse/voice-townie/), a way to talk\nto Townie via phone using the Vapi voice agent and Val Town MCP server, and\n[remix-3-beta-demo](https://www.val.town/x/stevekrouse/remix-3-beta-demo), a\nminimal val using recently released Remix 3.\n\nSteve also recorded a\n[Val Town 101](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MrspHO-zps) video for anyone who\nwants to learn how to (vibe) code: “This is the video I wish I could’ve watched\nwhen I was 14 and wanted to know how to make web apps.” Pass it along to those\nfriends of yours who want to build websites and finally feel like they might be\nable to.\n\n---\n\n**[Jenn Schiffer](https://jennschiffer.com/)** made a\n[counting-sheep-on-bluesky](https://www.val.town/x/jennschiffer/counting-sheep-on-bluesky)\nval to power her\n[counting sheep bot](https://bsky.app/profile/countingsheep.bsky.social): 30k\nsheep and counting 🐑\n\n---\n\n**[kamalnrf](https://www.val.town/u/kamalnrf/)** as a prolific Val Town power\nuser relies on his [valLauncher](https://www.val.town/x/kamalnrf/valLauncher) to\nconveniently search through the public HTTP endpoints across all of his vals. He\nalso made [defuddle](https://www.val.town/x/kamalnrf/defuddle/code/README.md),\nlive at [defuddle.val.run](https://defuddle.val.run/) as a convenient wrapper\naround the [defuddle](https://defuddle.md) web page to markdown service. I think\nanyone will have fun (and maybe eat some humble pie) spending 5 or 10 minutes on\nKamal’s [flag-quiz.val.run](https://flag-quiz.val.run/) 🇯🇵 🇧🇯 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 🇦🇶 🇨🇦 🇪🇨 🇦🇺\n\n---\n\n**[Nico Baier](https://www.val.town/u/nbbaier)**, another prolific citizen of\nVal Town, created: [brrr](https://www.val.town/x/nbbaier/brrr) and\n[ntfy](https://www.val.town/x/nbbaier/ntfy), push notification libraries for\nbrrr.now and ntfy.sh, respectively;\n[sheet-exporter](https://www.val.town/x/nbbaier/sheet-exporter) to export public\nGoogle Sheets to CSV or JSON; [vt-ssg](https://www.val.town/x/nbbaier/vt-ssg), a\nlightweight static site generator; and\n[agentfs](https://www.val.town/x/nbbaier/agentfs), a Val Town port of Pekka\nEnberg’s agentfs.\n\n---\n\n**[Peter Liu](https://peterqliu.github.io/)** made\n[SQLiteTable](https://www.val.town/x/pql/SQLiteTable), his own SQLite ORM of\nsorts with HTTP access and vector search.\n\n---\n\n**[Raymond Camden](https://www.val.town/u/raymondcamden)** wrote another fun Val\nTown blog post!\n[Using Val Town and Gemini for Sports Ball Stuff](https://www.raymondcamden.com/2026/05/04/using-val-town-and-gemini-for-sports-ball-stuff).\n\n---\n\n**[Britt Lewis](https://bl3.dev/)** made\n[pruning-calculator](https://www.val.town/x/bl3/pruning-calculator/code/main.ts),\na prompt cache economics pruning calculator.\n\n---\n\n**[Josh Beckman](https://www.joshbeckman.org/)** from Shopify made a\n[preRead](https://www.val.town/x/joshbeckman/preRead) val to consumer a web page\nthrough the lens of his knowledge garden.\n\n---\n\n**Ajaya** from [Subconcious](https://www.subconscious.dev/) made\n[subconscious-getting-started](https://www.val.town/x/subconscious_ajaya/subconscious-getting-started)\nto use the Subconscious AI agent API on Val Town.\n\n---\n\n**[William Kang](https://www.val.town/u/williamjaesunkang)** ported he and Luke\nMuoio’s\n[WHOOP dataset/study](https://www.val.town/x/williamjaesunkang/AMWHOOPDATA-PROJECT)\nto Val Town.\n\n---\n\n**[v7er](https://www.val.town/u/v7er)** made\n[epocket](https://www.val.town/x/v7er/epocket), a backend for a Chrome extension\nthat defines and saves words as you browse the web.\n\n---\n\n**[garmeeh](https://www.val.town/u/garmeeh)** made\n[MyEnergi](https://www.val.town/x/garmeeh/MyEnergi) to automate Zappi and Eddi\ncharging devices using the MyEnergi API.\n\n---\n\n**[andrewau](https://www.val.town/u/andrewau)** made\n[lyric.val.run](https://www.val.town/x/andrewau/claude-tool-util/), a lyric\nanalysis API tool for Claude.\n\n---\n\n**[bao](https://www.val.town/u/bao)** created\n[natgeo](https://www.val.town/x/bao/natgeo/), an RSS feed for National\nGeographic articles.\n\n---\n\n**[Ish](https://www.val.town/u/ishbrzero)** made a does-one-thing val called\n[HowManyDays](https://www.val.town/x/ishbrzero/HowManyDays) live at\n[howmanydays.val.run](https://howmanydays.val.run/). We’re already 131 days into\n2026!\n\n---\n\n**[recoeye](https://www.val.town/orgs/recoeye)** made an\n[api-watchdog](https://www.val.town/x/recoeye/api-watchdog) val that monitors\nyour API every minute and reports downtime to Slack with live-updating messages.\n\n---\n\n**[Douglas Mustapick](https://www.val.town/u/guardianengr)** made a\n[personal website val](https://www.val.town/x/guardianengr/douglas-mustapick-ai-consulting)\nfor his AI consulting business.\n\n---\n\n**[ewired](https://www.val.town/u/ewired)** made\n[hf-activity-rss](https://www.val.town/x/ewired/hf-activity-rss/), an RSS feed\nfor HuggingFace user activity pages.\n\n---\n\nIf you’d like to be featured in next month’s _Talk_, share your vals in our\n`#showcase` channel on [Discord](https://discord.val.town)! (Or share them\naround the web, and we’ll see them in Discord [thanks to Octolens](/octolens).)",[],[186,551],"0f287470-50eb-4961-ab93-6c7bf60e5e97","2026-05-06-better-auth.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-eb338fa440ca",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth\ndescription: \"The perils of logging in\"\npubDate: 2026-05-06:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Tom MacWright\nthumbnail: https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/d58722e1-ec33-4417-59a9-e63119bd6d00/public\n---\n\n![lock-watercolor](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/d58722e1-ec33-4417-59a9-e63119bd6d00/public)\n\nIn 2023, I wrote about\n[how Val Town moved away from Supabase](https://blog.val.town/blog/migrating-from-supabase)\nand toward a more conventional database setup. We were using a lot of Supabase's\nfunctionality, including their authentication. So when it came time to move we\nfound equivalents: [Render](https://render.com/) for the database, and\n[Clerk](https://clerk.com/) for authentication. But life came at us fast, and by\nlate 2023 we had an issue filed: get off of Clerk. That issue was finally closed\na month ago, when we switched to [Better Auth](https://www.better-auth.com).\n\nSome important context is that Clerk is a major success. They just raised\n[50 million dollars](https://clerk.com/blog/series-c) and they have lots of\nsatisfied users. Heck, in related news Supabase\n[raised 100 million dollars at a 5 billion dollar valuation](https://supabase.com/).\nCongratulations to both of them. I would make a terrible venture capitalist.\nWhatever opinions and experiences I hold about authentication and row level\nsecurity are secondary to these numbers and proof. You can't argue with success.\n\nBut still, I am happy to have closed that issue and switched to Better Auth.\nIt's been a tough experience, with a lot of workarounds, bugs, and outages. The\narchitecture of Val Town sharply conflicted with Clerk's expectations.\n\n### The core issue\n\nThe core issue is that Clerk tried to be your users table _and_ your sessions\ntable. I think they've been shifting away from saying this, but it started from\na pretty extreme place: there's a 2021 blog post titled\n\"[Consider dropping your users table](https://clerk.com/blog/offload_user_table)\".\nThere's a YouTube video from 2023 called\n[DELETE your Users table](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86sFORO-M3Y). I\nstrongly suggest you don't!\n\nThere are two big problems with farming out your users table to a third-party\nservice.\n\n**Clerk was a pretty bad replacement for a users table because it was heavily\nrate-limited and not very reliable.** When we initially switched, I assumed we\ncould load user data from Clerk's API whenever we needed to. After all, we want\nto know things like user settings, avatar URLs, and emails. Clerk's SDK made\nthis pretty convenient: the rootAuthLoader, the thing that handles auth for your\nwhole application, had a nice little option called `loadUser` which would do the\nrequest for you. Worked great in development. In production, the rate limit for\nthat endpoint was _five requests per second_. For the whole account, across all\nusers. Tough! A pretty bad footgun, that we discovered in production, and was\neventually\n[fixed by removing the option](https://github.com/clerk/javascript/issues/1043).\n\nThe rate limiting hit us especially hard for the social aspect of Val Town. For\nexample, let's say you have a social website, so a lot of pages have lists of\ncontent from other users, and usernames and avatars to identify them. Clerk's\ndefault UIs are based on the assumption that a user only sees _their own avatar_\nand needs their own settings and information, and they can get all of that stuff\nfrom their nifty [JWT](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7519) token.\nSocial websites like Val Town completely break this assumption, and the advice\nwas to sync avatars and other information between Clerk and our users table: so\nnow we have two authorities for that information, and the complexity of _two_\nusers tables.\n\nSo we had to sync Clerk's data to our database by using webhooks, which meant\nthat signing up was convoluted and tricky - for a few moments, a user has a\nClerk account but no Val Town database row. Or, because our platform requires\nusernames, users can be in a state where they have a Clerk account, a database\nrow, but their account is incomplete. Our user settings had to be split between\nthings that Clerk controlled, like auth strategies, and things that we needed,\nlike usernames and editor settings.\n\n**The second is that Clerk became a single point of failure for all our user\nsessions.** Cookie-based user sessions are usually short-lived with constant\nrefreshing: that way they can be invalidated quickly. But that also means that\nevery few minutes users need to swap their session cookies for new ones. So when\nsomeone's login session needed to be refreshed, it was a subdomain of Val Town\nthat passed the request to Clerk that did the refreshing. We didn't have a\nsessions table or any responsibility over sessions.\n\nThat's great, if you're trying to keep avoid any responsibility for\nauthentication, but on the other hand, if Clerk goes down, the whole website\ngoes down. Clerk outages don't just break the login & logout flow, they make the\nsite unusable to people who are already logged in. And Clerk went down pretty\noften, and went down for long periods of time.\n[Since May 2025](https://status.clerk.com/) it's been teetering between two and\nthree nines of uptime. There isn't data from before then, but I remember many\ntimes that we had a broken site and no way to fix it because of this single\npoint of failure.\n\nA hard lesson you learn building a complex system is that its reliability is the\n_minimum_ of the combined reliability of its critical parts.\n\nBesides these two major issues, there were\n[other bugs and problems we encountered](https://github.com/clerk/javascript/issues?q=sort%3Aupdated-desc%20is%3Aissue%20state%3Aclosed%20author%3Atmcw).\nMost got fixed eventually, but I spent a lot of time battling the \"Stale Issue\nBot\" from auto-closing them.\n\n### Three-ish years\n\nIf it was so bad, why didn't we switch away immediately?\n\nFirst of all, even though this will be the second \"switching from X to Y\"\narticle I've written, and I'm not trying to make it a habit. Making decisions\nand sticking with them is good for development velocity and team sanity. We're\nnot trying to rewrite Val Town any more than is absolutely necessary. And\nwriting critique is less fun and positive than building.\n\nAnd Clerk did some things well. They provided SDKs for all the tech we were\nusing: Remix, Fastify, and Express. They did a decent job of keeping up with the\nchurn of those frameworks, a task that I know is a full-time job. And their\nadministration and anti-abuse measures were decent at helping us solve customer\nsupport issues and keep scammers at bay.\n\nWhere Clerk definitely shines is relatively simple, heavily frontend apps that\ndon't have a social component, so they don't need a users table. It was\nincredibly easy to get started, affordable, and the Clerk dashboard is pretty\nnice.\n\nAnd there aren't a ton of great options for authentication. The bar for a Clerk\nreplacement was actually pretty high: a lot of open source auth solutions are\nancient and semi-abandoned. Authentication-as-a-service platforms had vendor\nrisk and potentially the same problems as those in Clerk. The right level of\ntechnical control is hard to nail. We don't want to build authentication from\nscratch and open Val Town up to new and embarrassing new vulnerabilities, but we\nalso don't want to offload so much responsibility to a provider. Definitely not\ntrusting third-party session management again.\n\n### Better Auth enters the frame\n\n[Better Auth](https://better-auth.com/) checked a lot of boxes right out of the\ngate: high code quality, good integrations with different frameworks, and truly\nusable as an independent open source project.\n\nThere still is vendor risk: it's a big, complex codebase developed mostly by one\ncompany. There's always vendor risk. But we are no longer dependent on a third\nparty staying online in order for sessions & user auth to work.\n\nA close second place was [AuthKit](https://www.authkit.com/) from\n[WorkOS](https://workos.com/). I trust WorkOS and AuthKit is incredibly slick,\nbut after bouncing between two vendors, it was important to me to find something\nthat could work independently and was open source at the core.\n\nI find Better Auth's dashboard and paid add-ons to be really clever, too. We\nmanage all of our data, and a plugin provides an API on our site that lets their\ndashboard pull information and do some light user administration. Better Auth's\npaid service (called 'Infrastructure') is basically stateless in the way that we\nuse it, and uninvolved in session management.\n\nIn short, so far it really has been better.\n\nAnd reluctantly I have to hand it to the LLMs here: with the augmentation of the\nrobots, we were able to take the more complex route of supporting _both_ Better\nAuth and Clerk for a transitional period of two weeks. Every endpoint that\nhandled authentication would accept either kind of cookie, and users slowly\nmoved over to Better Auth because that was the kind of session that the sign-in\npage provided. Like anything related to security, close reading, rewriting, and\ntesting of all of the code was necessary to make sure we didn't self-own, and\nthe eventual pure-Better Auth auth was handwritten entirely.\n\nBetter Auth also works pretty well with Vals: you can\n[try out the Better Auth starter template](https://www.val.town/x/templates/better-auth-starter)\nto add authentication to your code on Val Town.\n\n---\n\nI've learned a lot along the way. You really do depend on upstream providers for\nyour uptime, and should think hard about how exposed you are to that risk.\nProducts can be good for a lot of use-cases and really successful and still not\nthe right thing for your specific problem. The world of software changes quickly\nand the right solution might not exist at the moment you need it, but might\nappear a year later.",[],[186,558],"d09fb042-346a-438f-aea5-467b832209d1","2026-05-05-2026-april.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-e6614a9142e0",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Investor Update – April 2026\ndescription: \"April had 8% revenue growth. New focus: Claude Code + Val Town MCP\"\npubDate: 2026-05-05:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Steve Krouse\nthumbnail: https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/2d149dc0-30ba-4108-fa69-77ec70bec900/public\n---\n\n![Val Town Watercolor](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/2d149dc0-30ba-4108-fa69-77ec70bec900/public)\n\nDear investors and friends,\n\nVal Town is the delightful place to build and deploy lightweight apps. Our\nmission is spreading the joy of programming.\n\n## April 2026\n\nWe worked our butts of trying to grow Teams ($200/mo) with a hands-on, founder-led\nfunnel. We had a lot of good conversations and learned a ton, but the results\nweren’t where we wanted: we closed 4 Teams plans against a goal of 14.\n\nThe biggest lesson is that we’re spending too\nmuch time manufacturing demand in one off conversations – explaining our offering and brainstorming use-cases with users – and not enough time doing work that compounds: use-cases, templates, and stories that\ncreate warmer inbound.\n\n## May 2026\n\nThe good news: there are real broader market tailwinds. The demand for \nvibe coding internal tools and prototypes is incredible, and they need a\ngreat place to deploy. It seems like [original mission of \"end-user programming\"](https://blog.val.town/blog/end-programmer-programming) is in sight way sooner than we could've imagined. This is what Val Town is designed for: instantly-deployed endpoints, on the web, collaborative, with built-in SQLite.\n\nOur goal for May is to grow MRR 20% – and we're open minded about if this growth comes from 150 Pro vs 15 Teams subscriptions.\n\nOur focus is **Claude Code + Val Town MCP**. Claude Code is a phenomenon. Some of our best new users are already using us this way. I spent all day Sunday rebuilding my passion project, [Date Me Directory](https://www.val.town/x/stevekrouse/dateme), with Claude Code + Val Town MCP, and it was a delight. We are going to double-down with lots of content, guides, product-updates, tweets, videos, and emails so that our users, and the broader ecosystem knows that Val Town is a great companion for Claude Code. (And other agents.)\n\n## **Key numbers**\n\n**Team**: 5 (+1 starting in June)\n\n**Hiring**: 1 ([Infra Engineer](https://val-town.notion.site/infra-eng))\n\n**Revenue Growth**: 8% (Goal: 20%)\n\n

\n\n## Highlights\n\n- 8% revenue growth (4 new Teams subscriptions)\n- Hired our 6th team member\n- Val layout redesign\n\n## Lowlights\n\n- Missed 20% revenue growth goal\n\n\nBest,\n\nSteve",[],[186,565],"33b19c72-c033-4e9d-9013-337806acf9fd","2026-04-28-octolens.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-e15d0b87a48f",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Your ears are burning—listen in with Octolens and Val Town\ndescription: We tried hand rolling social listening before moving to Octolens\npubDate: 2026-04-28T00:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Pete Millspaugh\nthumbnail: https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/8e820cac-f4d8-4135-b59c-231e6f571e00/public\n---\n\n![octolens-vt.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/36f17b31-e32a-4117-fd60-109ea2418e00/public)\n\nApparently [SaaS is dead](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46888441), and on\npaper we should probably be broadcasting that narrative (\"roll your own SaaS on\nVal Town!\") until the cows come home. But sometimes, paying for a\ndoes-one-thing-well tool like Octolens makes more sense. Val Town complements\nsuch tools rather than replacing them.\n\n[Octolens](https://octolens.com) is a \"social listening\" tool for tracking\nmentions of your company across the web: LinkedIn, Twitter, Bluesky, Reddit,\nHacker News, GitHub, YouTube, TikTok, et cetera. Basically, you get notified\nwhen anyone on the internet types out your company keyword(s), whether an\nexcited superfan on Reddit or a LinkedIn thought leader or a cold Hacker News\ncommenter.\n\n## Hand rolled mentions\n\nBefore using Octolens at Val Town, we relied on hand-rolled social listening\nvals for each platform. One for\n[Twitter](https://www.val.town/x/stevekrouse/twitterAlert),\n[Hacker News](https://www.val.town/x/valdottown/templateHackerNewsAlert),\n[GitHub](https://www.val.town/x/charmaine/enrich-github-stargazers),\n[Reddit](https://www.val.town/x/valdottown/templateRedditAlert),\n[Bluesky](https://www.val.town/x/ianvph/blueskyAlert), and on and on.\n\n![socials.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/8fd93eb7-76b4-49c8-ef81-3813f4669f00/public)\n\nThat works _ok_, especially if you only really care about one or two social\nplatforms, and you can remix those vals to build your own specialized listening.\nBut it wasn't trivial to capture all mentions and keep up with maintenance.\nKeeping up with changes to Twitter's API, for example, was classic Whac-A-Mole:\ntheir API became very expensive, so we paid for it and became a sort of proxy\nreseller to customers, then when they stopped supporting that we used started\nusing scrapers, which of course Twitter blocked next.\n\nWe switched to Octolens, plus our own custom val, and it has been a useful\nset-it-and-forget-it tool for us.\n\n## Octolens webhooks\n\nOctolens as a standalone product has email and Slack alerts for your mentions.\nAnd for doing something bespoke, they have webhooks. Nowadays we have an\nOctolens alert set up that sends a webhook for every Val Town mention to our\n[octolens](https://www.val.town/x/valdottown/octolens/) val, which forwards to\nDiscord.\n\n![octolens-discord.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/d73ed932-3da1-42ba-5970-5a1ee34d4000/public)\n\nOur configured Octolens webhook URL contains a query string like\n`?secret=your_secret_here` stored in Val Town as an environment variable so that\nwe know requests to the val are actually from Octolens.\n\n![octolens-val.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/592cf125-36bf-4444-192d-3ceecb47fb00/public)\n\nYou can remix that val if Discord is where you want to see mentions, or you can\ndo something else: enrich customer leads via Clay or RB2B, add them to your CRM,\ncreate a custom testimonial wall, or\n[store in PostHog](https://www.val.town/x/brianatposthog/octolens-test). Social\nlistening can be for finding customer leads, shining a light on dark bug\nreports, or just pure vanity.\n\nTo get started, sign up at [octolens.com](https://octolens.com) and follow our\n[docs guide](https://docs.val.town/guides/octolens).",[],[186,572],"83ecf818-4d7d-4822-a2c5-4e9a3cece136","2026-04-09-code-is-inert.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-deccbb0a43d7",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Code is inert. Val Town makes it ert\ndescription: Whether or not you read the code, it's gotta be ert\npubDate: 2026-04-09T00:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Pete Millspaugh\nthumbnail: https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/45fc35d5-73ec-4fe9-4d15-d36868912700/public\n---\n\n> **Code is inert. How do you make it ert?**\n>\n> -Paul Ford,\n> [_What is Code_](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-code/)^{[[1](#footnotes)]}\n\nRight now, there is more inert code in the world than at any other point in\nhistory. Tomorrow even more inert code will exist, only to be one-upped again\nevery day after that. I wouldn't be surprised if soon one of the leading AI labs\nclaims something like, \"90% of all the code there ever was has been produced in\nthe last week.\" _Produced_, mostly generated, not written.\n\n

