\n \n

\n This is a val.\n

\n\n\nWe're proud that some of the most cracked engineers we know love Val Town. We're\nalso proud that some of our most enthusiastic users consider themselves\nnon-technical.\n\n### Secure collaboration by default with [Val Town Access](https://blog.val.town/access)\n\nAuth is one of the most annoying parts of internal tools. We've taken care of\nthat for you. Like Google Docs, each val has customizable permissions. Easily\nmanage who can see and build what:\n\n\n\nUpdate: [Val Town Access is live](https://blog.val.town/access) for all paid\norgs!\n\n~~Val Town Access is currently in beta.\n[Let me know](https://charlieslackchat.val.run/) if you want early... access.~~\n\nAnd the last reason your superbot should live on Val Town? We already made it\nfor you:\n\n# Your very own self-building Slackbot.\n\n\n\nJust remix [this val](https://www.val.town/x/templates/townie-slackbot) into\nyour Val Town org (create one if you're new), and follow the steps. Here's\nPotluck getting set up with a self-building slackbot in **less than four\nminutes**:\n\n\n\nPrefer me to walk you through it? Feel free to\n[grab some time](https://charlieslackchat.val.run/). We can set up a Slack\nconnect and build it together. I won't hang up until your whole team can\nvibecode artifacts from Slack. Deal?\n\nFrom there, you can\n[make your first dashboard](https://cleanshot.com/share/BhSHMYQ4) or\n[edit a shared artifact](https://cleanshot.com/share/MQJMFhGB).\n\nAnd remember, if you want something changed about your bot, well, just tell it!\n\n### Acknowledgements\n\nThank you to Steve, Potluck, and Townie for feedback on this post.\n\n

