\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

",[],[414,423],"ace49eb8-9d46-11f0-8408-0224a6c84d84","2025-09-09-vtlsp.md","01999608-05c7-7555-bcb8-8d4441c7158b",["D",1759158732102],"---\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

",[],[414,430],"ace49a94-9d46-11f0-8408-0224a6c84d84","2025-08-12-teams.md","01999608-05c7-7555-bcb8-8a9ccfd91ea3",["D",1759158732102],"---\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",[],[414,437],"ace493e6-9d46-11f0-8408-0224a6c84d84","2025-08-12-clay.md","01999608-05c7-7555-bcb8-85ea4d5f5c4f",["D",1759158732102],"---\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.",[],[414,444],"ace48a9a-9d46-11f0-8408-0224a6c84d84","2025-07-30-vibe-code.md","01999608-05c7-7555-bcb8-82fd52265916",["D",1759158732102],"---\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 needed 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 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 asisstant 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 in 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 suprising 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._",[],[414,451],"ace48680-9d46-11f0-8408-0224a6c84d84","2025-06-11-townie-credits.md","01999608-05c7-7555-bcb8-7cfca57770d1",["D",1759158732102],"---\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)",[],[414,458],"ace475c8-9d46-11f0-8408-0224a6c84d84","2025-06-03-newsletter-25.md","01999608-05c7-7555-bcb8-79312dd62354",["D",1759158732102],"---\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.",[],[414,465],"ace47280-9d46-11f0-8408-0224a6c84d84","2025-05-23-glitch.md","01999608-05c7-7555-bcb8-750d07a0b8fb",["D",1759158732102],"---\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/).",[],[414,472],"ace46e34-9d46-11f0-8408-0224a6c84d84","2025-04-23-upgrading.md","01999608-05c7-7555-bcb8-72e4b96f1ca4",["D",1759158732102],"---\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.",[],[414,479],"ace46556-9d46-11f0-8408-0224a6c84d84","2025-04-08-migration.md","01999608-05c7-7555-bcb8-6d7171d0e926",["D",1759158732102],"---\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\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\ngood patterns for proxying to old content.",[],[414,486],"ace46330-9d46-11f0-8408-0224a6c84d84","2025-04-02-post-mortem-db-migration.md","01999608-05c7-7555-bcb8-69710f7831be",["D",1759158732102],"---\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.",[],[414,493],"ace4bd30-9d46-11f0-8408-0224a6c84d84",["D",1759158732102],[211,212,213,214,215,216,217,218,219,220,221,222,223],[414],"ace45fd4-9d46-11f0-8408-0224a6c84d84","util.tsx","01999608-05c7-7555-bcb8-634398e66dc6","01999608-05c7-7555-bcb8-641af76ae379",["D",1759158732102],"export function formatDate(dateString: string): string {\n try {\n const date = new Date(dateString);\n return date.toLocaleDateString('en-US', {\n year: 'numeric',\n month: 'long',\n day: 'numeric'\n });\n } catch (e) {\n return dateString;\n }\n}\n\nexport function dayOfWeek(dateString: string): string {\n try {\n return new Date(dateString).toLocaleDateString(\"en-US\", {\n weekday: \"short\",\n });\n } catch (e) {\n return \"\";\n }\n}\n",[],[511,504],"components","ace45b74-9d46-11f0-8408-0224a6c84d84","icons.tsx","01999608-05c7-7555-bcb8-5d41521ceb69",["D",1759158732102],"/** @jsxImportSource https://esm.sh/react@18.2.0 */\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}\n\n",[],[511,513],"ace45a48-9d46-11f0-8408-0224a6c84d84","SocialLinks.tsx","01999608-05c7-7555-bcb8-588522fd3f13",["D",1759158732102],"/** @jsxImportSource https://esm.sh/react@18.2.0 */\nimport {\n BlueskyIcon,\n DiscordIcon,\n GitHubIcon,\n RSSIcon,\n TwitterIcon,\n} from \"./icons.tsx\";\n\nexport default function SocialLinks() {\n return (\n

\n \n View source\n \n \n RSS feed\n \n \n \n Val Town on Twitter\n \n \n \n Val Town open source code on GitHub\n \n \n \n Val Town on Bluesky\n \n \n \n Val Town's community chat on Discord\n \n \n

\n );\n}",[],[511,520],"ace45322-9d46-11f0-8408-0224a6c84d84","OGImage.tsx","01999608-05c7-7555-bcb8-547aac8cc2ba",["D",1759158732102],"/** @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}",[],[511,527],"ace450e8-9d46-11f0-8408-0224a6c84d84","LogoMark.tsx","01999608-05c7-7555-bcb8-50d78ede4aa0",["D",1759158732102],"/** @jsxImportSource https://esm.sh/react@18.2.0 */\n\nexport default function(props: React.SVGProps) {\n return (\n \n \n \n \n \n );\n}\n\nexport function Favicon(props: React.SVGProps) {\n return (\n \n \n \n \n \n \n );\n}",[],[511,534],"ace44968-9d46-11f0-8408-0224a6c84d84","Logo.tsx","01999608-05c7-7555-bcb8-4e3a87da66be",["D",1759158732102],"/** @jsxImportSource https://esm.sh/react@18.2.0 */\n\nexport default function (props: React.SVGProps) {\n return (\n \n \n \n \n );\n}\n",[],[511,541],"ace44882-9d46-11f0-8408-0224a6c84d84","Layout.tsx","01999608-05c7-7555-bcb8-487f6526c563",["D",1759158732102],"/** @jsxImportSource https://esm.sh/react@18.2.0 */\nimport React from \"https://esm.sh/react@18.2.0\";\nimport type { BlogPost } from \"../utils/types.ts\";\nimport Footer from \"./Footer.tsx\";\nimport Head from \"./Head.tsx\";\nimport Logo from \"./Logo.tsx\";\nimport SocialLinks from \"./SocialLinks.tsx\";\n\ninterface LayoutProps {\n title: string;\n children: React.ReactNode;\n post?: BlogPost;\n}\n\nexport function Layout({ title, post, children }: LayoutProps) {\n return (\n \n \n \n

\n \n \n \n

\n \n

\n \n Blog\n \n

\n {children}\n

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