\n \n

\n\n90% might be an exaggeration. Paul Kinlan's\n[napkin math](https://aifoc.us/damn-claude-thats-a-lot-of-commits/) has language\nmodels taking credit for 5% of public commits on GitHub, but that doesn't count uncommitted nor unattributed LLM code.\nEither way, written or generated, much of that code is inert.\n\nWhat does it mean for code to be inert?\n\nOne reasonable answer is that code is inert whenever it's not going brrr, not\n_running_, not \"being executed.\" And of course, code can _run_ locally on your\npersonal computer or elsewhere on some server. But in this essay, I mean code is\ninert when it's not deployed. Code that isn't deployed can't be easily shared\nand run, at least not without friction.\n\nThere was a meme in the early ChatGPT days where a programmer gets a text from a\nnon-programmer friend. It goes something like this:\n\n![chatgpt-meme.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/27a150b9-2ca7-47fd-df08-a233a084a700/public)\n\nThe non-programmer friend's smile fades (one imagines) upon realizing they have\nno clue how to actually bring that code to life, how to make it ert. Since that\nmeme, companies like Lovable, Replit, and Bolt have largely solved that\nparticular disconnect for vibe coders, but even for you the programmer and your\ncollaborators there's still often a bridge of friction from inert code to\ndeployed code.\n\nWell, Val Town makes code ert.\n\n## Val Town makes code ert\n\nConcretely, Val Town lets you write and run JavaScript. It's\na code editor in your browser, synced to our servers to run that code \"in the\ncloud\" (read: an AWS data center in Ohio). And whenever you save a file with\nyour code in it, we sync that code to our servers in 100 milliseconds.\n\nThere's no localhost, which means there's no deployment bridge to cross from\nlocalhost to production. Steve (one of Val Town's cofounders) told me that my\nfirst draft of this essay severely undersold this point about skipping\nlocalhost. He gave that feedback in a video articulating Val Town's core bet (on\nthe browser, against localhost) in a raw, honest sort of way that is hard to\nreplicate on a podcast or scripted video. With his permission, I'm including a\nclip of it here.\n\n\n\nWhen code is always deployed, you get a satisfying instant feedback loop. And as\nimportantly, it's trivial to share your code and collaborate. It's why Val Town\nsuits a Computer Science professor\n[teaching web dev fundamentals](https://www.val.town/x/ceculbe/html-css-js-template)\nto university students; OpenAI's Head of Realtime\n[launching their new voice model](https://x.com/juberti/status/2026038008240337101);\nand Kilo Code engineers\n[collaborating on a support agent](https://blog.kilo.ai/p/we-wasted-4-weeks-on-a-1000month).\n\n## Whether or not you read the code, it's gotta be ert\n\nOur industry is in the middle of a debate over whether the code itself matters\nat all. Whether you the programmer need to read and review your LLM's code.\nHistorically, Val Town has defended the position that code does matter. Steve\nwrote a blog post a couple weeks ago that floated right up to the front page of\nHacker News with over 400 comments:\n[Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47476315).\n\n_But whether or not you think code matters, it must be ert._\n\nUnsurprisingly, a lot of our users are vibe coding internal automations, agents,\nprototypes, and demos. They're _writing_ less code than ever but _generating_\nmore code than ever (remember, \"90% of all code...\"). Many archetypes are doing\nthis sort of work: technical founders, go-to-market engineers, forward deployed\nengineers, product engineers and PMs, business analytics teams, and internal\ndevtools teams.\n\nA common sentiment is that it's super easy to produce the code, asymptotically\napproaching zero cost. Or at least it's getting faster, smarter and cheaper all\nthe time. But then the gotcha or bottleneck—the hard, slow part—is deployment.\nWe hear people say deploying is where they got stuck, or where their less\ntechnical teammate or friend gave up. And that's the whole point of Val Town.\nThere isn't any deployment because it's already, automatically, always deployed.\n\nThe code is ert.\n\n\\*\\*\\*\n\n## Footnotes\n\n(1) _What is Code_ is Paul Ford's famous essay in the June 2015 issue of\nBloomberg Businessweek. B-list famous in some programmer circles, anyway. The\nessay is practically a novella: 38,000 words divided across seven sections\n(chapters?). The scrollbar on the web version is stubby, hard to even see, and\nyou get a sardonic \"Certificate of Completion\" at the bottom for reading it. The\nweb version also has all sorts of interactivity and easter eggs. Scroll through\nthe paragraphs too quickly and you'll see, \"Are you reading my essay, or looking\nat my essay?\" I've never read the print version, but I've searched around for an\nold copy more than once, so please do [email me](mailto:pete@petemillspaugh.com)\nif you know where I could get my hands on one (seriously).",[],[186,579],"95c16397-897e-43cc-a939-9c5135ec46ad","2026-04-07-2026-mar.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-db033c1bbd31",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Investor Update – March 2026\ndescription: 21% revenue growth. Everyone's building AI agents and internal tools. You should deploy them on Val Town\npubDate: 2026-04-07:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Steve Krouse\nthumbnail: https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/de7c9f5b-4753-46d4-0e7e-23543050bb00/public\n---\n\n![2026-04-03-investor-update.jpg](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/de7c9f5b-4753-46d4-0e7e-23543050bb00/public)\n\nDear investors and friends,\n\nWelcome to the second public Val Town Investor Update.\n\nVal Town is the delightful place to build and deploy lightweight apps. Our\nmission is spreading the joy of programming.\n\n# March 2026\n\nWe grew revenue 21% by closing an Enterprise deal from February.\n\nWe sold zero $200/month subscriptions. Our goal was 11 to hit 20% MoM growth,\nbut this month we hit that growth from Enterprise.\n\nOur strategy is self-serve, product-led growth. At our current scale, we're\ntreating growth as a hands-on sales funnel. We’re focused on identifying and\nremoving the frictions preventing customer success and conversion.\n\nIn March, we reached out to about 100 potential customers, had dozens of\nmeetings, and collected a ton of amazing feedback –\n[much of which has already landed in our product](https://blog.val.town/changelog-04022026)\n– including dozens of fixes to using AI with Val Town and\n[“Login with Val Town” OAuth](https://www.val.town/x/std/oauth) for securing\ninternal tools.\n\nWe're hearing that everyone and their VC is using AI agents or claws to build\ninternal tools. Most of those are running locally. Some are getting deployed to\nRailway, Render, Vercel, Hetzner. We are showing folks how to (get their agents\nto) deploy to Val Town instead. For some, that’s really clicking. Our 100ms,\nalways-already deployed model with public endpoints and built-in SQLite is an\nextremely compelling addition to your agent’s toolbelt.\n\nWe at Val Town have likewise been bit by the internal tools bug. We rebuilt our\nCRM systems on Notion and connected it to our other data systems via Claude\nCode. We also finally built our dream business intelligence platform – itself\nbuilt on Val Town. Townie on Opus 4.6 is building us a malleable surface that\nreplaces how we used to use Looker, Observable, and Retool. It connects to our\nprod read replica, Stripe, and CRM to understand usage, find issues, and find\nusers to talk to.\n\n# April 2026\n\nFor April, our goal is to add 14 new business customers paying $200 / month.\n\nOur ideal customer profile (ICP) remains early-stage startups with 2-10 people.\nFor example, most startups in the current YC batch.\n\nLast month, we had so many customer calls that we created a new bottleneck:\nfollow-ups. We are excited to build agents in Val Town to analyze Google Meet\ntranscripts, create follow-ups in Notion, and log product frictions in GitHub\nIssues.\n\n# **Key numbers**\n\n**Team**: 5\n\n**Hiring**: 1 ([Infra Engineer](https://val-town.notion.site/infra-eng))\n\n**Revenue Growth**: 21% (Goal: 20%)\n\n![image.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/d5ae21e8-46f6-4dc0-dcc9-8d29f26eb700/public)\n\n# Highlights\n\n- 21% Revenue Growth from our second Enterprise sale\n- My blog\n “[Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated](https://stevekrouse.com/precision#reports-of-codes-death-are-greatly-exaggerated)”\n [did well on HN](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47476315)\n\n# Lowlights\n\n- Zero new $200/month Val Town subscriptions\n\n# Asks\n\n- [Install our MCP server to your Claude Code.](https://docs.val.town/guides/prompting/claude-code/#mcp)\n Build your next internal tool or agent on Val Town. If you have any issues,\n I'm steve@val.town.\n\nBest,\n\nSteve",[],[186,586],"6f99ef98-88a7-43db-8d89-314ffa6322f8","2026-04-02-changelog-04022026.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-d65ca08e761e",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Changelog — Apr 2, 2026\ndescription: Better Townie system prompt, std/oauth, migrating from Clerk to BetterAuth, Deno 2.7.5, and more\npubDate: 2026-04-02T00:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Pete Millspaugh\nthumbnail: https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/e1014820-99e3-458c-532c-3cc4f2fa2d00/public\n---\n\n![changelog-04022026.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/e1014820-99e3-458c-532c-3cc4f2fa2d00/public)\n\nIn this changelog: improving Townie and the Val Town MCP server; a `std/oauth`\nlibrary for wrapping vals with authentication; migrating auth providers from\nClerk to BetterAuth; upgrading to Deno 2.7.5; and much more.\n\n_Editor's note:_ We've been deconstructing the old Newsletter into discrete\nparts: this changelog (new), the [Talk of the Town](/talk-of-the-town-mar-2026)\nseries highlighting community vals, Steve's public\n[investor updates](/2026-feb), and perhaps a public roadmap soon. The\n[Newsletter](https://newsletter.val.town) itself is a periodical rounding up the\nbest of what we've written each month.\n\n\n\n## Making Val Town delightful for both you and your LLM\n\nVal Town exists foremost _for you the developer_, which for many increasingly\nmeans _for your agent_. Much of our energy of late has been spent improving\nTownie and our MCP server to improve DX both in the browser and wherever you get\nyour LLMs.\n\nWe've appreciated all the positive feedback on Townie and our MCP server, but\nmore importantly please continue to send us bug reports and friction points so\nthat we can\n[improve AX while preserving great DX so you can improve UX](https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/thoughts-on-ax/).\n\n### Better Townie system prompt\n\nWe've updated Townie's\n[system prompt](https://www.val.town/townie/system-prompt) with more platform\nguidance and opinionated patterns on building vals, like:\n\n- Wrapping vals in `std/oauth` for authentication\n- Runtime constraints/gotchas\n- Preferring incremental progress over one-shot implementation\n- Testing vals to validate generated code\n- When to use different frontend app architectures\n- How to integrate external services (Slack, Google, Stripe, etc.)\n\nThe system prompt doubles as a dense but high-yield guide you can read to learn\nhow the Val Town platform works. Thanks to [Michael](https://x.com/msukkarieh1)\nfrom [Sourcebot](https://www.sourcebot.dev/) for the nudge here!\n\n### Preventing Claude Code hallucinations with the Val Town MCP server\n\nClaude Code has been recommending Val Town to some users as a handy place to\ndeploy the code it spits out (we're not doing any fancy AEO, in case you're\nwondering). But when using our MCP server with Claude, it's been hallucinating\nhow to work with Val Town. We updated instructions in the Val Town\n[MCP server](https://docs.val.town/guides/prompting/mcp/) with more\nplatform/runtime context that MCP clients previously had to explicitly request.\n\n### Bringing Val Town to OpenAI Codex\n\nLike Claude Code, Codex + Val Town MCP is an increasingly popular workflow for\ndevelopers on Val Town. We updated our\n[docs instructions](https://docs.val.town/guides/prompting/openai-codex/#mcp)\nfor getting set up. Thanks [Ash](https://www.ashryan.io),\n[Arti](https://artivilla.com/), and David M. for feedback on making the Codex\nauth flow smoother.\n\n### Fullscreen Townie\n\nTownie now has two modes:\n\n1. Sidebar (status quo)\n2. Fullscreen (new)\n\nFullscreen UX is more like Claude Code or Codex where you're not necessarily\nkeeping a close eye on the code itself, and sidebar Townie is more like Copilot\nor Cursor chat where you're reviewing code changes. (Why do all the AI coding\ntools start with C?)\n\n### Explicit context in Townie conversations\n\nPreviously, Townie knew which val you were currently viewing, but that wasn't\nobvious as a user. You were on the same page without knowing it. Now you can see\nand explicitly choose which vals to attach to Townie's context window.\n\n![townie-explicit-val-context.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/235f6927-c122-456a-ea89-5931c9b0ef00/public)\n\n### Townie can read blob content\n\nTownie could previously only read blob storage metadata: key, size in bytes, and\nlast modified timestamp. Now Townie (and any MCP client) can also read blob\ncontent via an updated MCP tool.\n\n### Townie onboarding for new users\n\nOnboarding for new users now routes to a Townie prompt box, which can be skipped\nto instead create a val manually (like the legacy onboarding flow).\n\n### Improving Townie reliability\n\nWe fixed a few corner cases in Townie where (1) responses manually stopped in\nprogress by the user would disappear from the chat, (2) duplicate messages would\nappear, and (3) you could still approve tool calls after stopping a response in\nprogress.\n\n### CLI improvements\n\nThe `vt` CLI is a third way to use LLMs with Val Town (we recommend Townie, then\nMCP, then CLI—in that order). Thanks to [JP](https://jpmarindiaz.com/) from\n[Datasketch](https://datasketch.co/) and Halah from\n[Swayable](https://swayable.wpenginepowered.com/) for bringing a couple\n`vt login` frictions to our attention.\n\n## Add a secure authentication layer to your vals\n\nWrap any val with the [std/oauth](https://www.val.town/x/std/oauth) middleware\nfrom the Val Town standard library. This will authorize users based on their\nmembership in your Val Town org (i.e. your teammates) or by their username or\nuser ID. Or just add a gate that someone must have a Val Town account to access\nyour val, to keep out spammers. It's sort of like Google OAuth meets Cloudflare\nZero Trust, but for Val Town.\n\n![val-town-oauth.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/054d5c9b-fcca-4d30-2793-590c787a3e00/public)\n\nThis is a major unlock for internal tools that need to be secured behind an\nauthentication wall. Thanks to [Cole Lawrence](https://www.colelawrence.com/)\nwho pushed for this feature!\n\n## Migrating auth providers: from Clerk to BetterAuth\n\nAfter experiencing a few too many stability issues with\n[Clerk](https://clerk.com/), we're migrating to\n[BetterAuth](https://better-auth.com/). We are optimistic about the greater\ncontrol and stability we'll have with BetterAuth.\n\nIf the transition goes smoothly, you should hardly notice (if at all). You may\nhave to mark login email links as not spam or re-approve GitHub OAuth. Please\nemail [support@val.town](mailto:support@val.town) if you run into bugs. Thanks\nin advance for your help with the transition.\n\n## Opt in to receive Error notification email\n\nThe default notification setting for val errors is now website-only, instead of\nwebsite + email. **You can opt back into error email in\n[val.town/settings/notifications](https://www.val.town/settings/notifications).**\nNotifications can trigger on the first occurrence of an error or every error,\ndepending on your preference.\n\nWe had trouble with other email (e.g. login links) going to spam, possibly\ncaused by sender reputation harm inflicted by error notifications. Error emails\nare often low-information and come from abandoned vals, anyway. Email sender\nreputation is a Hard Problem that Tom is working hard to improve.\n\n## Dashboard redesign\n\nThe logged-in val.town dashboard now includes a switcher to toggle between orgs,\nnamely your personal account and Teams org. This is table stakes for more and\nmore and more of you who are using Val Town both personally and at work.\n\n## Access email headers in email trigger vals\n\n[Email-triggered vals](https://docs.val.town/vals/email/) can now access\n`headers` (like `Message-ID`) in the email object passed to the val as input.\nWith `Message-ID` from an inbound email, you can set `In-Reply-To` on your reply\nso that strict-threading clients like Outlook will properly group the messages.\nThanks to [dt](https://thyresson.io/) for requesting this!\n\n## DB Pro Now Supports Val Town\n\n[DB Pro](https://www.dbpro.app/), a database desktop client, now\n[supports Val Town SQLite](https://www.dbpro.app/blog/val-town-database-client)\nas a database provider. This is a powerful query UI for SQLite power users in\nVal Town, if you graduate out of the built-in SQLite admin panel in a val's\nsidebar.\n\n## Upgraded to Deno 2.7.5\n\nVal Town code [runs on Deno](https://docs.val.town/reference/runtime/). Before\nupgrading to `2.7.5`, we were on version `2.5.5`.\n\n## Alternatives page\n\nWe wrote an [Alternatives](https://val.town/alternatives) page to help\nprospective customers evaluate Val Town against similar services. As Steve wrote\nabout in his [February investor update](/2026-feb), Val Town is still finding\ntrue product-market fit, which can be tricky for such a broad tool. The\nalternatives page is part of the effort to publicly reason about where Val Town\nfits in the devtools ecosystem. Thanks to [Justin Duke](https://www.jmduke.com/)\nat [Buttondown](https://buttondown.com/alternatives) for modeling what a\nthoughtful alternatives page looks like.",[],[186,593],"5ba07928-2ca7-4136-9e96-b7ba44d8e2d4","2026-03-26-talk-of-the-town-mar-2026.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-d124be1c1318",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Talk of the Town — Mar 2026\ndescription: Calling vals with GPT Realtime 1.5, NYC doorman, email and voice agents, and more\npubDate: 2026-03-26:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Pete Millspaugh\nthumbnail: https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/86ad7542-6032-4e0a-6536-b6afba7fbe00/public\n---\n\n![talk-of-the-town-march-2026.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/86ad7542-6032-4e0a-6536-b6afba7fbe00/public)\n\nThis month: calling vals with OpenAI Realtime, a Blade Runner Esper machine, an\nNYC doorman, tracking electricity pricing and D.C. water quality, a millennial\ncore tech quiz, learning web development in Val Town, and much more.\n\nWe recorded a video walkthrough of this blog post, like the old newsletter\nvideos Steve used to record, if you prefer watching to reading. (Thanks to\n[Cassidy](https://bsky.app/profile/cassidoo.co/post/3mhbm5b2gd22f) for the\ninspiration to reprise the video format!)\n\n\n\n

\n\n**[Justin Uberti](https://x.com/juberti)**, creator of WebRTC and head of\nRealtime AI at OpenAI, built a\n[hello-realtime](https://www.val.town/x/jubertioai/hello-realtime) val to demo\nOpenAI's new `gpt-realtime-1.5` model. You can literally _call_ the val! (As in\n\"call the function\" but also \"call your mother.\")\n\n

\n
\n Just released gpt-realtime-1.5 with improved intelligence, instruction following, and voice quality.
\n Try it out today at https://t.co/td6Cx2EOPO (or call 425-800-0042)!\n https://t.co/z8BtUMYSJ4
— Justin Uberti (@juberti)\n February 23, 2026\n

\n\n\nJustin's val inspired us to buy our own phone line: 1-304-VAL-TOWN. We haven't\ndecided what to do with it just yet...a new kind of val\n[trigger](https://docs.val.town/vals/#triggers)? A traditional customer support\nline? A talking Townie?\n\n

\n\n**[Paul Kinlan](https://x.com/Paul_Kinlan)**, Chrome DevRel Lead at Google,\ncreated a personal assistant\n[email-agent](https://www.val.town/x/paulkinlan/email-agent/) val using Val Town\nemail and SQLite, Deno sandboxes, and the Claude Agent SDK. It's live at\n[memory-do.val.run](https://memory-do.val.run).\n\nPaul also wrote a\n[colourful-scrollbar](https://www.val.town/x/paulkinlan/colourful-scroll-bar/)\nval using the new(ish) CSS `@property` rule (Baseline as of 2024) and\nscroll-driven animations, which you can play with at\n[colourful-scrollbar.val.run](https://colourful-scrollbar.val.run), and an\n[esper](https://www.val.town/x/paulkinlan/esper) val that uses\nWebSpeechRecognition and Gemini models to enhance images, as an homage to Blade\nRunner's Esper machine.\n\n

\n \n

\n I am creating a post about using voice as my primary input with LLMs and I remembered Blade Runner's Esper machine. I thought it'd be fun to replicant\n\n 👉 WebSpeechRecognition\n 👉 Gemini Flash Lite for Voice to UI \n 👉 Gemini Nano Banana to "Enhance"\n 👉 Built with voice\n\n Clone 👉 val.town/x/paulkinlan...

\n [image or embed]\n\n

\n — Paul Kinlan (@paul.kinlan.me)\n February 22, 2026 at 6:44 PM\n \n

\n\n\n

\n\nFor our party at the Val Town office a couple weeks ago, we dusted off our \"NYC\ndoorman\" [buzz](https://www.val.town/x/pmillspaugh/buzz) val to let partygoers\nbuzz themselves upstairs.\n\n

\n \n

\n\nAlso at the party, **[Charlie](https://www.val.town/u/dcm31)** 'n' friends vibe\ncoded a silly [party-val](https://www.val.town/x/partytime/party-val) photo\nbooth. You can relive the party at\n[hivecoding.val.run](https://hivecoding.val.run/).\n\n

\n\n**[Jenn Schiffer](https://jennschiffer.com/)** (longtime Glitch community\ndirector / self-described \"glitch witch\") wrote a\n[pixelstats](https://www.val.town/x/jennschiffer/pixelstats) utility val to\nanalyze tiny pixel art images 🏙️.\n\n

\n\n**[Cole Lawrence](https://www.colelawrence.com/)**, CTO of\n[Phosphor](https://phosphor.co/) and [Forethink](https://www.forethink.ai/),\nbuilt an\n[ephemeral-links](https://www.val.town/x/colel/ephemeral-links/code/main.ts) val\nat [to6r.val.run](https://to6r.val.run/) for \"short links that self-destruct in\n48 hours.\" Cole also made a\n[newsletter-signup](https://www.val.town/x/colel/newsletter-signup) val and a\n[rust-nyc-talk-submissions](https://www.val.town/x/colel/rust-nyc-talk-submissions)\nminisite val (hosted at\n[rustnyc-talks.val.run](https://rustnyc-talks.val.run/)).\n\n

\n\n**[Josh Beckman](https://www.joshbeckman.org/)** at Shopify wrote a\n[comed-hourly-pricing-calendar](https://www.val.town/x/joshbeckman/comed-hourly-pricing-calendar)\nval that produces an iCal calendar feed of ComEd electricity price changes. Josh\nalso made a [criticCron](https://www.val.town/x/joshbeckman/criticCron) val that\nemails critiques for new posts on his personal blog.\n\n

\n\n**[Drew McDonald](https://www.val.town/u/drewmcdonald)** at\n[Watershed](https://watershed.com/) made a\n[dc-water-filter](https://www.val.town/x/drewmcdonald/dc-water-filter) val that\nemails you if there's a DC water emergency in your configured home radius.\n\n

\n\n**[Peter Liu](https://peterqliu.github.io/)** wrote an\n[importLatest](https://www.val.town/x/peterqliu/importLatest) utility val that\ngrabs the latest version of an imported dependency val, bypassing the cache.\nThis is a nice DX improvement when you're actively updating both a val and its\ndependencies. Thanks to Peter for opening a pull request to add this to the\nupstream `std/utils` library!\n\nPeter also made [PineconeIndex](https://www.val.town/x/pql/PineconeIndex), an\ninterface for Pinecone vector databases using OpenAI embeddings to vectorize and\nsearch.\n\n

\n\n**[Cam Pak](https://cameronpak.com/)** wrote a\n[semantics-css-demo](https://www.val.town/x/cameronpak/semantics-css-demo) val\nlive at [semanticsui.val.run](https://semanticsui.val.run/) for the nascent\n[semantics-ui](https://www.npmjs.com/package/semantics-ui) npm package.\n\n

\n\n**[Paul Chin Jr.](https://paulchinjr.com/)** built\n[guess-that-hype](https://www.val.town/x/pchinjr/guess-that-hype), a\n\"millennial-core quiz about recycled tech hype\" (I scored a 3/8, very Gen Z of\nme). Paul also made\n[devfest26-raffle](https://www.val.town/x/pchinjr/devfest26-raffle/code/main.http.ts),\na groovy raffle website for the NorfolkJS meetup.\n\n

\n\n**[ceculbe](https://www.val.town/u/ceculbe)** made an\n[html-css-js-template](https://www.val.town/x/ceculbe/html-css-js-template) and\nseveral other vals like it for learning core web development concepts. I\nespecially love seeing Val Town used to teach programming, and one day we'd love\nto have a Val Town school (Val High?).\n\n

\n\n**[kamalnrf](https://www.val.town/u/kamalnrf/)** built a\n[golinks](https://www.val.town/x/kamalnrf/golinks) val for personal /go links,\nlive at [golink.val.run](https://golink.val.run/), and a\n[sprite-playground](https://www.val.town/x/kamalnrf/sprite-playground) val\ninspired by Josh Comeau's blog post on sprite animations.\n\n