\n \n

\n the gang\n

\n",[],[202,609],"af24f4da-b794-44ec-bffd-abba274c75e5","2026-08-11-2026-july.md","bab6377a-95c7-11f1-8b93-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1786482048840],"---\ntitle: Investor Update – July 2026\ndescription: 6% growth, 26% Pro growth, and more growth engineering\npubDate: 2026-08-11:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Steve Krouse\nthumbnail: https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/cafcb4c5-6fff-4443-2264-20e406854200/public\ntags: [company]\n---\n\nDear investors and friends,\n\nVal Town is the instant deploy platform for small apps. Our mission is spreading\nthe joy of programming.\n\n## July 2026\n\nIn July, ARR grew 6%. Not quite our 20% target, but still decently positive. The\ngrowth came from Pro subscriptions ($25 / month), which as its own ARR category\ngrew 26% in July (up from 16% in June). The majority of those customers were\nreferred to us by AI.\n\nOur use-case focus has been internal tools, particularly around growth and\ngo-to-market, and we've been doing a lot of dogfooding. We built ourselves a\nCRM, Slackbot, and a handful of other bots to help us figure out which users to\ntalk to.\n\nIn product updates:\n\n- We added `DeepSeek v4 Flash 0731` to Townie, and made it the default model. In\n my opinion, it's smart enough for most of what you'll need in Val Town, and\n 13x cheaper than `GLM 5.2`, 89x cheaper than `Opus 5`, and 178x cheaper than\n `Fable 5` – not to mention that it's fast and shows its reasoning traces.\n- [ChatGPT Plugin](https://chatgpt.com/plugins/plugin_asdk_app_6a5e7ac6ddf881919de226cb7506ef57?q=val+town)\n- [The Val Town Docs](https://docs.val.town/) are\n [now hosted on Val Town](https://blog.val.town/docfooding)\n- [Started our SOC 2 Type II audit](https://trust.val.town/)\n- [& lots more](https://blog.val.town/changelog-2026-08-06)\n\n## August 2026\n\nOur goal for August remains growing MRR 20%.\n\nOur use-case focus remains growth & GTM engineering. We will help others build\ninternal tools, continue to build our own growth internal tools on Val Town, and\nincreasingly talk publicly about what we're building.\n\nIn terms of product, we're about to release Val Town Access to enable your team\nto securely access your private vals.\n\nWe're also thinking a lot about Slack as a core surface area for our product.\nLet's make programming more multiplayer! Internal tools typically are illegible,\nbrittle, built by one person, and difficult for others to understand, maintain\nor tweak. We think building in your internal tools in Slack with a Val Town\nagent could solve many of these problems – while at the same time, making your\nwork on your internal tools more immediately legible to the rest of your\ncompany. Our instant deploys are an amazing fit for this paradigm.\n\nGiven where the market is, we're also thinking a lot about our AEO (getting AIs\nto recommend us more) and better evals for agents (ensuring LLMs have good\nexperiences with us).\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**: 6% (Goal: 20%)\n\n![ARR chart](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/75f49a13-deff-4320-ab13-c774790e9100/public)\n\n## Highlights\n\n- ARR grew 6%\n- Pro ARR grew 26%\n- Townie is another 13x cheaper\n\n## Lowlights\n\n- Missed the 20% ARR growth goal\n- [79 bug bounty reports in July (6 valid)](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/2083598708537454753)\n\n
\n\nBest,\n\nSteve",[],[202,617],"38244ac7-c146-4861-b0ea-38458e66a8f3","2026-08-06-changelog-2026-08-06.md","67bebeb8-91e2-11f1-9de9-1607ee4eb77e",788,["D",1786053701421],"---\ntitle: Changelog – August 6, 2026\ndescription: New models in Townie, new Discover page, new app layout, new docs, new, new, new\npubDate: 2026-08-06T00:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Pete Millspaugh\nthumbnail: https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/d9139d2e-daac-4338-4ac5-127d4140c800/public\ntags: [changelog]\n---\n\n![an illustration of an old timey computer](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/d9139d2e-daac-4338-4ac5-127d4140c800/public)\n\nMany changes [since early July](/changelog-2026-07-02): new docs site, new Discover page, new Townie models, new app layout, and more.\n\n## Docfooding\n\nThe Val Town [docs](https://docs.val.town/) are now written and hosted\n[on Val Town](https://www.val.town/x/valdottown/docs). You can read about that\n[docfooding](/docfooding) effort on the blog.\n\n![docs.val.town](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/b503652b-9e3e-4c9d-b5be-a6c64aedc200/public)\n\n## Discover\n\nTo dislodge your codewriter's block, we have a new\n[Discover](https://val.town/discover) page on val.town with templates, staff\npicks, and integrations.\n\n![new /discover](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/f46fdf84-0018-41be-1f9b-f8ade189d900/public)\n\n## Whack-a-model\n\nDeepSeek V4 Flash is now Townie's default model. It's ~100x cheaper and roughly\nas intelligent as Opus. We also added Fable 5 and Opus 5 to Townie, because to\neach her own. The game of\n[whack-a-model](https://blog.val.town/glm5.2-and-sonnet5) persists, though, with\n[Qwen 3.8 atop the charts today](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49200652).\n\n![Townie model picker](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/309d2daf-deae-4a7c-3cf6-6ccb3efd9100/public)\n\n## ChatGPT Plugin + AGENTS.md\n\nAfter adding our plugin to Claude's official marketplace last month, we did the\nsame for\n[Codex](https://docs.val.town/guides/prompting/openai-codex)/[ChatGPT](https://docs.val.town/guides/prompting/chatgpt).\n\n![the Val Town plugin in ChatGPT](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/3921a36c-ee04-4e97-2ab4-7d2f3f655d00/public)\n\nOne more piece of news in agentland: we now\n[support](https://blog.val.town/agents-dot-md) the `AGENTS.md`\n[convention](https://agents.md) via a special `.config` val. Those agent\ninstructions are injected into Townie chats and MCP sessions.\n\n## Layout\n\nJackson redesigned and implemented new val.town global navigation app chrome.\nThere's now an org switcher, left sidebar, searchable val dashboard, and an\nupdated footer.\n\n![new val.town page layout](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/9c536ba2-e96f-4839-cc90-19d7e9993e00/public)\n\n## Tags!\n\nYou can now add tags to vals in val settings.\n\n![adding tags to a val in settings](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/93f790d7-8147-443c-f215-ad549219ba00/public)\n\n## Monograms\n\nVals now have little placeholder monograms instead of defaulting to your profile\npicture as the val's image.