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Over the past three years at Val Town we've been copying the best AI coding tools (and occasionally getting copied ourselves!). We've done five throw-away-the-code-and-start-from-scratch rewrites:

• v1: ChatGPT-inspired
• v2: ChatGPT-inspired, with tools
• v3: Claude Artifacts-inspired
• v4: Open source, in "user space"
• v5: Claude Code-inspired
• v6? More on that in a minute

Some of those versions felt like the bell of the ball while others were just ok. The through line is that we feel good about investing in timeless developer principles and tools—the AI will find its place. Five rewrites in, this is the story of why it's all worthwhile.

The pace of AI is so amazingly (or fatiguingly) fast that it's proven easier to throw out all our code every six months. AI is changing devtools along two dimensions:

1. LLMs keep getting better: smarter, faster, cheaper
2. We as an industry keep finding better form factors: tab completions, tool use, agent loops

It's hard to predict how programmers will want to code a month from now. The pace of change makes it incredibly hard to invest deeply in any one approach.

If this post reminds you at all of Saagar Jha's satirical essay, Why we at $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched to $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY, that's no accident. It's still hard to believe that we'd not only decide to rewrite a feature every 6 months ourselves but also recommend others do the same.

So will we throw away the code and rewrite Townie again in 6 months? Yes, probably. And it will continue in our tradition of fitting together our favorite AI coding patterns of the moment with Val Town's timeless tools.

Btw: as far as punny AI agent names go, I think Gusto's Gus is pretty damn good. Of course I like Townie, too. But hands down my favorite bot name is Kroger's inventory-taking robot, Tally.

Thanks to my "speechwriter" Pete for helping me write this.