\n\n**[Raymond Camden](https://www.val.town/u/raymondcamden)** wrote about\n[Using Val Town to Get Me to the Movies](https://www.raymondcamden.com/2026/03/01/using-val-town-to-get-me-to-the-movies).\n\n

\n\n**[Curt Cox](https://www.val.town/u/curtcox)** built a\n[cors-audit](https://www.val.town/x/curtcox/cors-audit/code/main.ts) val that\nchecks the CORS policy of various APIs, live on\n[cors-audit.val.run](https://cors-audit.val.run/).\n\n

\n\n**[Trevor Munoz](https://www.val.town/u/trevormunoz)** created a\n[lakeland-timesheet](https://www.val.town/x/trevormunoz/lakeland-timesheet)\nSlack bot val to track intern work hours on the Lakeland Digital Archive\nproject.\n\n

\n\n**[Charlie](https://www.val.town/u/dcm31/)** made a\n[self-improving-podcast](https://www.val.town/x/dcm31/self-improving-podcast)\nval that generates a custom daily podcast in his Apple Podcasts feed, and\n[meet](https://www.val.town/x/dcm31/meet/), a minimal personal booking website\n(live at [charliechat.val.run](https://charliechat.val.run/)).\n\n

\n\n**[Sean Peters](https://www.val.town/u/snptrs/)** made\n[marx](https://www.val.town/x/snptrs/marx), a personal bookmark manager val with\ntag filtering using Val Town SQLite.\n\n

\n\n**[Tomaso Valmax](https://www.val.town/u/all)** made\n[brain](https://www.val.town/x/all/brain), a binaural beats val live at\n[brain.val.run](https://brain.val.run/) (wear headphones for intended effect).\nTomaso also built [shredreader](https://www.val.town/x/all/shredreader), a\nspeed-reading app (100-2000 WPM), live at\n[shredreader.val.run](https://shredreader.val.run/).\n\n

\n\n**[Christopher de Beer](https://www.christopherdebeer.com/)** created\n[mental-models](https://www.val.town/x/c15r/mental-models), a collection of\ninteractive mental models, and [microgpt](https://www.val.town/x/c15r/microgpt),\na minimal byte-level decoder transformer.\n\n

\n\nI ([Pete](https://bsky.app/profile/petemillspaugh.com)) made a\n[copy-sqlite-table](https://www.val.town/x/pmillspaugh/copy-sqlite-table) val to\ncopy your account-scoped sqlite databases to a specific val (because now\n[every val gets its own database](/scoped-databases)). Then\n**[Nico](https://www.val.town/u/nbbaier)** remixed it to make an even better\n[migrate-sqlite](https://www.val.town/x/nbbaier/migrate-sqlite) val that fully\nmigrates tables, views, indexes, and triggers from account- to val-scoped\ndatabases.\n\n

\n\n**[Steve](https://bsky.app/profile/stevekrouse.com)** (Val Town cofounder) is\nworking on [vtrr](https://www.val.town/x/stevekrouse/vtrr), a Val Town React\nRouter framework with SSR and client-side hydration and navigation. The\n[aim](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/2025360822243918048) is to find a middle\nground between 100% SSR (e.g. using Hono) and 100% client-side (e.g. with\nReact).\n\nSteve also made a\n[x402-playground](https://www.val.town/x/stevekrouse/x402-playground) val and\nwrote a companion blog post about how the\n[x402 protocol could make API keys obsolete](https://stevekrouse.com/x402). If\nit pans out, it could be like Apple Pay for APIs, moving you through the subway\nturnstile without ever stopping at the ticket machine.\n\nAnd one more: Steve vibe-coded a\n[steve-eval](https://www.val.town/x/stevekrouse/steve-eval) val to judge and\nrewrite LLM-drafted essays to match his writing voice. He wrote a blog post\nabout it: [getting AI to write like me](https://stevekrouse.com/eval).\n\n

\n\nSome developers in the atproto space (colloquially, \"the Atmosphere,\" best known\nfor Bluesky so far) have taken an interest in Val Town.\n**[Tom](https://bsky.app/profile/macwright.com)** (Val Town cofounder) wrote a\n[blog post about the AT Protocol](https://macwright.com/2026/03/16/atproto),\nmade an [atproto-login](https://www.val.town/x/tmcw/atproto-login/code/main.ts)\nval, and will be at [ATmosphereConf](https://atmosphereconf.org/) in Vancouver\nthis weekend.\n\n

\n\nIf you'd like to be featured in next month's _Talk_, share your vals in our\n`#showcase` channel on [Discord](https://discord.val.town)!",[],[186,600],"4decef3e-79c6-470c-a9d3-84aec81a394c","2026-03-17-2026-feb.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-cd765c6a7f1c",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Investor Update – Feb 2026\ndescription: Our first public investor update\npubDate: 2026-03-17:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Steve Krouse\nthumbnail: https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/2d149dc0-30ba-4108-fa69-77ec70bec900/public\n---\n\n![Val Town Watercolor](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/2d149dc0-30ba-4108-fa69-77ec70bec900/public)\n\nDear investors and friends,\n\nWelcome to the very first public Val Town Investor Update. I decided to start\npublishing these publicly,\nbecause [I want to bring those of you who care about Val Town along for our journey](https://stevekrouse.com/ir).\n\n[Val Town](https://www.val.town/) is a JavaScript developer platform. Our\nmission is spreading the joy of programming.\n\nWe’re still trying to find product-market fit. We have a small team, customers,\nand revenue, but we do not yet have the kind of product-market fit that makes\ngrowth feel inevitable. Right now, our focus is helping small technical teams build custom software and agents.\n\nOur goal this year is to grow revenue 20% month-over-month.\n\n## **February 2026**\n\nIn February, we grew revenue 2%. Most of the month went into supporting one\nlarge enterprise opportunity. If it closes, it could increase revenue by 40%.\n\nThe biggest lesson from February is how easy it is to drift from forward-deployed engineering into consulting, and how carefully we need to guard against that. Once\nyou’ve built custom software for a customer without them in the room, it’s hard\nfor them to take ownership of it, leaving our product company on the hook for\nongoing maintenance and feature work of their custom software.\n\nBy contrast, our best success story in Feb was with our existing Teams\ncustomer Kilo Code. They asked us to help them build a customer support agent.\nAfter just ninety minutes, we had an early prototype. They use it daily, and continue to add features and iterate on it on their own.\n[We wrote more about it on our blog](https://blog.val.town/byoa), and\n[Kilo did too](https://blog.kilo.ai/p/we-wasted-4-weeks-on-a-1000month).\n\nSo we’re trying a new rule: we only code on behalf of customers with them in the\nroom. That helps ensure the work is valued, that someone on their team can own\nit afterward, and that we get product feedback at the same time.\n\nWe’re starting to see flickers of product-market fit around\n[custom agents](https://blog.val.town/byoa), from\n[customer support](https://www.val.town/x/templates/pylon-support-bot)\nto [recruiting](https://www.val.town/x/templates/github-hires/)\nto [lead finding](https://www.val.town/x/templates/github-leads) and\n[lead qualifying](https://www.val.town/x/templates/leads/).\nWe sit at an interesting point on the abstraction spectrum – much more flexible than\nno-code/low-code platforms (Retool, Zapier, Clay), but simpler than classic deployment platforms (Vercel, Render, Railway). Especially with Townie, our AI Agent, Val Town may be the right level of abstraction for business people\nand programmers to collaborate on fully custom agents connected to their real\ndata.\n\n## **March 2026**\n\nFor March, we have two goals: close the enterprise customer, and add 11 net new\nTeams customers. The first would be a big win and validate all the hard work we\nput into February, but the second is the more important work of finding\nproduct-market fit for Teams.\n\nOur ideal customer profile (ICP) remains early-stage technical startups,\nespecially small YC-style teams. They move quickly, care about developer\nexperience, can justify paying for tools that save them time, and the people\nbuying the product are the same people using it.\n\nOur core growth strategy right now is talking to as many people in our ICP as possible, and seeing how we can solve their most pressing problems with a custom agent in Val Town. We're particularly focused on engaging existing Val Town users in our ICP that are not yet Teams customers, but we think should be.\n\nFrom a product perspective, our focus is ironing out the\nfrictions in our self-serve Teams motion, particularly around onboarding and pricing. \n\n## **Key numbers**\n\n**Team**: 5 \n**Hiring**: 1\n([Product Engineer](https://val-town.notion.site/product-engineer)) \n**Revenue Growth Feb 2026**: 2% (Goal: 20%)\n\n![image.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/db3354ac-036d-4267-205e-0f2bf83ddd00/public)\n\n## Highlights\n\n- [Built a customer success bot with Kilo Code in 90 minutes](https://blog.kilo.ai/p/we-wasted-4-weeks-on-a-1000month)\n- Built an analyst agent for a private equity firm (potential enterprise customer)\n\n## Lowlights\n\n- Got distracted with consulting work\n- 2% monthly revenue growth (Goal: 20%)\n- Fighting a new crop of spammers & phishers\n\n## **Asks**\n\n- If you’d like to pair program a custom agent with me in 90 minutes, email steve@val.town.\n\nBest, \nSteve",[],[186,607],"001d163f-d74a-4a18-bd37-21c723696ed4","2026-03-05-newsletter-26.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-c90cc09b3f60",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Newsletter 26\ndescription: Townie v5, MCP, Revamped SQLite, Teams, LSP, and more\npubDate: 2026-03-10:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Pete Millspaugh\nthumbnail: https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/65907716-f17f-4e58-c028-bb364b76a400/public\n---\n\n![newsletter-26.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/65907716-f17f-4e58-c028-bb364b76a400/public)\n\nThis is a newsletter about the goings-on in Val Town. I'm Pete, and I joined the\nteam this year, partly to write things like this (and [that](/byoa), and\n[this](/talk-of-the-town-feb-2026), and [that](/in-val-out)). Steve used to\nwrite these newsletters when I read them as a Val Town user, and I know it's\nnice to hear from the founder. Sorry I'm not Steve! Please do still reply with\nyour thoughts and feedback, though—what you like reading about, what you wish\nVal Town would support, what vals you've built or want to build, et cetera.\nWe'll reply!\n\n

***

\n\nOur last newsletter, [#25](/newsletter-25), was delivered in summer of 2025 when\nTownie was a val in user-space and \"vibe coding\" was only a few months old.\nSince then: the Val Town MCP server and vt CLI launched, so you can work on vals\nwherever you get your LLMs; Townie was reborn in product-space; every val gets\nits own SQLite database; our TypeScript editor is faster and better; we launched\nTeams so that you can bring Val Town to work; and much more.\n\nAlso: **[we're having a party](https://luma.com/qv7epfwq)** this Thursday, March\n12th, at our office in downtown Brooklyn. Come say hello!\n\n## The elephant in the town: AI\n\nThere are three primary ways to ✨ do AI ✨ in Val Town:\n\n1. [Townie](https://docs.val.town/guides/prompting/townie/)\n2. [MCP](https://docs.val.town/guides/prompting/mcp/) + your favorite LLM\n3. [vt CLI](https://docs.val.town/guides/prompting/cli/) + your favorite LLM\n\nBefore I talk about Townie, let me just say: Townie is quite good, but we\nencourage you to bring Val Town to whatever coding tool you prefer (claude code,\ncodex, cursor, et al—it's up to you). Townie and MCP are a step above the CLI\nbecause they have better access to val primitives, but regardless of your weapon\nof choice, **you get Val Town's core loop: edit code → 100ms deploy → live\nURL.**\n\nOk, without further adieu: Townie is Val Town's code robot, now\n[back in town](/townie-v5) next to your code editor. Townie uses the Claude 4.6\nfamily and the Val Town MCP server under the hood. The MCP server can do a whole\nlot: create, edit, and run vals; read your SQLite, blob, and log data; configure\ncron, http, and email; read and write environment variables; view history and\nswitch branches; and more. Here we ask Townie to one-shot a \"Val Town Square\"\nmessaging forum.\n\n

\n \n

\n\n_Video at 1x speed to offer a realistic sense of Townie. Song credit: Good Time\nOldies by Bosley._\n\n## Scoped SQLite\n\nAs of January, [every val gets its own SQLite database](/scoped-databases).\nBefore that, you got one global database for your org or personal account (and\nyou still do), but now it's a whole lot easier to manage your data. There's also\na new SQL admin dashboard for poking around your val's data.\n\n

\n \n

\n\nIf you've already been using the admin UI, you'll notice some new features this\nmonth: now you can create tables and add records with a GUI, and if you're\nwriting SQL by hand (or pasting from an LLM), your query will be saved as you\nnavigate between table, docs, and query views.\n\nPersonally, I'm very excited about this one. Previously my vals used the same\nshared database for newsletter subscriber lists, wiki submissions, and whatever\nother data I stored. Now each val's data lives sensibly in its own silo, and the\nquery interface lowers the friction to quickly explore data.\n\n_Also, coming soon: val-scoped blob storage._\n\n## TypeScript language server\n\nThe TypeScript code editor in Val Town now runs Deno's official Language Server\nfor faster and more accurate type information. The\n[CodeMirror language server](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@valtown/codemirror-ls)\nand full server+client+proxy [Val Town LSP](https://github.com/val-town/vtlsp)\nare open source, and Wolf wrote a great [blog post](/vtlsp) about it if you're\ncurious to learn how it works.\n\n

\n \n

\n\n## Val Town Teams\n\nTeams launched last year so that you can bring Val Town to work. Teams comes\nwith features for your organization like environment variable groups, val-scoped\nAPI tokens, val-scoped OAuth connections, blob management, custom domains, val\nownership transfers, member management and invites, public profiles, version\ncontrol/history/branching, and more. Companies like Kilo Code, Preston-Werner\nVentures, and Turso are collaborating on customer support agents, deal\npipelines, customer leads, and the like.\n\nWith the explosion of agents in 2026, we're noticing Teams customers _beyond the\neng team_ editing vals. One customer noted that Val Town is a perfect platform\nfor engineers and business people to collaborate because the biz team can easily\nupdate prompts and see changes deployed immediately without waiting on\nengineers, and the eng team can customize the code to their liking.\n\n## And much more\n\nHere's an unordered, incomplete list of other new features in Val Town:\n\n- Pin vals to your profile page\n- Change your account handle up to 5 times\n- Connect to Slack or Google from a val\n- `.json`, `.css`, and `.txt` files supported as val files\n- Download vals as ZIP files\n- Download val files individually\n- Export environment variables as `.env` file\n- Copy environment variables when you remix your own val\n- 3x faster SQLite, average latency down from 35ms to 10ms (thanks Turso)\n- New onboarding steps for org setup\n- Val READMEs support Mermaid diagrams\n- Docs [guide](https://docs.val.town/guides/auth/) for adding auth to your val\n- Docs [guide](https://docs.val.town/guides/slack/agent/) for building a Slack\n agent\n- Go to definition for any symbol in your code\n- DenoLS resolves and type-checks imported private vals and modules\n- Search and replace in branches\n- Search results link to source line\n- Better code search (`cmd+k`)\n- `cmd+s` saves globally (not just when the editor is focused)\n- `cmd+shift+f` maps to project search\n- Live HTTP preview pane floating in or alongside the editor\n- Markdown preview pane alongside the editor (`cmd+return`)\n- Full-page Logs view for a val\n- Render multi-line logs\n- Linkify stack traces in logs\n- Query val logs via API `/v1/logs`\n- API endpoints for managing environment variables\n- Browser-based device auth for `vt` CLI\n- Manage OAuth client connections in Settings\n- Include merge commits, PR links, and Townie edits in val History\n- View diffs between val versions from History\n- View Townie chat history in Settings\n- Townie model picker to choose between Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus\n- Show Townie diff view before approving/denying edits\n- Let Townie run vals\n- Townie's \"4 C's\": commands for /cost, /compact, /context, /clear\n- _As an aside^, why do so many AI things start with C? Claude Code, Codex,\n Cursor, context..._\n- Attach images to Townie chat\n- Fullscreen Townie mode (new!)\n\n## Val Town Party\n\nIf you live in or around NYC, swing by our headquarters this week! We're having\na [party](https://luma.com/qv7epfwq) at the Val Town office in downtown Brooklyn\non Thursday.\n\n

\n \n

\n\n## Val Town Hall\n\nSpeaking of community hangouts, last summer we had a\n[Val Town Hall](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itdNXoG5olAn) where we opened up\nthe floor to community members demo'ing vals they'd made (for business or\npleasure) and talked about our roadmap. This spring, we're bringing it back\n(date TBD).\n\n

\n \n

\n\nReply (1) if you're interested in presenting or attending, and/or (2) if you\nhave requests or ideas about what should be on the meeting agenda.\n\n## Talk of the Town\n\nMy favorite part of the old newsletter was the community vals section, which\nyou'll now find in [_Talk of the Town_](/talk-of-the-town-feb-2026). In February\nwe highlighted:\n\n- vals in the atmosphere (read: atproto/Bluesky)\n- a [*Val*entine's val](https://www.val.town/x/mewtru/valentine) (dubbed\n \"Valentown\" in one email reply)\n- a [literal laundry val](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uBQprP1Wlas)\n- a [Helium Hotspot val](https://www.val.town/x/jhiller/dc-hotspot-map)\n- a [moon phase val](https://moon.val.run)\n- _and dozens of other neat vals you all wrote_\n\nShare your vals in our [Discord](https://discord.val.town/) #showcase or on\nBsky/X/HN/etc to be included in the upcoming March issue.",[],[186,614],"8f4a11ff-4b40-4ed2-865c-8339a051ceea","2026-02-25-byoa.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-c70d4dfe9c27",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Bring Your Own Agent (BYOA)\ndescription: Your agent should answer to you, not your vendor\npubDate: 2026-02-25:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Pete Millspaugh\nthumbnail: https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/f9001654-eb7e-4e37-b2bf-534e80e5f200/public\n---\n\nYesterday morning I wrote a Slack\n[agent](https://www.val.town/x/petermillspaugh/duck) in Val Town using Vercel's\nAI SDK, and yesterday afternoon it became obsolete.\n\nJust after I'd written a docs [guide](https://docs.val.town/guides/slack/agent)\nand recorded a demo video, I saw the\n[announcement](https://vercel.com/changelog/chat-sdk): \"Today, we're open\nsourcing the new Chat SDK in public beta.\" By this morning, I learned that the\nChat SDK, which paves Vercel's new\n[Slack bot happy path](https://www.chat-sdk.dev/docs/guides/slack-nextjs), has\nalready been [renamed](https://vercel.com/blog/introducing-chatbot) to\n\"Chatbot.\" What will happen tomorrow? Or next week? Heaven forbid you go on a\nfamily vacation.\n\n![ferris.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/f9001654-eb7e-4e37-b2bf-534e80e5f200/public)\n\nI'd written my Val Town agent—named _duck_, as in\n[rubber duck debugging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging)—and\naccompanying guide based on Vercel's now-stale\n[Slackbot Agent Guide](https://ai-sdk.dev/cookbook/guides/slackbot). That guide\nand its companion repo—last commit 8 months ago, an eternity in AI Land—uses the\nAI SDK v4. But they're already on v6. _If even they were two versions behind on\ntheir own framework, imagine where that leaves the rest of us._\n\nJust about every software vendor you use has their own AI agent with a punny,\non-theme name.^{[1](#footnotes)} (Not to throw stones or anything—at Val\nTown we have [Townie](https://blog.val.town/townie-v5).) All those bespoke\nagents will always be behind, using yesterday's framework or model. It's ok to\nbe behind (\"if it ain't broke...\"), but you should control when you are behind\nand when you want to catch up. **You should Bring Your Own Agent.**\n\n## BYOA—in Val Town or elsewhere\n\nI've found Val Town to be quite a good place to write and run code, including\nagents. I thought so for two years as a regular user, and I think so now that\nI've been working here a couple months. It's \"a nice place for JavaScript,\" as\none of our users recently put it. But before I tell you why I think it's good, I\nshould say: you may prefer to BYOA elsewhere, which is just as well. I don't\nknow what tools you're familiar with and what you prefer. The important thing is\nthat your agent answers to you—not your vendor.\n\nVal Town is designed to have\n[credible exit](https://newsletter.squishy.computer/p/credible-exit), meaning if\nyou ever want to move your code elsewhere, you can do so easily. You can\n_credibly exit_. It's anti lock-in. Just like how when you own a domain name,\nyou can transfer it to another registrar, or move your website hosting between\nproviders, or change email clients. Val Town code runs on the Deno runtime and\nemphasizes Web-standard and mature technologies: JavaScript (or TypeScript), npm\npackages, SQLite, et cetera. So if you BYOA in Val Town, you can later port it\nover to Vercel or Netlify or AWS, or wherever.\n\nNow, I like building agents (and many other things, but not everything) in Val\nTown because it removes the deployment step, such that I don't even think about\nit. Vals auto-deploy on save in 100ms, and you get a live URL. The feedback loop\nis very fast. There's no local versus staging versus prod environment (although\nthere is branching for safe code changes). When collaborating with coworkers or\nsharing code with friends and strangers, there's no local dev setup—instead,\nthey just remix your val or create a new branch. At this point in the paragraph\nmy salesiness barometer is reading too high, and it'll probably only get worse\nin the next section about Kilo Code's agent val, so I'll transition by saying:\nit's totally reasonable if you want to BYOA on [insert hosting provider here]. I\nlike Val Town, but YMMV.\n\n## Case study: Kilo Code's customer support agent\n\nLast week, Steve (and Townie) from our team and Alex from\n[Kilo Code](https://kilo.ai/) set aside 8 hours to get a\n[customer support bot](https://www.val.town/x/templates/pylon-support-bot)\nagent^{[2](#footnotes)} up and running on Val town. But they\n[only needed 89 minutes](https://blog.kilo.ai/p/we-wasted-4-weeks-on-a-1000month).\n\nI watched a recording of Alex and Steve's meeting to inform my work on the\naforementioned Slack agent. It really was, like, surprisingly easy. Here's some\nverbatim dialogue from the crux of the meeting, screenplay-style (stage\ndirections added):\n\n![screenplay.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/4178c632-e0a1-48de-c154-6a6950748900/public)\n\nThe point this scene is supposed to illustrate is that setting up the agent was\neasy, even fun. But the more important, practical point that you can rehearse\nand repeat to your boss (or your boss's boss) in the architecture meeting next\nweek is what Alex wrote about in his blog post:\n\n> Every SaaS platform you use is shipping an AI agent add-on right now. Your\n> support tool has one. Your CRM has one. Your project management platform\n> probably just announced one last week. They all cost $500–$1,000/month.\n> They’re all black boxes. And if your experience is anything like ours, they\n> mostly don’t work.\n\nAnd these black box SaaS agents won't obviously be a hot mess, not at first.\nThey'll boil you slowly, like a frog. Of the customer support agent that Kilo\nCode tried for a month before BYOA'ing, Alex wrote:\n\n> It wasn’t bad enough to reject on day one — it was bad in the slow, corrosive\n> way that wastes your time: almost good enough, but never quite right, and no\n> levers to pull to fix it.\n\nSo Kilo Code rolled their own agent with Val Town and the Kilo Code AI Gateway.\nTomorrow or next week or next month, when a new model or better tools come out,\nthey'll be in control.\n\n## BYOA\n\n\"Bring Your Own Agent\"\n([not a new term](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Bring+Your+Own+Agent%22),\nbtw) feels like the right pattern for this build-don't-buy moment, and Val Town\nmight be the right place to do it. But again, I don't want to oversell. We are\n[pickling compute](https://blog.val.town/pickling), and BYOA is the new flavor.\nChances are your company is already (or will soon be) hiring agents to work\nalongside you: for customer support; for data analytics; for fraud detection;\nfor code review; for lots of things. Maybe you'll build them on Val Town.\n\n## Footnotes\n\n_(1) As far as punny AI agent names go, I think Gusto's Gus is pretty damn good.\nI like Townie, too. But my favorite robot name, hands down, is Kroger's\ninventory-taking robot, Tally._\n\n_(2) Here, and everywhere in this post, I mean \"agent\" as in\n[Simon Willison's definition](https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/18/agents/): an\nLLM running in a loop with tools—definitely not agent-as-human-replacement._",[],[186,621],"d4271a51-b0d2-4d45-8cac-2d343a4c9bb2","2026-02-18-talk-of-the-town-feb-2026.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-c35d60489dff",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Talk of the Town — Feb 2026\ndescription: Valentine's Day, ATProto, & other vals we love\npubDate: 2026-02-18:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Pete Millspaugh\nthumbnail: https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/9451ad5d-2a82-488b-b5e6-b4101c448b00/public\n---\n\n![talk-of-the-town-feb-2026.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/9451ad5d-2a82-488b-b5e6-b4101c448b00/public)\n\nWe're experimenting with a new _Talk of the Town_ blog series to spotlight neat\nvals from the community and other goings-on in Val Town.\n\n## *Val*entine's Day\n\n[mewtru](https://www.val.town/u/mewtru) made an adorable\n[valentine](https://www.val.town/x/mewtru/valentine) val—a _val_ val—that over\n10k people have remixed! That means to the ~20k people who signed up for Val\nTown in the last two weeks, we'll forever be the Valentine's Day company.\n\n![valentine.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/bf4a64bc-45cd-4427-821d-ba2ce4951300/public)\n\n## Val Town in the Atmosphere\n\nVal Town has made its way into the\n[Atmosphere](https://atproto.com/guides/glossary#atmosphere), as in the AT\nProtocol ecosystem (or \"atproto,\" for short).\n[Dan Abramov](https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov) is running code on Val Town\nfor his new [Inlay](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:mdg3w2kpadcyxy33pizokzf3)\n\"social component\" system.\n\n![danabramov-bsky.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/c3228c2b-792f-4441-4529-1023ac39b200/public)\n\nDan will be presenting at\n[ATmosphereConf 2026](https://ti.to/atmosphereconf/atmosphereconf2026) in March,\nand Tom from our team might be there, too—let us know if you're going!\n\n## Val Town in your town\n\n[Paul Chin Jr.](https://www.val.town/u/pchinjr) gave a Val Town demo at the\n[NorfolkJS January 2026](https://youtu.be/UNqv3tGKh2I) meetup. We love Paul's\ndescription of Val Town: \"a nice place for JavaScript.\" If you're throwing a\nval-centric local meetup or hackathon, let us know! We can order some pizza pies\nfor you (or a Wegmans charcuterie board, in Paul's case).\n\n## Vals we love\n\nThere are far too many cool community vals to share since we last rounded them\nup (in June), so we curated a handful to kick off the year.\n\n- [**Guy Dupont**](https://www.val.town/u/dupontgu) made a val to\n [track laundry machines in his building](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uBQprP1Wlas)\n using a tiny microphone, bluetooth microcontroller, and a Particle Tachyon\n computer\n- [**Joey Hiller**](https://www.val.town/u/jhiller) built a\n [dc-hotspot-map](https://www.val.town/x/jhiller/dc-hotspot-map) val to track\n Helium Hotspot growth around Washington DC\n- [**forresto**](https://www.val.town/u/forresto) created a\n [moon-phase](https://www.val.town/x/forresto/moon-phase) val that displays an\n image of the moon now, proxied from NASA's servers (live at\n [moon.val.run](https://moon.val.run/))\n- [**Trent**](https://www.val.town/u/tr3ntg) launched his\n [ReadBack](https://readbackapp.com/) app with its backend built entirely in\n Val Town!\n- [**Ash Ryan**](https://www.val.town/u/ashryanio) wrote an\n [index-now](https://www.val.town/x/ashryanio/index-now) val that automates\n IndexNow submission for your websites (live on\n [index-now.val.run](https://index-now.val.run/))\n- [**Jan Zheng**](https://www.val.town/u/yawnxyz) put together a\n [re-search](https://www.val.town/x/yawnxyz/re-search) val that search the web\n and academic sources with multilingual summaries (live on\n [re-search.val.run](https://re-search.val.run/))\n- [**Caleb**](https://www.val.town/u/spookyuser) created an\n [otp](https://www.val.town/x/spookyuser/otp) val that generates disposable\n emails and copies verification codes sent to them super fast with a Raycast\n shortcut\n- [**Caleb**](https://www.val.town/u/spookyuser) also made a\n [crxtotal](https://www.val.town/x/spookyuser/crxtotal/) val that scans Chrome\n extensions for viruses\n- [**Simplescraper**](https://www.val.town/u/simplescraper) made\n [extension-checker](https://www.val.town/x/simplescraper/extension-checker),\n another val that checks Chrome extensions for known threats (live at\n [extensioncheck.val.run](https://extensioncheck.val.run/))\n- [**Jono Yeong**](https://www.val.town/u/jonoyeong) made a\n [bluesky-cron](https://www.val.town/x/jonoyeong/bluesky-cron/) val to trigger\n Netlify builds (and\n [wrote about it](https://jonathanyeong.com/writing/using-val-town-as-a-webhook-middleware/)!)\n- [**dpip**](https://www.val.town/u/dpip) built a\n [graphemeCounter](https://www.val.town/x/dpip/graphemeCounter) to, you guessed\n it, count graphemes in text, including emojis and complex characters\n- [**Nico Baier**](https://www.val.town/u/nbbaier) refactored his\n [sqliteExplorerReact](https://www.val.town/x/nbbaier/sqliteExplorerReact) val\n (a userspace sqlite UI that preceded databases and a query interface for every\n val!)\n- [**Nico Baier**](https://www.val.town/u/nbbaier) also made a\n [chicago-resident-days](https://www.val.town/x/nbbaier/chicago-resident-days)\n val that scans Bluesky for free museum days in the upcoming week\n- [**kamalnrf**](https://www.val.town/u/kamalnrf) built a\n [github-zip-api](https://www.val.town/x/kamalnrf/github-zip-api) val to\n download any GitHub repo or subdirectory as a .zip for downloading Claude\n Skills\n- [**kamalnrf**](https://www.val.town/u/kamalnrf) also created a\n [claude-plugins-registry](https://www.val.town/x/kamalnrf/claude-plugins-registry)\n for Claude Skills and Claude Code Plugins (live on\n [claude-plugins.dev](https://claude-plugins.dev/))\n- [**yieldray**](https://www.val.town/u/yieldray) wrote a\n [honox-valtown-template](https://www.val.town/x/yieldray/honox-valtown-template)\n val to use HonoX file-based routing and islands hydration deployed on Val Town\n- [**Steve Olsen**](https://www.val.town/u/saolsen) wrote a\n [connect4_ai](https://www.val.town/x/saolsen/connect4_ai) val using a WebGPU\n shader to play connect4 against a bot (live on\n [connect4.val.run](https://connect4.val.run/))\n- [**Jim Nielsen**](https://www.val.town/u/jimniels) built a Remix 3\n [fetch-router](https://www.val.town/x/jimniels/fetch-router) val\n- [**tylersayshi**](https://www.val.town/u/tylersayshi) wrote a little\n [teapot](https://www.val.town/x/tylersayshi/teapot) val\n- [**raymondcamden**](https://www.val.town/u/raymondcamden) created a\n [randomhorrormovie](https://www.val.town/x/raymondcamden/randomhorrormovie)\n val to generate new horror movie titles using a Markov Chain\n- [**Wil B**](https://www.val.town/u/wilhelm) vibe-coded a\n [qbat](https://www.val.town/x/wilhelm/qbat) puzzle game val with Bluesky\n integration (live on [qbat.val.run](https://qbat.val.run/))\n- [**Jordan Mann**](https://www.val.town/u/jrmann100) built an\n [ashby](https://www.val.town/x/jrmann100/ashby) val to pull job listings from\n Ashby into your RSS feed\n- [**James Keezer**](https://www.val.town/u/Jamesllllllllll) wrote a\n [like-anything](https://www.val.town/x/Jamesllllllllll/like-anything) val (and\n [blog post](https://jameskeezer.dev/articles/like-anything)!)so you can put a\n like button anywhere\n- [**Erick Christian**](https://www.val.town/u/ericc) built\n [github-place](https://www.val.town/x/ericc/github-place) to turn his GitHub\n profile into r/place\n- [**neverstew**](https://www.val.town/u/neverstew) made a\n [spotifyPlaylister](https://www.val.town/x/neverstew/spotifyPlaylister) val to\n auto-download his last 20 liked Spotify songs\n- [**cheersderek**](https://www.val.town/u/cheersderek) wrote a\n [random-ghostbusters-quote](https://www.val.town/x/cheersderek/random-ghostbusters-quote)\n val using SASS\n- [**all**](https://www.val.town/u/all) built a\n [valamp](https://www.val.town/x/all/valamp) mp3 player val (live at\n [valamp.val.run](https://valamp.val.run/))\n- [**pomdtr**](https://www.val.town/u/pomdtr) made a\n [val-town-pages](https://www.val.town/x/pomdtr/val-town-pages) val as a sort\n of GitHub Pages in Val Town\n- [**helge**](https://www.val.town/u/helge) built a\n [doodle](https://www.val.town/x/helge/doodle) val (live at\n [doodle.val.run](https://doodle.val.run/))\n- [**Felix De Montis**](https://www.val.town/u/dervondenbergen) built\n [jahreskalender](https://www.val.town/x/dervondenbergen/jahreskalender) (in\n German) to customize his calendar\n- [**Steve**](https://www.val.town/u/stevekrouse) created an\n [auto-thread](https://www.val.town/x/stevekrouse/auto-thread) val to\n replace/improve upon Needle in Discord\n- [**Steve**](https://www.val.town/u/stevekrouse) made a\n [pylon-support-bot](https://www.val.town/x/templates/pylon-support-bot) val\n based on a bot built by one of our Teams customers\n- [**Steve**](https://www.val.town/u/stevekrouse) vibe-coded\n [smallworld](https://www.val.town/x/stevekrouse/smallworld) with Townie to\n sorts his Twitter friends by location so he can find friends to meet when\n traveling\n- [**Steve**](https://www.val.town/u/stevekrouse) created an\n [atproto OAuth template](https://www.val.town/x/stevekrouse/at-proto-oauth-demo/code/main.tsx)\n val, ported over from @zeu.dev's deno template\n- [**Steve**](https://www.val.town/u/stevekrouse) made a\n [rage-clicks](https://www.val.town/x/valdottown/rage-clicks) val to forward\n \"rageclicks\" from Posthog to Discord so we can see where our UI is making\n users mad\n- [**Tom**](https://www.val.town/u/tmcw) updated his\n [Bluesky ThinkUp Tribute](https://www.val.town/x/tmcw/bluesky-thinkup-tribute/)\n val that tracks whenever someone you follow on Bluesky changes their bio\n- [**Charlie**](https://www.val.town/u/dcm31) made a\n [riddle-diary](https://www.val.town/x/dcm31/riddle-diary) val so that when you\n write, your diary writes back (live on\n [riddle.val.run](https://riddle.val.run))\n- [**Charlie**](https://www.val.town/u/dcm31) built an\n [stl-viewer](https://www.val.town/x/dcm31/stl-viewer/code/README.md) that\n designs parts for a 3D printer with help from Townie\n- [**Pete**](https://www.val.town/u/petermillspaugh) built a\n [tld-wiki](https://www.val.town/x/petermillspaugh/tld-wiki) val to explore all\n 1,592 top-level domains and collect uses in the wild\n\nShare your favorite vals (whether written by you, a friend, a coworker, or\nClaude) in our [Discord](https://discord.val.town/) `#showcase` channel, and\nwe'll link to them in a future _Talk of the Town_ edition!",[],[186,628],"e309dd38-a83f-4f1a-ac55-d05bc7c2dac6","2026-01-23-scoped-databases.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-be2e7a70b6e3",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Every val gets a database!\ndescription: Every user gets a database interface!\npubDate: 2026-01-23:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Tom MacWright\nthumbnail: \"https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/abb72093-3f91-4fa9-9e4b-c07e409bd800/public\"\n---\n\n![turso+vt](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/abb72093-3f91-4fa9-9e4b-c07e409bd800/public)\n\nEvery val now gets its own SQLite database, and a powerful database UI. This\nmakes it even easier for your vals to persist data and then more transparent to\nsee what data exists, update it manually if you need to, and run queries against\nthe val-specific database.\n\nThis also unlocks new ways to collaborate: when you fork one of your own\nprojects, you can choose to fork the database too, so that the new forked val\ncontains a copy of the old database.\n\n## Code example\n\nUsing the [std/sqlite](https://www.val.town/x/std/sqlite) val to access the val\ndatabase:\n\n```ts\nimport sqlite from \"https://esm.town/v/std/sqlite/main.ts\";\n\nawait sqlite.execute('CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS \"docs\" (contents TEXT)');\nawait sqlite.execute('INSERT INTO docs (contents) VALUES (\"Hello, world!\")');\n```\n\n## Demo\n\n\n\nWith the built-in SQLite browser you can:\n\n- Add and rename columns\n- Delete rows\n- Get the schema of any table\n- Run queries\n- Export tables as CSV\n- Dump the database as SQL\n\n## History\n\nIn 2023 we launched\n[SQLite](https://blog.val.town/blog/val-town-newsletter-13#sqlite--blob-storage)\nfor every Val Town user, powered by our friends at [Turso](https://turso.tech/).\nVals could use the database with zero configuration and total control. A lot of\nthe most interesting vals are built on this - my\n[Bluesky ThinkUp Tribute](https://www.val.town/x/tmcw/bluesky-thinkup-tribute)\nval uses SQLite to store people's social media bios, and\n[devstats](https://www.val.town/x/tmcw/devstats/code/README.md) uses the\ndatabase to track statistics about our repository.\n\nBut because databases were scoped to users and organizations, they contained\nintermixed data: it's impossible to tell a priori which data came from which\nval. Scoped databases fix that problem, eliminating conflicts between different\nvals and making it easy to just browse val-specific data.\n\n## Security\n\nWe've designed scoped databases to be more secure, too: accessible only by the val itself, so vals can't reach into scoped data living somewhere else. This makes it a lot safer to work on SQLite databases too, because your\nschema changes can't affect any other vals.\n\nUnder the hood, we've added project-scoped API tokens to make this work: each\nval automatically gets a temporary API token as the `VAL_TOWN_API_KEY`\nenvironment variable. That API token has always belonged to a user, but now it\nbelongs to a val as well, which gives it specific val superpowers.\n\n## Existing databases will stick around\n\nWe're supporting both val-scoped and user-scoped databases for the long term:\nthere are uses to both, and there's no reason to force everyone into a gnarly\nupgrade path. But val scoped databases are definitely recommended for new\nprojects: they make a lot of things easier, and come with a powerful UI.\n\n## Thanks Turso for the continued collaboration!\n\nWe've provisioned thousands of databases and this will add even more - but it's\npossible because Turso runs SQLite in the cloud. This feature really relies on\nsome tricks from Turso too, like forking databases by\n[seeding from point-in-time backups](https://docs.turso.tech/api-reference/databases/create#body-seed).",[],[186,635],"51fbaa5e-8704-4a7d-8ced-bbd9eeae4682","2026-01-22-townie-v5.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-baa11967946c",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Townie's back in town!\ndescription: Townie v5, powered by Val Town MCP and Claude 4.5\npubDate: 2026-01-22:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Steve Krouse\nthumbnail: \"https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/4d639983-2a9f-4c77-8c69-cc1277925b00/public\"\n---\n\n

\n \n

\n\nTownie's back! In its 5th version, Townie, our AI agent, lives alongside your\ncode editor, powered by the Claude 4.5 family and our carefully crafted tools.\n\nTownie is like Claude Code, but in the browser, optimized for Val Town's simple\nand instant runtime.\n\nHere we ask Townie to scaffold this very blog post:\n\n

\n \n

\n\nLike every edit in Val Town, Townie's changes are instantly deployed live on the\ninternet at a URL (or a branch-preview-URL) in 100ms.\n\n## What can Townie do?\n\nTownie can take almost any action that you as a user can take:\n\n- List, search, & create vals\n- Read, write, & run files\n- View history, create & switch branches, revert versions\n- Query your SQLite databases & Blob storage\n- Read & write environment variables\n- Read logs\n- Read & configure cron jobs\n\nBecause Townie has so much context, you can ask it to one-shot whole features or\neven full-stack apps. Or remix one of our\n[templates](https://www.val.town/explore/use-cases). Townie gets the same tight\nfeedback loop that Val Town users get:\n\n1. Edit code\n2. Automatically deployed live in 100ms\n3. Run the code\n4. View the output\n5. Read the logs\n6. Keep iterating until done\n\nYou can rely on version history and branching to move fast without breaking\nthings, along with Townie's\n[chat history](https://www.val.town/settings/chat-history) to pick up where you\nleft off.\n\n## Modes\n\nWe're using the latest models in the Claude 4.5 family — Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus\n— with three modes:\n\n1. **Normal**: Townie asks you to approve before writes\n2. **Plan**: Townie as your read-only thinking partner\n3. **Allow all edits**: Townie YOLOs changes to your vals\n\n## System prompt\n\nTownie knows Val Town inside and out. Our\n**[system prompt](https://val.town/townie/system-prompt)** is public\n([still](https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/28/system-prompt-for-townie/)), and\nit doubles as a great \"101 intro to Val Town.\"\n\n## Keyboard shortcuts & slash commands\n\nAs a power user, you can open Townie with `⌘J` and use slash commands:\n\n- `/cost` Show estimated cost and usage\n- `/context` Show context window usage\n- `/compact` Summarize older messages to save context\n- `/clear` Start a new chat\n\n## Townie is writing ~50% of my code\n\nBefore Townie v5, we didn't think we needed an in-browser AI agent. We wanted to\nthoughtfully craft a good MCP server and let you the developer stay where you\nare (in your favorite AI coding tool). And we did. And\n[you](https://docs.val.town/guides/prompting/mcp/)\n[can](https://blog.val.town/vt-cli)!\n\nBut MCP _clients_ just aren't good enough yet, so that experience often falls\nshort. Our customers asked for a good in-browser AI agent. Honestly, we as users\nof our product wanted this too. And it's pretty great! I use Townie v5 a lot\nnow. Sometimes I use it for vibe coding (for prototypes or simple things), and\nother times I keep it on a tight leash (for stuff I care about).\n\nIt's fun and productive – give it a try!\n\n## Try Townie\n\n[Townie](https://www.val.town/townie) is available in public beta for\n[Pro](https://www.val.town/pricing) and [Teams](https://www.val.town/teams)\ncustomers, so you can try it for $10/mo.\n\n_Thanks to Pete for helping me write this and crafting the lovely Townie doodle\nat the top._",[],[186,642],"aae70fbe-e811-403c-95d8-687e0e71584b","2026-01-14-catching-stars.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-b66aee742bce",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Catching stars\ndescription: Finding new customers & hires from your GitHub stargazers\npubDate: 2026-01-14:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Steve Krouse, Pete Millspaugh\nthumbnail: \"https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/dcbbc8be-9378-4144-31a6-374ec82b2b00/public\"\n---\n\n![catching-stars.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/34d63456-9cdf-4890-59c7-a32ace4e0c00/public)\n\nTLDR: Find new customers and/or hires from your GitHub stargazers:\n\n1. [val.town/x/templates/github-leads](https://www.val.town/x/templates/github-leads)\n2. [val.town/x/templates/github-hires](https://www.val.town/x/templates/github-hires)\n\nLast month we started [pickling compute](https://blog.val.town/pickling):\nbottling up Val Town's commodity ingredient (compute) and selling the flavor of\nthe month (narrow use case). Right now we're bottling \"inbound lead\nqualification\" and selling it to seed-stage b2b founders who can code. Bottling\ninbound lead qualification means automating the manual process of researching\nnew customer signups by hand to see if they'd be good upsell candidates: going\nto their GitHub profile, googling them, looking for a LinkedIn or personal\nwebsite, finding where they work, researching their company, etc. This turns out\nto be a good fit for an LLM agent armed with a web-search tool.\n[Charmaine](https://www.charmaineklee.com/) on our team threw the\n[OpenAI Agents SDK](https://openai.github.io/openai-agents-js/) at it, and it\nwas surprisingly effective, often surpassing results from traditional enrichment\nservices. From there we iterated toward the current\n[GitHub Leads](https://www.val.town/x/templates/github-leads) template that\ntracks activity on your public GitHub repos (stars, forks, issues, etc.) and\ngauges whether your contributors could be new hires or customers. In short,\n_catching stars_.\n\n![github-leads val preview.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/0fb83700-973c-41b7-3994-2d962c88eb00/public)\n\nThere are a couple reasons why we're interested in catching stars, beyond the\ntool itself:\n\n1. Like our customers, we're also searching for new\n [hires](https://www.val.town/careers) and [Teams](https://www.val.town/teams)\n customers, so we've been dogfooding this leads val as we build it. Eating our\n own pickles, I guess\n2. This tool—and others like it—are stops on our way toward\n [end-programmer programming](https://blog.val.town/blog/end-programmer-programming).\n The tool is _yours_, meaning it's completely customizable—remix the val and\n refactor the code as you wish. There are plenty of existing tools that\n automate hiring and sales pipelines, and if you don't want to touch code you\n should use one of those instead! But if you're a \"know-code\" founder (or head\n of sales or hiring manager) with a public GitHub repo, we think you'll like\n remixing our tool and making it your own\n\nIf you'd like to try it out, the vals live here:\n[github-leads](https://val.town/x/templates/github-leads),\n[github-hires](https://www.val.town/x/templates/github-hires) (same code, save\nfor the prompt). Here's what the code does:\n\n1. [Cron job polls GitHub for new activity](https://www.val.town/x/templates/github-leads/code/github.cron.ts)\n2. [SQLite database stores activity](https://www.val.town/x/templates/github-leads/code/db.ts)\n3. [OpenAI web-search agent researches & qualifies hires/customers](https://www.val.town/x/templates/github-leads/code/agent.ts)\n4. [Dashboard displays the results](https://www.val.town/x/templates/github-leads/code/dashboard.tsx)\n5. [Daily email digest sends you the best leads](https://www.val.town/x/templates/github-leads/code/digest.ts)\n\nThe research and scoring are only as good as your prompt. If your company has an\n\"ideal customer profile\" written down (or a job description), this is the place\nfor it. Here's our current\n[PROMPT.txt](https://www.val.town/x/templates/github-leads/code/PROMPT.txt):\n\n```md\nYou are an assistant to the CEO of Val Town.\n\nVal Town is like Zapier for people who know how to code, a tool for writing code\nand getting it running in the cloud, particularly useful for lightweight\nautomations in technical teams.\n\nI'm sending you data about GitHub activity and it's your job to exhaustively\nresearch the person by visiting the links on their GitHub profile, any company\nlisted on their profile, searching the web for their name creatively, finding\ntheir personal and company sites, blogs they've written, etc to determine if\nthey are in Val Town's ideal customer profile.\n\nVal Town's ideal customer profile:\n\n1. Founder\n2. B2B SaaS Startup\n3. Seed-stage (approximately)\n4. They know how to code\n\nReturn your final response in JSON only with the following schema:\n\n{ \"name\": string, \"company\": string, \"match\": boolean, \"score\": number,\n\"reasoning\": string }\n\n- The score field is from 0 to 100.\n- The company is where they currently work.\n- For the \"reasoning\" field, write in Markdown. Include newlines where\n appropriate.\n- If the person works at Val Town, there is no match and the score is 0.\n```\n\nThe core of this app was coded carefully by hand, while the lower stakes parts\nwere churned out by Claude.\n\n- To ingest GitHub activity, we thoughtfully considered (1) webhooks, (2)\n polling every resource individually, or (3) polling an org's entire activity\n feed. After much trial-and-error, we choose option 3—polling the activity\n feed—as the simplest approach. It's an elegant enough\n [34 lines of code](https://www.val.town/x/templates/github-leads/code/github.cron.ts)\n covering all activity across an org (stargazers, issues, discussions, PRs,\n etc...but not emoji reactions 😢)\n- [The research agent code](https://www.val.town/x/templates/github-leads/code/agent.ts)\n is similarly short and sweet. The complex agent-loop parts are handled by the\n OpenAI Agent SDK\n- On the other hand, the dashboard and daily digest email were mostly vibe\n coded. They aren't load bearing and can be regenerated from scratch at any\n time. [Vibe code is legacy code](/vibe-code), but only when you have to\n maintain it\n\nTo test, we ran this GPT-5 agent on ourselves first.\n[Tom](https://macwright.com) was automatically disqualified by the hiring agent,\nfor example:\n\n```md\nHe is actively merging PRs and pushing to main on Val Town repos as of January\n2026, indicating he works with Val Town. Per our rules, current Val Town team\nmembers/users are automatically disqualified.\n```\n\nAnd it's a good thing Tom does work for Val Town, because before we added\nautomatic disqualification criteria to the prompt, GPT-5 identified him as a\nstellar candidate, 99/100:\n\n```md\nProlific open‑source engineer and writer; cofounder/CTO at Val Town with deep\ndevtools and infrastructure focus, previously founder of Placemark and\nex‑Mapbox. Strong full‑stack/backend track record with extensive public work.\nExceptional hire fit (already on team), not a customer lead.\n```\n\nYou can remix [leads](https://www.val.town/x/templates/github-leads) or\n[hires](https://www.val.town/x/templates/github-hires) to qualify new customers\nor employees for your startup...or to qualify _yourself_ as a new lead or hire\nat Val Town 😉.\n\nA note of caution for anyone looking to use this mini-app to contact developers:\nwe're particularly allergic to spam. If you're a commercial OSS company, use\nthese tools to qualify leads so you can reach out to fewer people, more\nthoughtfully. Reach out humbly and with respect and curiosity.\n\nEach OpenAI agent run costs about 30 cents and 30 seconds in inference with\nGPT-5. That can be dialed way down on cheaper models and still return decent\nsignal. You can run this on a free [Val Town](https://val.town/) account by\nsupplying your own OpenAI key. Or if you’re using this for a business, consider\nsigning up for [Val Town Teams](https://www.val.town/pricing) for collaboration,\nproduction limits, and extra support starting at $167/mo. And if you want a hand\nautomating any workflow, please reach out.",[],[186,649],"3eb26342-df8b-4ae9-8118-eaa7b339605f","2025-12-14-pickling.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-b0538ffb68d1",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Pickling Compute\ndescription: Why Val Town is selling inbound lead qualification to B2B startups\npubDate: 2025-12-08:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Steve Krouse\nthumbnail: \"https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/e73b1146-5e79-44c3-a2da-e2871dd1cf00/public\"\n---\n\n> tl;dr – If you are a technical founder doing b2b sales, please reach out to me\n> at steve@val.town. My focus this month is working closely with you to solve\n> your sales problems with code on Val Town.\n\nVal Town sells compute. Selling a commodity can be hard. Imagine if you wanted\nto sell cucumbers. Not many people want to buy cucumbers from a new vendor –\nthey already get their cucumbers from their grocery store. However, people might\nbe open to a new bespoke pickle vendor. So we're pickling some compute and\nselling that.\n\n

An American Pickle. Warner Bros. Pictures.

\n\nOur pickle flavor this month is **inbound lead qualification** and our target\ncustomer is **seed-stage b2b founders who code in typescript**.\n\nImagine you're a seed-stage founder who is trying to sell to other businesses.\nYou have some inbound traffic to your website, folks submitting forms, or\nsigning up for your product. You have a problem: the vast majority of these\ninbound folks are not in your target market. They're just random fly-bys from\nthe internet. How do you figure out who these people are and if you should\ncontact them?\n\nThis is **inbound lead qualification**.\n\nFor example, one of our users is a devtools startup. They're using a tool called\n[rb2b](https://www.rb2b.com/), which helps you de-anonymize website traffic into\nenriched leads, including visitors' LinkedIn profiles. However, 95% of their\nvisitors are not in their ideal customer profile. So\nwe [created a val template for them](https://www.val.town/x/templates/rb2b) that [receives webhooks from rb2b](https://www.val.town/x/templates/rb2b/code/main.ts#L7), [spins up an OpenAI agent with search capabilities](https://www.val.town/x/templates/rb2b/code/agent.ts#L6-12),\narmed\nwith [a prompt about their ideal customer profile](https://www.val.town/x/templates/rb2b/code/PROMPT.txt),\nto deep research that person for fit.\n\n

\n Generated by Nano Banana Pro. Pretty neat, huh?\n

\n\nFor another user, we built\n[a similar template for new-user sign-ups](https://www.val.town/x/templates/new-user-enrichment).\nFor yet another user we built a val that does the same idea, but for GitHub\nstars. (This last one isn't an official template yet. Email me if you'd like to\nuse it.)\n\nWhat's particularly neat about this focus is that it's recursive: we can build\nbetter go-to-market automations for our customers, which we can also use\nourselves to sell better. We're now using\n[this rb2b val](https://www.val.town/x/templates/rb2b) at Val Town.\n\nTo be clear, we are not pivoting to this niche forever. Our mission is to spread\nthe joy of programming, both in people's personal lives and at work. We spent\nthe first couple years of the Val Town spread thin across all of those myriad\nuse-cases. We're now choosing to focus on these extreme niche because these\ntarget users – technical startup founders – have the good taste to point us in\nthe right product directions, as well as the ability to pay well for useful\nsoftware.\n\nWithin this target demographic we've chosen the further focus of inbound lead\nqualification to make it easier for us to delight folks with well-built\ntemplates, patterns, and libraries. Our medium-term plan is to land-and-expand\ninto other areas that early technical founders want to automate, such as social\nlistening (alerts when your product is mentioned on socials), GitHub automation\n(proper tagging of issues, automatic change-log generation, etc), and more.\n\nAs an aside, this path has been partly walked before us.\n[Clay](https://www.clay.com/) is a successful no-code tool in the go-to-market,\nenrichment, and lead qualification space. You may be surprised to learn that\ntheir original product was incredibly similar to Val Town: hosted in-browser\nJavaScript functions. I was a passionate early customer of that product. When\nthey shifted their focus to go-to-market, they also changed their target user to\ngo-to-market folks, who historically have been less technical, and thus unable\nto write JavaScript. Thus Clay went from a code tool to a no-code tool. We think\nthere's a small but interesting gap in the market: technical founders doing\nfounding sales who want go-to-market tools, but feel more at home in TypeScript\nthan a no-code tool.\n\nI wrote this blog post for two audiences.\n\nFirstly, to our existing customers, users, and community members who use Val\nTown for a diversity of things: please do not feel like we are abandoning you to\nchase after startups. We intend for Val Town to remain general purpose computing\nplatform. We want to sell the world's best cucumbers. We're currently selling\npickles to build a sustainable business, which will hopefully allow us to invest\nmore into our core cucumber production.\n\nSecondly, to our prospective customers, if you are a technical founder doing b2b\nsales, please reach out. I'm steve@val.town. My focus this month is working\nclosely for you, doing things that don't scale, including white-glove customer\nsupport, writing code for you, to solve your sales problems.",[],[186,656],"03469cee-1c29-4d36-8f89-8c088e5dc6f5","2025-11-14-mcp.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-ae52130f22a1",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Introducing Val Town MCP\ndescription: Bring Val Town to your favorite LLM\npubDate: 2025-11-14:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Steve Krouse\nthumbnail: \"https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/be5936e7-7a4a-4222-0cb0-13571bdd5e00/public\"\n---\n\nOn Val Town, you deploy JavaScript in 100ms. Now with the Val Town MCP server,\nyou can do that from Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, VSCode, or wherever you do your AI\ncoding.\n\n![Val Town MCP](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/be5936e7-7a4a-4222-0cb0-13571bdd5e00/public)\n\nIf you've been following my tweets recently –\n[\"I've gotta rant about LLMs, MCP, and tool-calling for a second\"](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1986922520298287496),\n[\"MCP is mostly nonsense\"](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1988641250329989533?s=20),\n[\"MCP is overhyped\"](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1902708759870226785) – you\nmight be surprised by this announcement. Well, how did you think I got those\nsalty takes except by building an MCP server?\n\nYes, I think MCP is dubious as a protocol. But for now, MCP is the right way for\nVal Town to meet developers where they are. In Cursor or Claude Code or Zed or\nwherever. For example, here we use Claude Code to make a blog. Every edit is\nimmediately live and deployed on Val Town.\n\n

\n \n

\n\nWe have guides for some of the popular LLMs:\n\n- [Claude Code](https://docs.val.town/guides/prompting/claude-code/)\n- [ChatGPT](https://docs.val.town/guides/prompting/chatgpt/)\n- [Claude Web/Desktop](https://docs.val.town/guides/prompting/claude/)\n\nBut the Val Town MCP server should work with any MCP client. If you'd like a\nhand with setup, ask in our [discord server](https://discord.val.town/) or send\nus an [email](mailto:hi@val.town).\n\n## Why MCP\n\nMCP is not perfect (again, see tweets), but it has a few things going for it:\n\n1. **Cheaper** – Don't pay _us_ for credits. Pay your inference provider\n directly.\n2. **Better** – Use whatever state-of-the-art LLM you want. We at Val Town don't\n have to [fast-follow](https://blog.val.town/blog/fast-follow) it.\n3. **Val Town everywhere** – Get the best parts of Val Town – instant\n deployments, built-in SQLite, etc – in your favorite LLM coding tool.\n\nMCP also allows us to\n[ship faster](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1988641250329989533). Traditional\nAPIs require careful versioning to prevent breaking changes, but an MCP server\ncan change continuously because LLMs read the spec and run inference _at\nruntime_.\n\n## Fast feedback loops\n\nThere's a common thread running through every feature we build – AI or\notherwise: enabling fast feedback loops.\n\n> Creators need an immediate connection to what they're creating.\n>\n> If you make a change, you need to see the effect of that immediately.\n>\n> \\- Bret Victor, _Inventing on Principle_\n\nWhen you – or your LLM – make an edit on Val Town, your code is deployed in\n100ms. This allows you to have insanely fast feedback loops _in your production\nenvironment_. No need to wait a minute or two to see how it'll actually look\nwhen deployed. Every change is immediately live, at a public URL.\n\nVal Town isn't an AI company – we're a developer tools company – but this\nalways-deployed model works quite well with LLMs. Just give your favorite LLM a\nbranch, and the code it writes will be alive and sharable by default.\n\n[Bring Val Town MCP to _your_ favorite LLM](https://docs.val.town/guides/prompting/mcp/),\nand let us know what you think.",[],[186,663],"0116c5e3-e98c-4a39-9e7e-1dcd56596366","2025-11-04-oss-pledge.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-ab204f469341",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Year Two of the Open Source Pledge\ndescription: Continuing to fund open source software\npubDate: 2025-11-04:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Tom MacWright\n---\n\n[Last year](https://blog.val.town/blog/oss) we joined the\n[Open Source Pledge](https://opensourcepledge.com/) and started supporting the\npeople who write the NPM modules and vital utilities that Val Town is built\nupon.\n\n

\n\n

\n\n\nWe're sticking with it this year, and have donated another $8,131 these\ngreat folks, rounding out to $2,710 per developer.\n\n| $ | To |\n| ------ | ------------------------------------- |\n| $1,300 | [esm.sh](https://esm.sh/) |\n| $1,300 | [Fastify](https://fastify.dev/) |\n| $1,188 | [Zod](https://zod.dev/) |\n| $1,200 | [unified](https://unifiedjs.com/) |\n| $1,343 | [CodeMirror](https://codemirror.net/) |\n| $1,200 | [Drizzle](https://orm.drizzle.team/) |\n| $600 | [tRPC](https://trpc.io/) |\n\nWe also did a bit of open source on our own – both of [Wolf's](https://404wolf.com/) big\nprojects are open source:\n\n- [vt, the CLI for Val Town](https://blog.val.town/vt-cli)\n- [Our new Deno language server infrastructure](https://blog.val.town/vtlsp)\n\nIf you're also running a startup that's built on open source, you\nshould [join the pledge](https://opensourcepledge.com/join/) too -\nit is the best shot we have to sustain the open source ecosystem.",[],[186,670],"4f24f71e-47c2-43b5-b1ee-afeab58e6bb0","2025-10-02-in-val-out.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-a52f2880b9cb",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: In, Val, Out\ndescription: I/O with a val in the middle\npubDate: 2025-10-02:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Pete Millspaugh\n---\n\nOne of the most common patterns in Val Town is to take data input from some\nexternal source, do something useful with that data, and send output to another\nexternal source.\n\n![in-val-out.svg](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/51317006-2c2a-43f6-d319-c4c3b08a3b00/public)\n\nI/O but with a val in the middle: I/V/O. _In, val, out._\n\n## New user Slack alert\n\nThe canonical example is a user signup alert in Slack:\n\n1. Receive a webhook when a user signs up (e.g., from\n [Supabase](https://docs.val.town/integrations/supabase/))\n2. (Optionally) process or enrich user data in your val (e.g., with\n [Clay](https://blog.val.town/clay))\n3. Notify your team on\n [Slack](https://docs.val.town/integrations/slack/send-messages-to-slack/)\n\n![signup-val-slack.svg](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/d6e6b94d-6d81-4742-48b0-29415fd8c900/public)\n\nRemix [this val](https://www.val.town/x/stevekrouse/enrich-new-users) to your\nliking. Maybe you use in-house auth or another provider like Auth0. Maybe you\nwant to take the new user's email address and query for existing users from the\nsame employer. Maybe you'd prefer a Discord notification or an email.\n\nRegardless of the tools you use and the result you want, a val can flexibly\nhandle it. The in-val-out pattern goes beyond new user alerts, of course. Dozens\nof examples are listed on the\n[I/V/O docs](https://docs.val.town/guides/in-val-out), but the best examples\nwill be the vals you create and use. Consider this a Call For Vals.\n\n## In\n\nInput could be customer support [email](https://docs.val.town/std/email) you\nreceive, stars or new issues on your\n[GitHub](https://docs.val.town/integrations/github/receiving-a-github-webhook/)\nrepo, failed payments from [Stripe](https://docs.val.town/integrations/stripe/),\nuser signups from [Supabase](https://docs.val.town/integrations/supabase/),\ncalendar invites, Sentry errors, form submissions—you name it.\n\n## Val\n\nOnce you've piped input into a val, you could analyze or classify data with\n[OpenAI](https://docs.val.town/std/openai/) or Anthropic, enrich it with browser\nautomation via [Browserbase](https://docs.val.town/integrations/browserbase/) or\n[Kernel](https://docs.val.town/integrations/kernel/), verify phone numbers or\nemails with Twilio, process images and video, parse PDFs, or pipe data directly\nto an output channel.\n\n## Out\n\nAfter input and processing, you could notify yourself over email or\n[Slack](https://docs.val.town/integrations/slack/send-messages-to-slack/),\ncreate a Linear issue, open a GitHub PR, write to a Notion doc or\n[Airtable](https://docs.val.town/integrations/airtable/), update a\n[Google Sheet](https://docs.val.town/integrations/google-sheets/), persist data\nin [SQLite](https://docs.val.town/std/sqlite/) or\n[Supabase](https://docs.val.town/integrations/databases/supabase/), or whatever\nelse would be useful to you and your team.\n\n--\n\nReach out to the Val Town team on [Discord](https://discord.gg/dHv45uN5RY) or\nover [email](mailto:hi@val.town) if you'd like a hand setting up I/V/O, or feel\nfree to open a [docs](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-docs) PR linking to\nyour val.",[],[186,677],"c76f48f4-581c-407d-9830-015f3996dd03","2025-09-11-gardening-dependencies.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-a3ebc278419e",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: How to keep package.json under control\ndescription: How I wrangle the many tools that we use to build Val Town\npubDate: 2025-09-11:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Tom MacWright\nthumbnail: \"https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/062dfce1-0be9-498a-6ce3-99a2f9892900/public\"\n---\n\nVal Town is a React application with a ton of dependencies. It's complicated,\nand we have to deal with dependency upgrades all the time. We are committing the\ncardinal sin of overcomplicating the web: our `node_modules` directory is 863MB\nas of this writing. Whew!\n\n![A boat with boxes that symbolize our dependencies](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/062dfce1-0be9-498a-6ce3-99a2f9892900/public)\n\nIs it, though? Are we installing dependencies freely, taking on technical debt\nleft and right? I'd say _not really_.\n\nThe thing is, there's some\n[essential complexity](https://macwright.com/2023/12/31/luxury-of-simplicity) in\nwhat we're trying to build. We aren't going to DIY our own TypeScript transpiler\nor avoid installing [CodeMirror](https://codemirror.net/) and use a textarea for\nour code editing. I spend a little time every week looking through\n`package.json` and thinking _which of these can I remove?_ Sometimes I find a\ndependency that can be yanked, but a lot of times I come up empty-handed: we\nactually need all this junk. My ability to judge other people fades as I learn\nthe hard way how principles make contact with reality.\n\nBut that's not to say that there's no art in dependency grooming. There are a\nbunch of techniques and tools that all fit together into a general sort of\ndependency hygiene that I've developed. I'm not sure I've written it down\nanywhere in full. Here's a shot.\n\n## Read all new dependencies (except React)\n\nRule #1 is to read. This is very literal: read the source code of any dependency\nthat you're about to introduce into your project. And, of course, the README. I\nhighly recommend doing this the old fashioned way, with your eyes and brain, but\nLLMs can be helpful too if that's more your speed: but don't offload the whole\ntask to a robot. Actual _understanding_ is the goal, and you can't achieve that\nsecondhand.\n\nFairly often you'll do this and discover that the new dependency you're adding\nis just 50 lines long, and is better off\n[vendored](https://macwright.com/2021/03/11/vendor-by-default) rather than\ninstalled with NPM: just copy that code over and preserve its open source\nlicense in a code comment.\n\nOr you'll realize that the module is 2MB gzipped and introduces 3 new transitive\ndependencies, but you're only actually using 50 lines of it. Again, this is not\na good scenario: you're introducing a lot of surface area that's pure downside.\nIt'll take up more room in `node_modules`, or it could have security\nvulnerabilities in the parts that you aren't using and you'll have to triage\nthem just the same.\n\nI make an exception for React and other mega-dependencies: I've seen the inside\nof React's algorithms and TypeScript compiler code, and decided that I just need\nto trust the whizzes at those companies.\n\nIf you don't read, you won't succeed.\n\n## `npm ls` and reading `package-lock.json` is your friend\n\nOr, if you're using `pnpm`, `pnpm-lock.yaml` and `pnpm why`. And a similar\ncommand for whatever other package manager you're using. The reason is pretty\nsimple: your direct dependencies are inevitably the tip of the iceberg. What\nreally fills up `node_modules` is all of the stuff they bring along, and that\nstuff - transitive dependencies - is extremely important.\n\nFor example, let's say your project needs to transpile TypeScript. It's fairly\nlikely that you already have a transpiler installed: in our project, we have\ncopies of esbuild that are dragged in by [drizzle-kit](https://drizzle.team/),\nby [Vite](https://vite.dev/), and by [tsx](https://www.npmjs.com/package/tsx).\nSo using `esbuild` as a _direct dependency_ costs us nothing: it gets deduped to\nthe same `esbuild` binary that everything was using under the hood before. This\nis a useful little game: when you're installing something for your application,\nif you can find a way to reuse something that's already installed transitively,\nyou can get a dependency for free!\n\nAnd _read_ package-lock.json or pnpm-lock.yaml. It's not that bad, and you'll\nlearn something. There's a lot in there. It'll familiarize yourself with what\nmodules others rely on, which builds a little PageRank algorithm in your head so\nthat you can recall, off the bat, what you might want to use for something new.\nFeed your curiosity and open those `npmjs.com` webpages.\n\n## Analyzing the actual size of packages is pretty nifty\n\nThere are two distinct impacts of big NPM modules: their contribution to your\ndistributed application, and how much room they take up in `node_modules` while\nyou're developing the application. It's good to focus on application size first,\nbut both matter: an application that relies on 2 gigabytes of code in\n`node_modules` is going to be pretty slow to test in CI, and slower to deploy\nbecause it just requires more downloading.\n\n![Grand Perspective visualizing dependencies in node_modules](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/5e1ec4cb-ff5c-4af1-cda2-ddaa10f72500/public)\n\nI use [Grand Perspective](http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net), a vintage\napplication that's been around for 20 years, to keep track of `node_modules` on\ndisk, but there are a lot of other\n[disk space analyzers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Disk_space_analyzers)\nworth considering if you're using Linux or Windows.\n\nAnalyzing the size of your distributed application is a much more complicated\nand system-specific. We're using React Router with [Vite](https://vite.dev/), so\n[rollup-plugin-visualizer](https://github.com/btd/rollup-plugin-visualizer) is\nthe solution, but it's different for every bundler and some frameworks have\ntheir own solution, like\n[Next.js's bundle analyzer](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@next/bundle-analyzer).\n\n## What makes a good NPM module\n\nBut what are you really looking for? The definition of a good module keeps\nshifting, but pretty often it'll look something like: a decent history of\nmaintainership, built-in TypeScript types, passing tests, good documentation.\n\nA slang shorthand for this would be that _it should have a vibe of competence_.\nEven if you're building something by the seat of your pants and making lots of\nmistakes, you want the parts that you're using to be solid. An application's\nbugs are the sum total of the bugs you write and the bugs you inherit from\nothers, so it's actually kind of fair to have higher standards for code that you\ninstall than code that you write.\n\nWhat makes a bad module? Of course something that's abandoned and poorly written\nis bad, but even worse than that is a module that solves the wrong problem -\nsomething that doesn't actually fit the problem you have and instead you have to\nshift the problem to make it work. You can fix this by reading and spending a\nlittle time understanding both your problem and the solution. Or by asking the\nLLM, you little baby.\n\n## Get rid of what you don't use and keep the rest up to date\n\n![Renovate and Knip](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/80b2a3d8-80cd-4d09-5298-dbb26a958d00/public)\n\nYou should be using [Renovate](https://www.mend.io/renovate/). It'll nag you to\nkeep your modules up to date, and it's better to do that kind of work\nincrementally rather than in one yearly push.\n\nAnd you should be using [Knip](https://knip.dev/). It's just straight-up magic:\nit's so fast, extremely accurate. It'll tell you which modules you have\nspecified in `package.json` but that you aren't actually using. It's super easy\nto lose track and have a lot of junk lying around from old versions of a\nproject. Get rid of it with Knip! It'll even show you which files your project\nno longer uses. If there was a Knip t-shirt I'd be wearing it right now, that's\nhow good it is.\n\n## Have a quick cheatsheet of people who write good modules\n\nThe NPM module ecosystem is made up of people. It's useful to know who those\npeople are! For example, when I'm looking for something related to Promises (or\nmany other topics), I'll check if\n[Sindre Sorhus](https://github.com/sindresorhus?tab=repositories&type=source)\nhas already published something. Very often he has!\n\nOther folks who have lots of solid work are good to know, like\n[isaacs](https://github.com/isaacs?tab=repositories&type=source),\n[Matteo Collina](https://github.com/mcollina?tab=repositories&type=source),\n[Mafintosh](https://github.com/mafintosh?tab=repositories&type=source).\n\nIf you're doing something with Markdown, you should know all the\n[wooorm](https://github.com/wooorm) and [unified](https://github.com/unifiedjs)\nrepos. Nextgen Node.js stuff? Check [unjs](https://github.com/unjs). Transpiler\ninternals, you should always check\n[Rich Harris](https://github.com/Rich-Harris?tab=repositories&type=source)'s\nprojects, which include so many gems.\n\n_Tune in for a follow-up post that just includes some starting points for\ndependencies that you can even put in an AGENTS.md file if you want to._\n\n## Dependencies are an inevitability\n\nThat's the truth: we're all building on the shoulders of each other. But there's\nan art to finding the right shoulders to build on.\n\nIn a way, it's frustrating that the web platform, and the NPM module ecosystem,\nmoves so fast and requires so many nitpicky updates and decisions. But that's\npretty much the norm: even next-generation languages that have learned the\nlessons of NPM and Node suffer from bloated package ecosystems. Gardening\ndependencies is part of the job and we should do it well.",[],[186,684],"d4ee07cc-1a14-4aa2-92b5-3f74b96aa5aa","2025-09-10-vt-cli.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-9f810402bd94",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: \"Introducing vt, the Val Town CLI\"\ndescription: Write your scripts on the internet, from your terminal, or in any editor\npubDate: 2025-09-10T00:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Wolf Mermelstein\n---\n\nIntroducing **vt**, the CLI for Val Town that lets you use your favorite editors\nand local tools. Now you can use VS Code, Claude Code, Codex and more with our\nsuper-fast feedback loop, deploying software instantly as you develop it.\n\n\n\nTo get vt,\n[install Deno](https://docs.deno.com/runtime/getting_started/installation/),\nthen run\n\n```sh\ndeno install -grAf jsr:@valtown/vt\n```\n\nWith vt, you can:\n\n- Use `vt watch` to watch a folder for changes, pushing updates and redeploying\n instantly as you save\n- Remix or create brand-new Val Town projects directly from your command line\n- Livestream logs from your Val directly to your terminal\n- Manage branches, switching between separate deployments or prod & dev branches\n of a project\n\nWe designed vt to work much like `git`, so `vt branch` and `vt checkout -b` work\njust like you'd expect. But the real magic is in the `vt watch` command: vt can\nresolve deltas between Val Town and a local folder of TypeScript and text files,\nautomatically detecting file changes like renames and modifications. As you edit\nin VS Code, neovim, or your favorite editor, every time you save the changes go\nlive. Or, if you don't want to live on the edge, you can use `vt push` to\nexplicitly push new changes.\n\n## Bring your own editor - and LLMs!\n\n

\n \n

\n\nvt works perfectly with your favorite LLM tools: it can even initialize a\n[AGENTS.md](https://agents.md/) file that contains all of the context necessary\nto write code for the Val Town platform.\n\nPeople are already using vt to build cool projects, like\n[Geoffrey Litt's Stevens](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43681287)\nproject, a really cool AI personal assistant telegram bot, built locally with\ncursor and vt. We built Val Town's new [Val search](https://codesearch.val.run/)\non Val Town itself, with Claude Code and vt.\n\n## Use the companion browser extension\n\n

\n \n

\n\nvt also has a companion browser extension which pairs with `vt watch` to\nautomatically reload the tab as you edit your Val.\n\nIt's available for\n[Chrome](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/vt-companion/jjpaicfaaobmjlcppnooejnjnbefalfo)\nor [Firefox](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vt-companion/).\n\nIf you have `vt watch` running, it should \"just work\"! The companion\ncommunicates with vt's watcher over a local WebSocket connection.\n\n## We want feedback!\n\nvt is a big leap forward in the local development experience for Val Town. But\nwe're always looking to improve and polish the experience. If you have any\nfeedback we'd love to hear it. You can join our Discord server\n[here](https://discord.gg/dPeaMwfarG), and contribute ideas, PRs, or issues to\nthe [val-town/vt GitHub repo](https://github.com/val-town/vt).\n\n All editors supported

",[],[186,691],"9064448e-61d2-4410-8d15-d9a0f609f67d","2025-09-09-vtlsp.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-99de17d49ac1",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Building a better online editor for TypeScript\ndescription: Running the Deno LSP to make our TypeScript language tools dramatically better\npubDate: 2025-09-09:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Wolf Mermelstein\n---\n\n

\n \n

\n\nVal Town makes it easy to ship TypeScript automations and applications to the\ninternet via an integrated web editor experience. We strive to offer a magical\ntight feedback loop, with 100ms deploys on save.\n\nThat online editor experience should be great: we should support high-quality\nhighlighting, autocompletion, information for when you hover over bits of code.\nBut unfortunately it hasn't been so: our previous editor has been buggy and slow\nto give useful TypeScript feedback.\n\nBut now, we've rewritten our editor's TypeScript integration from scratch. It's\navailable to all Val Town users, is fast and accurate, and\n[the code is open source](https://github.com/val-town/vtlsp).\n\n## Our old system: running TypeScript in a Web Worker\n\nOur previous language integration was entirely client-side. We ran a TypeScript\n[Language Service Host](https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript-wiki/blob/main/Using-the-Language-Service-API.md)\nin a Web Worker, to isolate it from the top frame's thread, and communicated\nbetween the Web Worker and top frame using\n[Comlink](https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/comlink).\n\nThe system looked like this:\n\n![codemirror-ts system diagram](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/476d273a-ca88-4e66-f31d-58317844fa00/public)\n\nAnd we bundled it into\n[codemirror-ts](https://github.com/val-town/codemirror-ts/), a\n[CodeMirror](https://codemirror.net/) extension, and\n[Deno-ATA](https://github.com/val-town/deno-ata), an incomplete implementation\nof Deno's import resolution logic grafted onto TypeScript's capabilities.\n\nThis solution worked great in the simplest cases, but stumbled when importing\ncertain NPM packages, and required more and more workarounds. The main two\nissues we were facing were these:\n\n1. **TypeScript isn't written for Deno.** At Val Town, we run Deno, a modern\n JavaScript runtime that differs from standard TypeScript. Deno supports URL\n imports, provides server-side APIs through the Deno global (like environment\n variables), and introduces its own quirks. Sometimes we’ve been able to work\n around these differences. For example, we could use Deno type definitions.\n But in other cases, like handling URL imports, it requires us to interpret\n files differently. Deno is distinct enough that it ships its own language\n server, built in Rust and wrapping tsserver.\n2. **NPM modules can be gigantic and installing dependencies is no joke.** Huge\n import trees for NPM modules are nothing new, but at least when you're\n installing NPM modules locally, you have the brilliant minds of the package\n manager implementers to do module resolution: to install the minimal number\n of packages by comparing semver ranges. We didn't have that luxury, and often\n referencing an NPM module would trigger an avalanche of HTTP requests and\n bytes downloaded, which would overload the Web Worker and make the editor's\n language tools unresponsive.\n\n## Bringing DenoLS to Val Town\n\nSo, we redesigned our editor's TypeScript handling. Instead of running TSserver\nin a Web Worker, we now run the official Deno Language Server remotely in cloud\ncontainers.\n\nWe no longer suffer writing our own workarounds to the mismatch between\nTypeScript and Deno, because the Deno project's\n[Rust code that wraps around a TypeScript instance](https://github.com/denoland/deno/tree/main/cli/lsp)\nsolves all those problems. Your browser doesn't struggle to download huge NPM\ndependency trees because a beefy server does that for you, from a faster\nconnection.\n\nNow, when you visit our editor, we launch a containerized server that exposes a\nWebSocket and speaks the LSP protocol. The architecture was partially inspired\n[Mahmud Ridwan's great writeup of connecting CodeMirror & an\nLSP](https://hjr265.me/blog/codemirror-lsp/#language-server-over-websocket),\nwith the main difference being that we directly map stdio to the WebSocket\nrather than serializing messages, because\n[vscode-jsonrpc can do that for us!](https://www.npmjs.com/package/vscode-jsonrpc).\n\n## Our open source implementation\n\nTo tweak the language server for our unique purpose, while keeping the\nCodemirror extensions LSP-generic, we also took inspiration from the official\n[VS Code LSP client library](https://www.npmjs.com/package/vscode-languageclient),\nwhich we couldn't use directly because of its reliance on VS Code globals. Their\nclient provides a way to use\n[middleware and URI transforms](https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-languageserver-node/blob/3412a17149850f445bf35b4ad71148cfe5f8411e/client/src/common/client.ts#L347)\nso that you can easily tweak the language server at the client level when\nwriting VS Code plugins. Transforming URIs makes it easy to spawn the language\nserver from a temp directory but map file paths as if they were relative to the\nroot, and middleware modify the language server for our unique use case, like\nautomatically downloading dependencies when the server sends the client a red\nsquiggle saying a package isn't installed. We built a similar style system as a\n[Language Server proxy server library](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@valtown/ls-ws-server).\nIt acts as a language server of its own, but can arbitrarily modify messages\npassing through it.\n\nTo actually host the LSP as a WebSocket server, there are various subtleties\nthat were important for our use case. We want to keep connections persisted even\nwhen the editor leaves, and allow multiple clients to connect to the same\nlanguage server instance (to support multi tab, or even multi-browser/device\nediting). [Our implementation](https://github.com/val-town/vtlsp) uses a stream\nWebSocket wrapper and pipes stdio directly, and manages multicasting connections\nso many clients can talk to the same process at once.\n\n### Bringing it to the Browser\n\n

\n\nOnce we had a language server _server_ in place, we needed a client. This will\nbe querying for hover information on symbol hovers, displaying red squiggles,\nand all of the rest of the language-specific tooling. The\n[LSP specification](https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/specifications/lsp/3.17/specification/)\nis quite sprawling – there are many fun features to support, like code actions\n(buttons such as \"infer return type\") and method suggestions (that pop up as you\ncall functions). Meanwhile we need the client to keep documents synced with the\nlanguage server, and send document update events.\n\nThere are\n[some existing](https://discuss.codemirror.net/t/codemirror-lsp-client/9309)\nCodeMirror language server\n[client implementations](https://discuss.codemirror.net/t/state-of-lsps-in-codemirror-reference/8601),\nwhich we pulled from when building\n[our own](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@valtown/codemirror-ls). We wrote our\nown so that we could support more arbitrary transports, in our case WebSockets\nwith message chunking, external renderers for language server UIs (like to be\nable to use libraries like react, highlight.js, or remark), and take external\ncallback inputs (so that you can implement things like going to definition on an\nexternal document).\n\n## Shipping on Cloudflare Containers\n\nFor deploying our language servers, it was important that we kept user workloads\nisolated because code is private. Even though we are running language server\nprocesses in temporary directories, you can still infer types of libraries in\nother directories by importing upwards \"../../\", and possibly even hop to their\ndefinition.\n\nWe also wanted servers to live for as long as the user's session. Someone might\nbe editing code for two hours, so a solution like traditional AWS Lambda would\nbe a tough fit. Finally, we wanted to restrict users to using a limited amount\nof language server resources at a time.\n\nInitially, [fly](https://fly.io) seemed like a great option. We could spin up\ncontainers on the fly (🥁) and shut them down when not needed. The issues we saw\nwith fly were that we'd need to manually manage the lifecycles of our\ncontainers, routing individual users to unique containers, and make sure\ncontainers shut down after some amount of time not sending heartbeats from the\nclient.\n\nWhen Cloudflare announced\n[Cloudflare containers](https://developers.cloudflare.com/containers/), they\nimmediately seemed like a perfect choice. Cloudflare containers fit within their\nworker/durable object ecosystem and are tenants of durable objects. This means\nthat they are routable by an arbitrary ID, and that the durable object layer (a\npersistent, serverless, JavaScript class instance) can internally manage\ncontainer lifecycles. In our case, we're routing users to a durable object with\nthe ID that is their literal user ID, and then using their\n[container library](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@cloudflare/containers) to\nshut containers down after inactivity.\n\nThis means that we didn't actually need to implement any stateful routing layer\nourselves. When you want to connect to a Val Town language server, you simply\nhit our Cloudflare worker with a signed cookie containing your user ID, which\nroutes you directly to a already-running, or brand-new durable object/container\nthat boots your LSP. In the future, it will also be easy to hook into\nCloudflare's built in worker sqlite db to internally manage utilization too.\n\nAll together, the architecture ends up looking like this:\n\n![VTLSP after](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/057b670d-412d-467e-a7bf-7d9743fdd400/public)\n\nA server replaced the WebWorker, and instead of communicating by postMessage\n(via Comlink, to a WebWorker), we now use a WebSocket. But the biggest win here\nis using the Deno Language Server and an isolated server for running language\ntooling: this lets us piggy-back on the stock implementation of module\nresolution and keep those huge NPM dependency trees out of the browser's\nresponsibilities.\n\n## Try it out\n\nThe easiest way to see this all in action is to\n[sign up for Val Town](https://www.val.town/auth/signup) and write some code!\nWhile we'll continue striving for perfection, it's nice to know that we've\ngotten a lot closer to it this summer.\n\nOut is the editor that was slow, buggy, and required a lot of custom\nworkarounds. Now every user has the full, luxurious Deno language server\nexperience.\n\nNow that our editor is in production, it will only continue to improve. We have\nplans to add more Val Town specific language server functionality, like\nsuggesting Val Town standard library function imports, giving useful diagnostics\nabout aspects of Deno that behave differently on our platform, and adding more\nlanguage server features.\n\nWe've also open-sourced everything you need to ship your own cloud container\nWebSocket language server as [vtlsp](https://github.com/val-town/vtlsp). This\nrepo includes the client, server, and proxy, which you can see in the demo\nbelow.\n\n Open Source Demo

",[],[186,698],"0beb60ad-a8de-4180-8004-53d17b626c8a","2025-08-12-teams.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-979142e03f93",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Val Town for Teams\ndescription: Bring Val Town to work\npubDate: 2025-08-13T00:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Steve Krouse\n---\n\nVal Town is the fastest & easiest way to deploy TypeScript.\n\nToday, we're launching Val Town for Teams, so you can bring your favorite\ndeveloper tool to work.\n\n\nSchedule a demo\n\n\n## Know-code automation\n\nVal Town is perfect for automations too complex for no-code, but too orthogonal\nfor your monorepo. Why string together dozens of node-and-wires when you can\nwrite 20 lines of JavaScript?\n\n![Screenshot 2025-08-01 at 13.44.44@2x.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/0d2b3f34-33bf-4693-6bbd-edc229f56300/public)\n\nStartups like PostHog, Kilo Code, Stainless, and Scalar are using Val Town to\nautomate workflows between GitHub, Clerk, Slack, Clay, and more.\n\nA classic example is user enrichments in Slack:\n\n1. A user signs up\n2. Your auth system sends a webhook to your val\n3. Your val enriches the user via Clay\n4. Your val asks an LLM if the user is in your ICP\n5. Your val notifies your team in the appropriate Slack channel\n\n```ts\nexport async function enrichmentWebhook(req: Request): Promise {\n const user = req.json();\n const enriched = await clay(user.email);\n const isICPUser = await icp(\"b2b saas with funding?\", enriched);\n if (isICPUser) await slack(\"🎉 New user signup!\", enriched);\n}\n```\n\nWant this for your company? Remix\n[`enrich-new-users`](https://www.val.town/x/stevekrouse/enrich-new-users).\n\nWe have [hundreds of templates](https://www.val.town/explore/use-cases) and over\n80,000 public vals from our community to explore and learn from –\n[here are some favorites](https://www.val.town/explore/community-showcase).\n\n## Val Town Orgs\n\nToday, we're introducing Val Town Orgs, so your common resources can live in\nyour shared shared org account, including:\n\n- Vals\n- Files\n- Logs\n- Environment Variables\n- Branches\n- Pull Requests\n- Custom Domains\n- Crons\n- Blob storage\n- Sqlite Storage\n- API Tokens\n\nOnce you have an Org account, you can:\n\n1. Invite your teammates\n2. Create or transfer vals in the org\n3. Collaborate: create branches, edit & deploy code, send pull requests\n\n## Private beta\n\nVal Town Teams is in private beta while we onboard customers by hand to ensure\nthey have a great experience.\n\n\nSchedule a demo\n",[],[186,705],"f9984520-dafc-40d8-a7a2-8ebca75b44c0","2025-08-12-clay.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-927ef3a369ef",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: How we built an API for Clay\ndescription: Enriching users to find ideal customers\npubDate: 2025-08-12T00:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Charmaine Lee\n---\n\nThis post is for our fellow engineers & founders doing GTM / sales.\n\nI used to think doing enrichment was for big companies with massive outbound\nsales functions.\n\nBefore launching Val Town for Teams (coming this week!), we set a goal: find 10\npre‑sales customers. All of a sudden, I was spending all my time looking for\nteams who could be the right fit.\n\nOur best channel was obviously new users signing up for Val Town. However,\nscrolling through emails and hoping we recognize someone quickly became\nunsustainable. (And really it only works for\n[celebrities](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1950673130877313280) anyways.)\n\n## Clearbit vs Clay vs Val Town\n\nClearbit used to be the obvious answer, but post‑HubSpot acquisition, it's no\nlonger an option for small new customers.\n\nClay is great, but we wanted to use it like an API so anyone on our team could\nuse it programatically, without Clay knowledge or set-up.\n\nWe asked on X, the CEO explained how we could do it.\n\n

You can pass in data via a webhook and pass it to any system after that
— Kareem Amin (@kareemamin) May 1, 2025

\n\n## Introducing: Clay API Proxy\n\nWe turned Clay into an API / SDK on Val Town via our\n[Clay API Proxy](https://www.val.town/x/charmaine/clay-proxy/code/README.md).\n\nThe hard part was that Clay enrichments are triggered by one webhook, but you\nget the results from another webhook. We wanted the developer experience to be a\nsingle request that gets back the enriched data as the response.\n\nHere's how we built it:\n\n1. Your val imports and calls our `clay()` \"sdk\" function with an email or\n GitHub username\n2. Our proxy authenticates you as a Val Town user\n3. We generate a request id, and forward the payload to Clay with that id\n4. Clay enriches, and POSTs the result back using the id. We save the result to\n SQLite.\n5. While your original request is still open, we poll sqlite for it.\n6. When it returns, we give you the JSON back in the normal request/response\n pattern.\n\nEnriching emails with Clay is now as simple as:\n\n```ts\nimport { clay } from \"https://esm.town/v/charmaine/clay-proxy/sdk.ts\";\n\nconst result = await clay({\n email: \"steve@val.town\",\n source: \"user_signup\",\n});\n\nconsole.log(result);\n```\n\nWhich returns:\n\n```json\n{\n \"email\": \"steve@val.town\",\n \"person\": \"Steve Krouse\",\n \"linkedin\": \"https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevekrouse\",\n \"company\": \"Val Town\",\n \"funding\": \"Seed round\",\n \"totalFunding\": \"$7 million\",\n \"employeeCount\": \"6\"\n}\n```\n\n## How this helps\n\nUser enrichment is a big part of how we successfully found our first 10\npre-sales customers.\n\nOur users are no longer a long list of anonymous emails. We are able to more\nefficiently spend our time interacting with our\n[ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-identify-your-ideal-customer)\nas soon as they sign up, instead of combing through endless dashboards in search\nof a unicorn.\n\n- We see new users joining in real-time, with their enriched profiles\n- Anyone can start a thread, tag the right person, or notify everyone else that\n they've already reached out. For example:\n ![image.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/393a9a4f-45fd-4a79-a7b8-62784ae88700/public)\n- Warm intros were easy to track\n- The team then starts building intuition about: how many new users joined, are\n we attracting ICP, who owns follow‑ups etc.\n\n## Then what?\n\nOnce you have this data on Val Town, there's lots you can do.\n\nHere are some templates:\n\n- [Send new user enrichments to Slack](https://www.val.town/x/stevekrouse/enrich-new-users)\n- [Enrich yours' or your competitors' GitHub repo stargazers](https://www.val.town/x/charmaine/GitHub-Stargazers-Alert)\n- For fellow devtool companies, we reach out with an auto‑generated Val that\n runs their SDK so the first touch includes a working demo. This got some great\n responses!\n ![Screenshot 2025-08-07 at 4.36.15 PM.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/0d323fdf-9f86-4549-cb9e-ff7e4f115b00/public)\n- Get Townie to build custom outbound demos etc. based on their profile.\n (Patrick Spychalski\n [has a great example post with a similar workflow](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7325887578379870210/).)\n\nWe've been loving these experiments, and would love to help more engineers scale\nthe traditional GTM function.\n\n## Pricing\n\nClay credits aren't free, so we can't let just anyone use our proxy. We've\n[allowlisted a couple of friends](https://www.val.town/x/charmaine/clay-proxy/branch/main/version/133/code/main.tsx#L25-26)\nwho we know are good for it, and can bill them later. If you wanted to get\nstarted, shoot me an email at charmaine@val.town and I'll personally help you\nget set up.\n\nWe also have\n[a self-hosted alternative](https://www.val.town/x/charmaine/clay-api-proxy), if\nyou'd like to create an API for your own Clay account.",[],[186,712],"22554352-3f49-4da6-8ab4-052b3cfcfc1f","2025-07-30-vibe-code.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-8df776570d8f",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Vibe code is legacy code\ndescription: Code that nobody understands is tech debt\npubDate: 2025-07-30T00:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Steve Krouse\n---\n\nDespite [widespread](https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/) [confusion](https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/1/not-vibe-coding/), Andrej Karpathy [coined \"vibe coding\"](https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383?lang=en) as a kind of AI-assisted coding where you **\"forget that the code even exists.\"**\n\n## Legacy code\n\nWe already have a phrase for code that nobody understands: **legacy code**.\n\nLegacy code is universally despised, and for good reason. But why? You have the code, right? Can't you figure it out from there?\n\nWrong. Code that nobody understands is tech debt. It takes a lot of time to understand unfamiliar code enough to debug it, let alone introduce new features without also introducing bugs.\n\nProgramming is fundamentally [_theory building_](https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf), not producing lines of code. We know this. This is why we make fun of business people who try to measure developer productivity in lines of code.\n\nWhen you vibe code, you are incurring tech debt as fast as the LLM can spit it out. Which is why vibe coding is _perfect_ for prototypes and throwaway projects: It's only legacy code if you have to maintain it!\n\n## Prototypes & throwaway code\n\nI've happily vibe coded apps to:\n\n- [Calculate weekly growth rates](https://growth.val.run/)\n- [Rate NYT Connections](https://www.val.town/x/stevekrouse/rate-connections)\n- [Propose to my fiance](https://stevekrouse.com/proposal)\n\nI don't need to continue developing those apps, so it hasn't been a problem that I don't understand their code. These apps are also very small, which means that I haven't incurred that much debt if I need to jump in and read the code at some point. I was able to vibe code these apps way faster than I could've built them, and it was a blast.\n\n## Vibe coding is a spectrum\n\nVibe coding is on a spectrum of how much you understand the code. The more you understand, the less you are vibing.\n\n![shapes at 25-07-30 10.32.53.png](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/a93f8e81-c9b8-4277-6d19-525d2b8d5400/public)\n\nSimply by being an engineer and asking for a web app with a persistent database, you are already vibing less than than a non-programmer who asks for an \"app\" without understanding the distinction between a web app and a native app, or how persistent data storage works.\n\n## Giving a credit card to a child\n\nThe worst possible situation is to have a non-programmer vibe code a large project that they intend to maintain. This would be the equivalent of giving a credit card to a child without first explaining the concept of debt.\n\nAs you can imagine, the first phase is ecstatic. _I can wave this little piece of plastic in stores and take whatever I want!_\n\nWhich is a lot like _AI can build anything now! Nobody needs to learn how to code! Look at what it just made for me!_\n\nBut if you wait a month, you'll get the credit card bill. _Did I actually need to buy all those things? How will I get myself out of this hole?_\n\nIt's similar for the vibe coder. _My code is broken. What do all these files and folders even do? How will I ever get this fixed? Can I get a refund for the $400 I spent vibe coding?_\n\nIf you don't understand the code, your only recourse is to ask AI to fix it for you, which is like paying off credit card debt with another credit card.\n\n## Serious coding with AI in 2025\n\nIf you're building something serious that you intend to maintain in 2025, Andrej has the right of it:\n\n> [Keep] a very tight leash on this new over-eager junior intern savant with encyclopedic knowledge of software, but who also bullshits you all the time, has an over-abundance of courage and shows little to no taste for good code. And emphasis on being slow, defensive, careful, paranoid, and on always taking the inline learning opportunity, not delegating.\n>\n> — Andrej Karpathy, [twitter](https://x.com/karpathy/status/1915581920022585597)\n\n## How we approach building for AI\n\nAt Val Town, we've built AI into our product in dozens of ways. [Townie](https://townie.val.run/) is our AI assistant that agentically reads & writes code, runs it, views the logs, and keeps iterating until it's done.\n\n[Townie](https://townie.val.run/) is an awesome tool for vibe coding. I heartily recommend it to folks who understand these tradeoffs. I use it to vibe code sometimes. Other times I keep it on a tight leash as it makes surgical edits to a project I care about. Both are fun and useful.\n\nCoding with AI is changing so quickly that it's hard to know what tomorrow will bring, but I'm confident that theory building will remain central to the activity of building complex software. Our technical expertise will still be relevant! And I'm optimistic that AI will continue to make programming better in surprising ways.\n\nBut if you know any non-programmers spending thousands of dollars vibe coding their billion dollar app idea today, please send them this post. Vibe coding is not going to get them where they want to go. They're going to have to learn to use their human eyes to read the code 😱, and learn that sometimes it's easier to start over with building a well-written code base from scratch than to fix a legacy one that nobody understands.\n\n---\n\n_This essay is a distillation of a talk I gave last month, [The Role of the Human Brain in Programming](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WC8dxMC4Xw). Thanks to my fiance Emily for listening to me rant about these topics for months, and for filming my talk. Thanks Malte and Rippling for hosting the talk._\n\n_Thanks Geoffrey Litt, Jimmy Koppel, Max McDonnell, Tom MacWright, Charmaine Lee, Brent Jackson, and Dan Shipper for feedback on this post. Thanks Simon Willison and Andrej Karpathy for being voices of reason amidst all the AI hype and naysayers._",[],[186,719],"adafbf28-c1b6-4537-85fe-56252adea11e","2025-06-11-townie-credits.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-88915b3596b2",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Introducing Townie Credits\ndescription: Townie is now pay-per-use\npubDate: 2025-06-11T00:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Steve Krouse\n---\n\nToday, we are introducing a new credits payment system for\n[Townie](https://townie.val.run/), our AI coding assistant. Townie is now\npay-per-use. Here's the upside:\n\n1. You can use Townie as much as you want – no limits\n2. Townie is now priced independently from\n [Val Town Pro](http://val.town/pricing), which makes it cheaper for casual\n Townie users\n3. Townie becomes sustainable\n4. We at Val Town get a clearer signal about how much to invest in making Townie\n better\n\n## How credits work\n\nWe charge a 50% markup on top of raw LLM costs. If you use $10 in Townie\ncredits, Anthropic will get $6.66 and we'll get $3.33. We think this is fair,\nsustainable, and transparent. We don't want to be in the business of having\nmurky limits, obfuscated credits, or unsustainable margins.\n\nWhen you pay for Townie, you're telling us in the clearest way possible to\ncontinue to invest in Townie. If you don't think Townie is worth the cost, there\nare\n[many wonderful AI coding alternatives that you can use with the new\nVal Town CLI](https://docs.val.town/quickstarts/prompting/#local-development).\nWe want you to choose Townie on its merits, not because it's subsidized.\n\n## Start coding with Townie\n\nWe think Townie is one of the best coding assistants out there. It uses agentic\ntool-calling, powered by Claude 4 Sonnet, to read and write your code. It can\neven make test HTTP calls and inspect logs & traces to see how things are\nworking, and keep iterating from there. Paired with Val Town's instant (100ms)\nfull-stack deploys, Townie is one of the fastest ways to create a deployed app.\n\n

\n \n

\n\nWe hope you give it a shot, and are very eager to hear what you think.\n\nStart coding with Townie here: [val.town/townie](https://townie.val.run/)\n\nps - Townie is\n[100% open-source & is hosted on Val Town](https://www.val.town/x/valdottown/Townie)",[],[186,726],"33e5e22e-44e5-43c7-a749-23099a2c5e89","2025-06-03-newsletter-25.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-862297ca8557",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Newsletter 25\ndescription: Mutli-file vals, local development, new Townie, new Search, and much more\npubDate: 2025-06-03T00:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Steve Krouse\n---\n\nVal Town has gotten a lot more powerful. \n\nVals now support multiple files, folders, and branches. You can edit vals locally with your favorite editor via the `vt` CLI. Townie, our AI coding assistant, uses Claude 4 Sonnet to agentically read and write your vals. We've been supporting companies using Val Town to automate workflows and build internal tools.\n\nOur roadmap is packed with the powerful features you've been requesting: Team Accounts, SOC2, Logs & Traces API, OAuth, and much more.\n\nAs always, we save the best part of the newsletter for last: a collection of the best new vals from all of you in the community 🤩\n\n## 🗂️ Multi-file Vals\n\nWe rebuilt vals from the ground-up to support multiple files and folders. Vals are now like GitHub repos – including branches and pull requests – but the code is instantly deployed, and scales as hosted web services. We rebuilt [Townie](https://www.val.town/x/valdottown/Townie), [Search](https://www.val.town/x/maxm/vtProjectSearch), and even [this very blog you're reading right now](/migration) as vals.\n\n

\n \n

\n\nAs show in this video above, vals now support:\n\n- Multiple files & folders\n- Branches, three-way merges, and pull requests\n- Custom [subdomains](https://docs.val.town/vals/http/custom-subdomains/) & [email addresses](https://docs.val.town/vals/email/#custom-email-address)\n\n## 🦾 New Townie\n\nWe rebuilt Townie from the ground-up around multi-file vals. It uses agentic tool-calling, powered by Claude 4 Sonnet, to read and write your code. It can even make test HTTP calls to see how things are working, and keep iterating from there.\n\n

\n \n

\n\nTownie is available only for [Val Town Pro](https://www.val.town/pricing) users during a limited free preview. We are adding the ability to purchase credits.\n\nBecause Townie was built [100% open-source and in userspace](https://www.val.town/x/valdottown/Townie), you can read the code, system prompts, and even remix & run it in your account. Pull requests welcome.\n\n## ＞ Local development\n\nOne of the biggest feature request for Val Town has always been to edit vals with your favorite editor. Now you can with the [`vt` CLI](https://github.com/val-town/vt).\n\n

\n \n

\n\nThe `vt watch` command brings the classic Val Town deploy-on-every-save experience to your favorite IDE. (Especially with [the browser extension that automatically reloads your browser tab](https://github.com/val-town/vt?tab=readme-ov-file#watching-for-changes).) However, that doesn't mean you're deploying to *production* on every save. As shown in the video above, Val Town means you're always developing directly in your *production environment*, but you choose when to deploy directly on `main` or in a branch preview that you can merge in when ready.\n\n## Val Town for Teams\n\nIf you think Val Town is useful in your personal life, wait till you bring it to work! Our customers have saved hundreds of hours building custom tools like:\n\n- **[GitHub x Slack Automations](https://www.val.town/x/charmaine/GitHub-PR-Automation)**: Auto-assign PRs, enforce labels, streamline PR approvals, and surface GitHub issues in Slack.\n- **[Hubspot Leads Deep Research](https://www.val.town/x/charmaine/Hubspot-Research)**: Generate AI deep research-powered reports on new HubSpot leads. Optionally convert them into audio feeds for on-the-go listening.\n- **[Discord → Linear Tickets](https://www.val.town/x/charmaine/Discord-to-Linear)**: React to messages with a designated emoji to instantly create a Linear ticket, with full context.\n- **[Changelog Generator](https://www.val.town/x/charmaine/Change-Logs-Generator)**: Auto-generate changelogs from GitHub commits and share them in Discord for review before publishing.\n\n**We'd love to help you too!** Our Val Town for Teams plan includes private VIP support on Slack Connect, hands-on help building custom workflows and onboarding your team, and higher limits across the board.\n\n

💌 Email charmaine@val.town to save your team hours every week.

\n\n## New Search\n\nWe rebuilt [Val Town Search](https://www.val.town/x/maxm/vtProjectSearch) for the multi-file vals. It's much faster and gives exact matches. (It runs on [Val Town SQLite](https://docs.val.town/std/sqlite/), and uses `like`.) It searches across public val source code, usernames, and our docs.\n\n

\n\nSearch was built [100% open-source & in userspace](https://www.val.town/x/maxm/vtProjectSearch). With one-click, you can remix it to your account: it'll start reading from the public val firehose API, and index all public val code into your [Val Town SQLite](https://docs.val.town/std/sqlite/). If you want to make an improvement to search, or build something on top of that index, please do! The power of userspace 💪\n\n## Town Hall\n\nWe held our very first Val Town Hall!\n\n\n\nWe got a chance to share what we're building at Val Town, and see 9 lovely demos from the community. Everybody really pulled together to make it an action-packed hour. If you're curious to know what's going on in the town, this is a must-watch.\n\n### Val Town Hall #2\n\nWe scheduled the next Val Town Hall for **June 25th, 12pm ET**. **[Register here to participate or demo.](https://town-hall.val.run/)**\n\n## Roadmap\n\n- Logs & Traces API (to power `vt tail` & Townie reading logs)\n- UI improvements branch & pull request flows\n- UI improvements to Logs\n- Deno LSP to dramatically improve the browser editing experience\n- Townie credits & other improvements\n- UI improvements to val version history\n- Team Accounts\n- \"Login with Val Town\" OAuth\n- SOC2\n- Ability to lock/protect a main branch\n- Comments on vals (again, but better, ie on lines)\n- Comments on pull requests\n- Improve the discoverability of vals\n- Binary file support in vals\n- Infinite scale vals with usage-based pricing\n- WebSocket vals\n- UI & keyboard affordances to help you import from Val Town, npm, jsr\n\n## 🌟 Community Vals\n- [**Geoffrey Litt**](https://www.val.town/u/geoffreylitt)'s [Stevens](https://www.val.town/x/geoffreylitt/stevensDemo) went viral on HackerNews. It's a personal AI Assistant, you can read more about how he built it on [his blog](https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2025/04/12/how-i-made-a-useful-ai-assistant-with-one-sqlite-table-and-a-handful-of-cron-jobs). \n- [**Brad Noble**](https://www.val.town/u/bradnoble) made [Val Town for Notion](https://www.val.town/x/bradnoble/ValTownForNotion), a great demo accompanied by a post about using Val Town to unlock Notion’s full potential, and vice versa.\n- [**Fiberplane**](https://www.val.town/u/fiberplane) made [OpenTelemetryCollector](https://www.val.town/x/fiberplane/OpenTelemetryCollector), which receive traces and store it in SQLite.\n- [**bgschiller**](https://www.val.town/u/bgschiller) made [personalShopper](https://www.val.town/x/bgschiller/personalShopper/), which turns any grocery list into a Kroger cart full of groceries.\n- [**Moe**](https://www.val.town/u/moe) made [MiniAppStarter](https://www.val.town/x/moe/MiniAppStarter), a Hono + React + Tailwind + Farcaster Mini App Starter Project. This has taken off in the Farcaster community and we've been seeing lots of new mini apps! You can find other Farcaster starters directly on [moe's profile](https://www.val.town/u/moe).\n- [**Smirfolio**](https://www.val.town/u/smirfolio) made [petitPrince](https://www.val.town/x/smirfolio/petitPrince), a child-friendly article summarizer.\n- [**tmcw**](https://www.val.town/u/tmcw) made [timeline](https://www.val.town/x/tmcw/timeline), an online card game for 2+ players: draw historical‑event cards and race to slot them into the correct timeline.\n- [**Wolf**](https://www.val.town/u/wolf) made [FileDumpThing](https://www.val.town/x/wolf/FileDumpThing) so you can easily share files and text snippets by pasting or uploading them and getting a URL in return. This is very handy for dropping gifs into val READMEs.\n- [**Michael Schultz**](https://www.val.town/u/michaelwschultz) made [eink-frame](https://www.val.town/x/michaelwschultz/eink-frame) for information screens designed to be shown on an e-ink display.\n- [**Wilhelm**](https://www.val.town/u/wilhelm) made [ProtoRuns](https://www.val.town/x/wilhelm/ProtoRuns), which lets you track and store your physical runs on ATProto.\n- [**Loading**](https://www.val.town/u/loading) made [url-project](https://www.val.town/x/loading/url-project), a simple URL shortener application built on Val Town.\n- [**c15r**](https://www.val.town/u/c15r) made [ProtoShare](https://www.val.town/x/c15r/ProtoShare), a secure backend system for iOS share sheet shortcuts.\n- [**Cam Pak**](https://www.val.town/u/cameronpak) made [voicemessages](https://www.val.town/x/cameronpak/voicemessages), a web app for recording, transcribing, and sharing voice notes with expiration controls.\n- [**Salon**](https://www.val.town/u/salon) made [mandate](https://www.val.town/x/salon/mandate), a val that helps you set up AI agents through a registry and workflow definitions.\n- [**Wolf**](https://www.val.town/u/wolf) made [Electric](https://www.val.town/x/wolf/Electric), a lightweight static site hosting system built on Hono RPC and Val Town blob store, with a simple CLI.\n- [**supagroova**](https://www.val.town/u/supagroova) made [LiveStormMCP](https://www.val.town/x/supagroova/LiveStormMCP), a val that is hosting a Livestorm MCP server.\n- [**Malcolm Ocean**](https://www.val.town/u/malcolmocean) made [FlexCal](https://www.val.town/x/malcolmocean/FlexCal), a flexible Google Calendar alternative interface that syncs 2 way with Google Calendar via OAuth.\n- [**Max**](https://www.val.town/u/maxm) made [esm](https://www.val.town/x/maxm/esm), a fast content-type friendly proxy for esm.town.\n- [**Alex Wein**](https://www.val.town/u/alexwein) made [gordwame](https://www.val.town/x/alexwein/gordwame), a word game.\n- [**nucky**](https://www.val.town/u/nucky) made [book-lookup-notion](https://www.val.town/x/nucky/book-lookup-notion), which uses the Google Book API to look up bibliographic metadata elements. The val thumnail is a great gif.\n- [**chadparker**](https://www.val.town/u/chadparker) made [endpoints](https://www.val.town/x/chadparker/endpoints) for interacting with Notion DB.\n- [**artivilla**](https://www.val.town/u/artivilla) made [fren](https://www.val.town/x/artivilla/fren), an app for browsing, searching, and copying AI prompts, similar to [ray.so/prompts/browser](https://ray.so/prompts/browser).\n- [**probablycorey**](https://www.val.town/u/probablycorey) (who started Atom and Electron at GitHub!) made [mini-remix](https://www.val.town/x/probablycorey/mini-remix), which lets you write server side and client side react code in the same file and render it to a val.\n- [**ije**](https://www.val.town/u/ije) made [mono-jsx](https://www.val.town/x/ije/mono-jsx/main.tsx), mono-jsx just works on Val Town!\n- [**boucher**](https://www.val.town/u/boucher) made [vt-discord](https://www.val.town/x/boucher/vt-discord), which stores your chats and shared links on a private server, and lets Claude AI search and analyze them.\n- [**dcm31**](https://www.val.town/u/dcm31) made [logoWorkshopOpenMoji](https://www.val.town/x/dcm31/logoWorkshopOpenMoji), an SDK to generate logos directly in code.\n- [**Wolf**](https://www.val.town/u/wolf) made [NPLLM](https://www.val.town/x/wolf/NPLLM), a clone of the npm website with search functionality, package detail pages, and the ability to download npm packages as tar files.\n- [**dcm31**](https://www.val.town/u/dcm31) made [demoCamera](https://www.val.town/x/dcm31/demoCamera), a floating webcam component that you can easily add to any val.\n- [**prashamtrivedi**](https://www.val.town/u/prashamtrivedi) made [promptfixer](https://www.val.town/x/prashamtrivedi/promptfixer), a prompt fixing service with form and email processing.\n- [**elouan**](https://www.val.town/u/elouan) made [oceaniverse](https://www.val.town/x/elouan/oceaniverse), a [pondiverse](https://www.val.town/x/todepond/pondiverse) store.\n- [**bradley**](https://www.val.town/u/bradley) made [litebrite](https://www.val.town/x/bradley/litebrite), a little web‑app version of the classic Lite‑Brite toy.\n- [**Steve Krouse**](https://www.val.town/u/stevekrouse) made [live-reload](https://www.val.town/x/stevekrouse/live-reload), middleware for live-reloading HTTP vals during development. (We use it to edit this blog!)\n- [**gwoods22**](https://www.val.town/u/gwoods22) made [cp24-digest](https://www.val.town/x/gwoods22/cp24-digest), a val that manages [CP24](https://www.cp24.com/) email alerts by recieving them, storing them in a blob, and displaying them here.\n- [**Nico Baier**](https://www.val.town/u/nbbaier) made [thirdTimer](https://www.val.town/x/nbbaier/thirdTimer), a web app implementing the \"Third Time\" productivity method. [neverstew](https://www.val.town/u/neverstew) [remixed it](https://www.val.town/x/neverstew/thirdTimer) with visual displays.\n- [**pomdtr**](https://www.val.town/u/pomdtr) made [tinyfeed](https://www.val.town/x/pomdtr/tinyfeed), which generate a static HTML page from a collection of feeds.\n- [**thirdsouth**](https://www.val.town/u/thirdsouth) made [Mercury](https://www.val.town/x/thirdsouth/Mercury), which connects Mercury's Bank API to Slack so you can check account balance, view recent transactions, get notifications etc directly in Slack.\n- [**cmknz**](https://www.val.town/u/cmknz) made [maine-bills-tax](https://www.val.town/x/cmknz/maine-bills-tax), which summarizes all of the current pending bills that could impact taxes in the State of Maine.\n- [**kamalnrf**](https://www.val.town/u/kamalnrf) made [MailGoat](https://www.val.town/x/kamalnrf/MailGoat), which automatically organizes your emails with custom labels.\n- [**Wolf**](https://www.val.town/u/wolf) made [instagramScraping](https://www.val.town/x/wolf/instagramScraping), which extracts image and caption data from Instagram posts.\n- [**colingourlay**](https://www.val.town/u/colingourlay) made [supernote-crosswords](https://www.val.town/x/colingourlay/supernote-crosswords), which uploads daily crosswords to your Supernote.\n- [**humbl**](https://www.val.town/u/humbl) made [figma-variables-manager](https://www.val.town/x/humbl/figma-variables-manager), a Figma plugin that syncs variables from external sources like Notion and Coda.\n- [**dcm31**](https://www.val.town/u/dcm31) made [build.moi](https://build.moi/), a social showcase for your Val Town vals, like TikTok but Val Town! ([YouTube demo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxXomaA4hYY))\n- [**yakuzadave**](https://www.val.town/u/yakuzadave) made [notionWidgets](https://www.val.town/x/yakuzadave/notionWidgets), a way to be able to host your own Notion Widgets using Val Town.\n- [**jpchip**](https://www.val.town/u/jpchip) made [GlobalEntryAppointmentChecker](https://www.val.town/x/jpchip/GlobalEntryAppointmentChecker), which emails you when global entry appointments are available.\n- [**nucky**](https://www.val.town/u/nucky) made [notion-2-bluesky](https://www.val.town/x/nucky/notion-2-bluesky), which lets you auto-schedule Bluesky posts from a Notion DB.\n- [**Llad**](https://www.val.town/u/Llad) made [Gardenon](https://www.val.town/x/Llad/Gardenon), to help map your garden and track information about each plant.\n- [**Steve Krouse**](https://www.val.town/u/stevekrouse) made [profile-pics](https://www.val.town/x/stevekrouse/profile-pics), a Val Town Profile Pic Proxy.\n- [**stu43005**](https://www.val.town/u/stu43005) made [hololiveAnniversaryIcs](https://www.val.town/x/stu43005/hololiveAnniversaryIcs), for tracking anniversary dates for Hololive (a virtual YouTuber agency).\n- [**jamiedubs**](https://www.val.town/u/jamiedubs) made [twitterCompetitorMonitoring](https://www.val.town/x/jamiedubs/twitterCompetitorMonitoring) to track tweets mentioning competitor URLs and visualizes the data in charts.\n- [**We at Val Town**](https://www.val.town/u/valdottown) made [door](https://www.val.town/x/valdottown/door) for Val Town office guests to open the door through their phone, like [this](https://www.val.town/x/valdottown/door/pull/ef854848-34b0-11f0-9887-9e149126039e)!\n- [**Joey Hiller**](https://www.val.town/u/jhiller) made [ValTown-Package-Tracker](https://www.val.town/x/jhiller/ValTown-Package-Tracker) to track a package of sensors he was sending from Oakland to us in Downtown Brooklyn!\n- [**dinavinter**](https://www.val.town/u/dinavinter) made [slack](https://www.val.town/x/dinavinter/slack), a Slack bot that uses OpenAI to generate responses.\n- [**prashamtrivedi**](https://www.val.town/u/prashamtrivedi) made [hn-remote-ts-genai-jobs](https://www.val.town/x/prashamtrivedi/hn-remote-ts-genai-jobs), to track Hacker News' Who's Hiring filter for remote TypeScript + GenAI-related jobs.\n- [**dcm31**](https://www.val.town/u/dcm31) made [rotrank](https://www.val.town/x/dcm31/rotrank), an ELO ranking system for popular Italian Brainrot characters.\n- [**tmcw**](https://www.val.town/u/tmcw) made [bluesky-thinkup-tribute](https://www.val.town/x/tmcw/bluesky-thinkup-tribute), so you can know when people you follow update their descriptions on Bluesky.\n- [**Alex Brinsmead**](https://www.val.town/u/abrinz) made [autonomous-val](https://www.val.town/x/abrinz/autonomous-val), a demo on how to build autonomous agents on Val Town that can be triggered by API calls, cron jobs, etc.\n- [**pomdtr**](https://www.val.town/u/pomdtr) made [extract-feeds](https://www.val.town/x/pomdtr/extract-feeds) to extract RSS feeds from an HTML page.\n- [**curtcox**](https://www.val.town/u/curtcox) made [wwtdotcom](https://www.val.town/x/curtcox/wwtdotcom), a proxy for wwt.com that rewrites all links to stay within the proxy and injects a help widget on every page.\n- [**ashryanio**](https://www.val.town/u/ashryanio) made [halpk](https://www.val.town/x/ashryanio/halpk), which fetches the RSS feed from Astoria Tech's Subcurrent blog and displays a random blog post each time the page is loaded. He also made [subcurrentShuffle](https://www.val.town/x/ashryanio/subcurrentShuffle) with Townie in 15 minutes at that same meetup!\n- [**Cam Pak**](https://www.val.town/u/cameronpak) made [groq-api](https://www.val.town/x/cameronpak/groq-api), a simple API using the AI SDK and Groq.\n- [**mgmarlow**](https://www.val.town/u/mgmarlow) made [aposd-red-flags](https://www.val.town/x/mgmarlow/aposd-red-flags), a simple flashcard app to help learn about common software design red flags from the book A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout.\n- [**JJG**](https://www.val.town/u/jjg) made [blockbench-plugin](https://www.val.town/x/jjg/blockbench-plugin), which fetches JavaScript or TypeScript files from GitHub repositories or Gists and serves them with the proper content type headers.\n- [**Steve Krouse**](https://www.val.town/u/stevekrouse) made [luciaMagicLinkStarter](https://www.val.town/x/stevekrouse/luciaMagicLinkStarter) to roll-your-own auth & magic link login using Lucia.\n- [**Max**](https://www.val.town/u/maxm) made [sqlitelogs](https://www.val.town/x/maxm/sqlitelogs), a logging system that stores logs in SQLite with a web interface and search functionality.\n- [**orjpap**](https://www.val.town/u/orjpap) made a blog analytics system using Val Town's SQLite to track visitors and page views.\n- [**Payton**](https://www.val.town/u/payton) made [Privy Pay](https://privy.io/blog/onchain-payments-with-privy-pay), a tap to pay experience with Farcaster mini apps using NFC technology.\n- [**yawnxyz**](https://www.val.town/u/yawnxyz) made [andp](https://www.val.town/x/yawnxyz/andp/index.tsx), a demo of embedding Observable in Val Town.\n- [**neverstew**](https://www.val.town/u/neverstew) made [voweltown](https://www.val.town/x/neverstew/voweltown), an interactive website to explore vowels across different languages.",[],[186,733],"1ee7ba2a-36db-46b2-8458-9a2e49321390","2025-05-23-glitch.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-82a9073d9210",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Val Town for Glitch Users\ndescription: Saying goodbye to a platform we admired\npubDate: 2025-05-23T00:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Tom MacWright\n---\n\nThe [news yesterday is that Glitch is shutting down](https://blog.glitch.com/post/changes-are-coming-to-glitch/).\nVal Town has always been inspired by Glitch - they paved the way\nfor zero-configuration instantly-edited websites.\nIt's a bummer that what brought so many people joy\nand [was a great community for diverse communities](https://blog.keith.is/blog/the-end-of-glitch-even-though-they-say-it-isnt/)\nis coming to an end.\n\nSo: where does Val Town fit into this? Depending on how you were\nusing Glitch, we could be a new home for you. But Val Town isn't a drop-in\nreplacement for Glitch, and I am no macabre salesperson so here's the basics:\n\n## Val Town is for TypeScript projects\n\nWe support static text files, TypeScript projects that work on the backend\nand the frontend, and frameworks like React. There are lots of batteries built-in:\nsending and receiving emails, an SQLite, blob storage, scheduling code\nto run, and all of the functionality unlocked by importing modules from\nNPM.\n\nGlitch also supported static websites, as well as bundlers, like Vite. We don't\nsupport those things right now, so stuff won't transfer over automatically.\n\n## Val Town supports online editing and instant reload\n\nNow that's the part where it matches: we have invested a lot of time into our\neditor and site so that it's easy to do everything you need to without\ninstalling any extra software. But we _also_ support a great desktop\nflow with our [beta vt tool](https://github.com/val-town/vt), so if you\nlike using VS Code or Cursor, there's a home for you here.\n\n## Val Town is also a startup\n\nI've been around for a while. Startups are hard to rely on. There's no way I'm\ngoing to promise that your Val Town projects will still work in the year 2500,\nbecause we both know that I'd be lying. Like Glitch, we've raised money from\nventure capital and it is currently what pays our paychecks and server bills.\nIf it runs out and we haven't become profitable or found an acquirer, that'll\nbe curtains.\n\nWith that out of the way, I can tell you two things. First, Val Town is really\nefficient. From day one, we've been building on abstractions that let us run\ncode cheaply at scale. Stuff that's magically good, like [Deno](https://deno.com/), and\nwasn't available when Glitch was getting started. So keeping the lights on in\na technical sense is not a huge concern: we aren't provisioning a whole server\nevery time that you run a val.\n\nAnd with that, we've also got a pretty long runway, given those low costs, so\nwe've got some time to get our accounting in the black: and we fully intend\nto become profitable. We're currently working hard to find design partners,\nbuilt out our paid offerings, and make sure that we aren't burning CPU\ncycles on anything unnecessary.\n\n## Give it a shot\n\nI hope that a commonality between Glitch and Val Town is that we're both\n_fun_. So anyway, if you're leaving Glitch or just looking to tinker with code\nin a way that feels lightweight, casual, and joyful, [give Val Town a shot](https://www.val.town/).",[],[186,740],"b69cf1d4-2c69-471f-8f0c-8c00c5d5ab11","2025-04-23-upgrading.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-7e2fce12f5bf",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: Upgrading vals\ndescription: Vals are being upgraded to support multiple files, folders, and more\npubDate: 2025-04-23T00:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Steve Krouse\n---\n\nToday, we’re unifying our two primitives — *vals* and *projects* — into a single primitive: the **val**, with the best features of both.\n\nHistorically, vals have been simple and lightweight, but limited to a single file. This upgrade will preserve the elegant spirit of our platform while supporting more complex code and collaborative workflows. This upgrade will help you create bigger things on Val Town – APIs, internal tools, fullstack apps, blogs ([like this one](https://www.val.town/x/ValDotTown/blog)), and much more – without sacrificing the simplicity you've always loved about vals.\n\n*Legacy vals* will temporarily become *projects* during this migration. Post-migration, the concept of *projects* will disappear entirely — leaving only upgraded *vals*. In short: *legacy vals* → *projects* → *vals*.\n\n## Timeline\n\nFor most users, no upgrade action is required. We’ll auto-migrate your vals next week. All existing HTTP endpoints, crons, email handlers, and custom domains will be preserved.\n\nFor those with mission-critical vals or who use our API to edit or create vals, you can start upgrading your legacy vals today and integrating with our updated API.\n\n- **April 23, 2025** – Announcement of changes & API deprecations.\n- **April 30, 2025** – All remaining *legacy vals* auto-upgraded. Deprecated API routes become read-only.\n- **May 1, 2025** – The term *projects* will no longer exist — everything will simply be a *val*.\n\nIf you need more time, please contact us at [help@val.town](mailto:help@val.town) and we'll work with you.\n\n## Upgrading\n\nWe will upgrade all remaining legacy vals on **April 30, 2025**.\n\nYou can proactively upgrade by:\n\n- Going to the **Settings** of any legacy val.\n- Clicking **Upgrade**.\n\n[See more details in our docs.](https://docs.val.town/upgrading/legacy-vals)\n\n## API Changes\n\nToday, we're introducing the following API routes:\n\n```bash\nGET /v2/vals\nPOST /v2/vals\nGET /v2/vals/{val_id} \nDELETE /v2/vals/{val_id}\nGET /v2/vals/{val_id}/branches/{branch_id}\nDELETE /v2/vals/{val_id}/branches/{branch_id}\nGET /v2/vals/{val_id}/branches\nPOST /v2/vals/{val_id}/branches\nGET /v2/vals/{val_id}/files\nPOST /v2/vals/{val_id}/files\nDELETE /v2/vals/{val_id}/files\nPUT /v2/vals/{val_id}/files\nGET /v2/vals/{val_id}/files/content\nGET /v2/alias/vals/{username}/{val_name}\nGET /v2/me/vals\n```\n\n_Note: During this transition, `{val_id}` is your `project ID`. You can grab it by clicking `Copy` > `Copy project ID` on any new val._\n\nWe are deprecating these routes:\n\n```bash\n* /v1/vals/*\n* /v1/projects/*\nGET /v1/alias/{username}/{val_name}\nGET /v1/alias/projects/{username}/{project_name}\nGET /v1/me/comments\nGET /v1/me/references\nGET /v1/me/likes\nGET /v1/me/projects\nGET /v1/users/{user_id}/vals\n```\n\nView our [updated API reference here](https://docs.val.town/openapi).\n\nAll `v1/vals` API routes become read-only on **April 30, 2025**. If you rely on *writing* to those routes, please upgrade to our new `v2/vals` API. All deprecated API routes will continue serving historical legacy val data.\n\n### SDK changes\nWe've also released a new major version of the [Val Town SDK](https://github.com/val-town/sdk/tree/main), `v1.0.0`, using these new endpoints. The deprecated routes above are not accessible in this new version of the SDK.\n\nUnpinned SDK imports will automatically pull the latest version upon your next edit / save. At that point, your SDK calls will temporarily break until you upgrade. To upgrade, update every mention of `projects` → `vals`, `projectName` → `valName`. \n\n## What's next\n\n1. Upgrade your mission-critical vals early.\n2. Update your Val Town API & SDK usage to `/v2` routes.\n3. All remaining legacy vals migrate on **April 30, 2025**.\n4. Migration completes on **May 1, 2025**.\n\nWe're committed to making this transition smooth for you — reach out anytime via [email](mailto:help@val.town) or [Discord](http://discord.val.town/) if you need assistance. We appreciate your help and patience through this migration.",[],[186,747],"b102daef-023a-4167-9a3e-a48d0fe4032c","2025-04-08-migration.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-7b42355043f3",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: The Val Town Blog is now hosted on Val Town\ndescription: We migrated this blog to Val Town Projects\npubDate: 2025-04-08T00:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Steve Krouse\nthumbnail: \"https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/ab4e9a49-40aa-4fef-08f0-b37512ba9500/public\"\n---\n\n![street-blog-web.jpg](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/4abb41d0-f710-46b4-523e-4440a252f400/public)\n\nWe migrated our blog to Val Town 🥳\n\nWith some cleverness, we were able to build it and migrate 65 old blog posts in\none day. Now our deployments happen instantly (~100ms), and we've greatly\nsimplified our blogging stack.\n\n| | Before | Now |\n| ------------------- | ------------------------- | ---------- |\n| **Rendering** | Astro | React |\n| **Version control** | GitHub | Val Town |\n| **Text editing** | Local editor | Val Town |\n| **Deployment** | Cloudflare Pages + GitHub | Val Town |\n| **Hosting** | Cloudflare Pages | Val Town |\n| **CDN** | Cloudflare | Cloudflare |\n\n## Should you blog on Val Town?\n\nMaybe! It depends on your constraints and what matters to you. We care deeply\nabout:\n\n1. Tight feedback loops\n2. Simple, browser-based workflows\n3. A fast migration\n\nWe also care deeply about dogfooding, but unless you're us – and unfortunately\nmost of you aren't – that one doesn't apply to you.\n\nThere are also good reasons _not_ to migrate to Val Town, but we'll get to them\nlater.\n\n## Tight feedback loops\n\nWe at Val Town are obsessed with tight feedback loops.\n\n> \"Creators need an immediate connection to what they're creating.\"\n>\n> – Bret Victor, \"Inventing on Principle\"\n\nIn some ways, this singular commitment to tight feedback loops is what separates\nVal Town from all other code hosting & deployment platforms. We believe that you\nshould be able to _iterate directly in your production environment_, not iterate\nlocally, then deploy, then wait minutes to see how things look live.\n\n

\n \n

\n\nIn Val Town, a save _is_ a deploy, and it happens in about 100ms. We go to great\ntechnical lengths to make this possible. This means no waiting minutes to see\nwhat your post looks like live. You get the fast local dev experience, but with\nproduction. And this goes for branches too. Every edit of every branch is\ninstantly deployed in a shareable URL.\n\n## Simple, browser-based workflow\n\nVal Town lets you use fewer tools. It replaces:\n\n- your local text editor,\n- git + GitHub for version control\n- whatever you use for deployment and hosting, Cloudflare, Vercel, Render,\n Railway, Heroku, Digital Ocean, Hertzner, etc\n\nSimpler, browser-based workflows are particularly important for casual\ncontributors, such as less technical folks on your team or strangers on the\ninternet. Val Town is a single website for code to be edited, versioned,\ncollaborated on, and deployed. No need for anyone to install or use git, clone\nthe repo locally, install programming languages and dependencies, or use a local\ntext editor.\n\nFor example, here's how to make a change to this blog that you're reading right\nnow:\n\n

\n \n

\n\nVal Town is uniquely positioned to allow anyone see their changes deployed live\nin their remix, because we host both your source code _and_ your deployments.\n\n## A fast migration\n\nHow did we migrate 65 blog posts – with images, videos, and intricate formatting\nand styles – to an entirely new blog in a single day?\n\nWe didn't. We left them where they are, and proxy to them.\n\nWriting a proxy in Val Town (or any functions platform with the\n['fetch handler' interface](https://blog.val.town/blog/the-api-we-forgot-to-name/))\nis a delight:\n\n```ts\nconst OLD_BLOG_HOST = \"https://val-town-blog.pages.dev/\";\nexport async function proxy(req: Request): Promise {\n const url = new URL(req.url);\n return fetch(OLD_BLOG_HOST + url.pathname + url.search, {\n method: req.method,\n headers: req.headers,\n });\n}\n```\n\nSo if you go to view\n[blog.val.town/blog/val-town-newsletter-24](https://blog.val.town/blog/val-town-newsletter-24)\nyou'll see exactly what you would at\n[val-town-blog.pages.dev/blog/val-town-newsletter-24](https://val-town-blog.pages.dev/blog/val-town-newsletter-24).\nI find it eerie that proxies work so well.\n\nWe've had reasonable success with this technique of migrating to Val Town\nquickly by proxying most old content, and only rebuilding the homepage and new\nposts. I first used this technique on my personal website,\n[stevekrouse.com](https://stevekrouse.com), and was pleased to see it continue\nto work here.\n\n## Good reasons _not_ to blog on Val Town\n\n1. Val Town Projects are beta software, so you'd be on the cutting-edge\n alongside us. We're coming up with patterns that you'd get for free from\n mature blogging tools like Astro and Cloudflare Pages.\n2. Val Town doesn't have good workflows for bundlers or build steps, so it's\n hard to use anything that requires vite, etc.\n3. Val Town doesn't (yet) have pull request comments.\n\nPersonally, I value simplicity, so I don't mind building a basic blog from\nscratch without a bundler with some help from AI. I do miss pull requests\ncomments though. We plan on building them soon.\n\n## Bad reasons _not_ to blog on Val Town\n\n1. **Lock-in**. Val Town is built on Deno and web standards, so you can easily\n leave for another deployment platform like Cloudflare, Vercel, or Deno\n Deploy. We'll even help you migrate. We believe in the open web.\n\n2. **Price**. We have a generous free tier, so your blog can go viral on HN, get\n 100k hits in a day, and you pay $0. It's $10 / month for 1m code runs per\n day. Need additional scale beyond that? It's still $10 / month while our\n Scale Plan is in beta. When ready, our scale pricing will be in line with\n other FaaS providers.\n\n## Get yourself a Val Town blog\n\nIf you are starting a new blog from scratch, remix\n[this markdown blog starter](https://www.val.town/x/stevekrouse/markdownBlogStarter).\n\nIf you are migrating an existing blog, feel free to remix\n[the Val Town blog](https://www.val.town/x/ValDotTown/blog). It comes with good\npatterns for proxying to old content.",[],[186,754],"c127f3a7-021f-47eb-8699-7d40073ad7e1","2025-04-02-post-mortem-db-migration.md","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-764a5e7a2a17",["D",1783331559094],"---\ntitle: \"Post-mortem: A Backward Incompatible Database Migration\"\ndescription: Val runs failed due to a database migration that was not backward compatible\npubDate: 2025-04-02T00:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Sophie Houser\n---\n\nToday at 10:11am we experienced a 12-minute outage, which caused HTTP vals to return 503 errors and other types of vals to fail. In the end, the root cause was a deployment timing issue where database migrations were deployed successfully, but our application code deployment hung for several minutes. The new database migrations were incompatible with the old application code and crashed the process. \n\nWe aim to make all database migrations maintain backward compatibility, but in this case, we only discovered through the delayed deployment feedback that the new migrations were not compatible with previous versions.\n\n## Timeline\n\n- **10:11AM ET** - We merged the new migration and application code\n- **10:16AM ET** - We got pinged for downtime\n- **10:17AM ET** - We posted that HTTP vals are down in the new #service-status channel\n- **10:18AM ET** - The new application code deployment was still lagging\n- **10:19AM ET** - We rolled back to an earlier deployment on Render, which Render rejected because the earlier migration had succeeded, so the ‘old migration’ check prevented it from entering production.\n- **10:22AM ET** - We pushed something we thought could be a fix\n- **10:28AM ET** - We notified everyone that we’re back up.\n\n## Impact\n\n- HTTP vals returned 503 errors for ~12 minutes, and all other val types did not run.\n- The [val.town](http://val.town) site remained up.\n\n## Next Steps\n\nReliability is important to us and we’ve taken steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again. We’ve added a test to ensure database migrations are backward compatible, which we’ll run before we deploy any new code that includes database migrations.",[],[186,761],["D",1783331559094],[233,234,235,236,237,238,239,240,241,242,243,244,245,246,247,248,249,250,251,252,253,254,255,256,257,258,259,260,261,262,263,264,265,266,267,268,269,270,271,272,273,274],[186],"ea842a10-4cac-4dae-b973-f6a9030b194f","util.tsx","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-6dfa45f40e78",["D",1783331559094],"const AUTHOR_URLS = {\n \"Steve Krouse\": \"https://stevekrouse.com/\",\n \"Tom MacWright\": \"https://macwright.com/\",\n \"André Terron\": \"https://www.andreterron.com/\",\n \"Max McDonnell\": \"https://maxmcd.com/\",\n \"JP Posma\": \"https://janpaulposma.nl/\",\n \"Charmaine Lee\": \"https://www.charmaineklee.com/\",\n \"Wolf Mermelstein\": \"https://404wolf.com/\",\n \"Sophie Houser\": \"https://sophiehouser.com/\",\n \"Pete Millspaugh\": \"https://www.petemillspaugh.com/\",\n} as const;\n\ntype AuthorName = keyof typeof AUTHOR_URLS;\n\nexport function getAuthorLink(name: string): string | null {\n if (name in AUTHOR_URLS) {\n return AUTHOR_URLS[name as AuthorName];\n }\n return null;\n}\n\nexport function formatDate(dateString: string): string {\n try {\n const date = new Date(dateString);\n return date.toLocaleDateString(\"en-US\", {\n year: \"numeric\",\n month: \"short\",\n day: \"numeric\",\n });\n } catch (_e) {\n return dateString;\n }\n}",[],[191,771],"44b11ba6-6487-4ff9-b386-599d3206b6c9","icons.tsx","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-6afeaa64963f",["D",1783331559094],"/** @jsxImportSource https://esm.sh/react@18.2.0 */\n\nexport function RSS() {\n return (\n \n \n \n \n \n );\n}\n\nexport function HackerNews() {\n return (\n \n \n \n );\n}\n\nexport function Twitter() {\n return (\n \n \n \n );\n}\n\nexport function Bluesky() {\n return (\n \n \n \n );\n}\n\nexport function Discord() {\n return (\n \n \n \n );\n}\n\nexport function YouTube() {\n return (\n \n \n \n );\n}\n\nexport function GitHub() {\n return (\n \n \n \n );\n}\n\nexport function Email() {\n return (\n \n \n \n \n );\n}\n\nexport function LinkedIn() {\n return (\n \n \n \n );\n}\n\nexport function OSS() {\n return (\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n );\n}\n\nexport function RSSIcon(props: React.SVGProps) {\n return (\n \n \n \n \n \n );\n}\n\nexport function TwitterIcon(props: React.SVGProps) {\n return (\n \n \n \n );\n}\n\nexport function GitHubIcon(props: React.SVGProps) {\n return (\n \n \n \n );\n}\n\nexport function BlueskyIcon(props: React.SVGProps) {\n return (\n \n \n \n );\n}\n\nexport function DiscordIcon(props: React.SVGProps) {\n return (\n \n \n \n );\n}",[],[191,778],"a53acde6-ac96-412a-b244-daec0277982a","OGImage.tsx","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-6680477653d1",["D",1783331559094],"/** @jsxImportSource https://esm.sh/react@18.2.0 */\nimport wrap from \"https://esm.sh/word-wrap@1.2.5\";\n\nconst LINE_HEIGHT = 72;\n\nexport default function OGImage({\n title = \"Val Town Blog\",\n ...props\n}: React.SVGProps & {\n title?: string;\n}) {\n const wrapped = wrap(title, { width: 44 });\n const lines = wrapped.split(/\\n/g);\n\n return (\n \n \n {lines.map((line, i) => (\n \n {line}\n \n ))}\n\n \n\n \n Blog\n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n );\n}",[],[191,785],"deabc630-6560-499d-ae67-cc9394df6515","NewsletterSignup.tsx","019f36d8-171a-772c-a70f-624a7fb9032d",["D",1783331559094],"/** @jsxImportSource https://esm.sh/react@18.2.0 */\n// Adapted from https://app.loops.so/forms/clic9j2ah00a6kz0fwvrdv41o\n\nimport { readFile } from \"https://esm.town/v/std/utils/index.ts\";\n\nconst LOOPS_FORM_ACTION =\n \"https://app.loops.so/api/newsletter-form/clic9j2ah00a6kz0fwvrdv41o\";\n\nconst NEWSLETTER_SCRIPT = await readFile(\"utils/newsletter-signup.ts\");\n\nexport default function NewsletterSignup() {\n return (\n

\n \n \n\n \n\n \n \n\n

\n You'll hear from us soon!\n

\n\n

\n Ugh, paper jam—sorry. Try again, or email hi@val.town and we'll sign\n you up.\n

\n\n