\n\n![placeholder monogram example](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/888d958c-2375-40c5-4b52-ca7c77b48f00/public)\n\n## Environment variables\n\nEnvironment variable groups are now accessible through our API — create, update,\nand attach environment variables for your org. Thanks to our friends at\n[Herd](https://herd.eco/home) for the feature request.\n\nYou can also now show and hide secrets while editing environment variables in the UI.\n\n![showing environment variables](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/5a5f26b5-282c-4740-5aba-274514379400/public)\n\n## Sprig Sans\n\nWe've been sprinkling [Sprig Sans](https://www.fairetype.com/fonts/sprig-sans),\nthe typeface on our new homepage, across other pages. Gosh, type foundries\nalways have the coolest websites.\n\n## std/openai\n\nWe updated the [std/openai](https://www.val.town/x/std/openai) val to use\nOpenAI's latest models.\n\n## MCP branching tools\n\nNew MCP tools: `merge_branch` and `delete_branch`. That's 54 tools now, so Steve\nmade some [docs](https://mcp-docs.val.run/) (in a val, ofc).\n\n![MCP server docs](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/f40cf370-e437-4e5f-ff1c-8b5fe5c9c100/public)\n\n## HTTP analytics\n\nHTTP analytics in a val now have more useful x-axis time labels.\n\n![HTTP analytics example](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/9239de03-e4f1-4d5f-a843-c14ba272ae00/public)\n\n## Lightning round\n\n- PRs for vals now show the author's handle instead of their org's name\n- We fixed a bug where some Pro users were seeing the wrong Townie limits in\nsettings\n- You can now link to a val's Connections page (and its other pages, like env\nvars) in its README by writing markdown, like\n`[Connect to Slack](/connections)`\n- The first HTTP file in a val is now auto-pinned so that a preview will appear on\nthe val's home page. You can change a val's pinned HTTP file in settings\n- When creating a val, we now present an inline warning when a val description is\ntoo long. Thanks [Nico](https://nicobaier.com/) for the suggestion\n- We fixed a tiny text overflow problem in Townie, e.g. when rendering long URLs\n- The MCP server can now directly upload blobs up to 1 MB, or 10 MB if the blob is\nhosted at a URL\n- We fixed the CLI command to rename an org\n- The Townie/MCP system prompt now documents val transfers between orgs\n- Code search is now available on public vals (thanks,\n[Nico](https://nicobaier.com/), for reporting)",[],[202,624],"2194e52a-43b6-4c6c-993b-46f8080e7b6c","2026-08-05-docfooding.md","5a4581a6-9109-11f1-9a78-1607ee4eb77e",787,["D",1785960478025],"---\ntitle: \"Docfooding: Eating our own documentation\"\ndescription: The Val Town docs are now written and hosted on Val Town\npubDate: 2026-08-05T00:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Pete Millspaugh\nthumbnail: https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/f5a9ebdf-6e0b-4429-cbdc-1c0601494a00/public\ntags: [engineering]\n---\n\n![two anthropomorphized potatoes and a pothole](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/f5a9ebdf-6e0b-4429-cbdc-1c0601494a00/public)\n\nThe Val Town [documentation site](https://docs.val.town) is now written and\nhosted [on Val Town](https://www.val.town/x/valdottown/docs). To reach parity\nwith our now-deprecated Astro+Cloudflare site, our docs needed to meet a high\nbar of [AX, DX, and UX](https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/thoughts-on-ax/).\n\n1. **AX:** Agents read docs more than humans these days. Are we serving them\n well?\n2. **DX:** We knew Val Town would lower editing friction and tighten feedback\n loops. But could we live without a static site framework?\n3. **UX:** Docs must be fast and searchable, with all the table stakes features.\n Will users _like_ our new site?\n\n## Stack\n\nThe stack for our new docs is unusual. Notably, the entire app is\nserver-rendered. We do not load a client-side library like React, although we do\nuse JSX for components. We write vanilla CSS and old fashioned `\n\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)",[],[202,702],"baa40291-5659-4949-ad8b-4ce83c9ddf60","2026-06-11-scoped-blob-storage.md","29d60e2e-65ac-11f1-b141-1607ee4eb77e",814,["D",1787163445341],"---\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\ntags: [product]\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.",[],[202,709],"566a0e74-27df-41b7-8773-be5c0aea6927","2026-06-10-2026-may.md","93c8201c-64d3-11f1-bf68-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\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\ntags: [company]\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",[],[202,717],"5896ac9a-1af5-42ad-af2a-8fded7adbfca","2026-06-05-plugin.md","f03a6c9c-60d7-11f1-a092-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\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\ntags: [product]\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).",[],[202,724],"12404fd6-a01a-458c-8ed0-9c22615774d4","2026-05-27-growbots.md","1ac8cd76-59ff-11f1-af2c-ee650bb23af1",["D",1784053703462],"---\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\ntags: [customers]\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.",[],[202,731],"be441f98-3f61-40c5-8724-abd04c0756a3","2026-05-26-changelog-05262026.md","cb715dc6-5943-11f1-81de-ee650bb23af1",["D",1784053703462],8,"---\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\ntags: [changelog, product]\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..._",[],[202,738],"6aff07c8-f5fc-468a-b481-0539ddbe6dd4","2026-05-19-slow-mode.md","e702fe5e-53b8-11f1-90e1-ee650bb23af1",["D",1784053703462],"---\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\ntags: [essay]\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.",[],[202,746],"46508185-fb11-4432-85a8-be7c829c0343","2026-05-12-talk-of-the-town-may-26.md","b4fcc7f4-4e32-11f1-a1c1-ee650bb23af1",["D",1784053703462],"---\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\ntags: [customers]\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).)",[],[202,753],"f70ba73b-4fc6-4b32-aa69-0bbb9db10915","2026-05-06-better-auth.md","0c83323a-496d-11f1-bd73-42b51c65c3df",["D",1784053703462],"---\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\ntags: [engineering]\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.",[],[202,760],"a194fea7-c348-4883-a916-7b25064bc431","2026-05-05-2026-april.md","bafc4a78-48b8-11f1-998d-42b51c65c3df",["D",1784053703462],"---\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\ntags: [company]\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",[],[202,767],"02f19da2-bccc-4d41-8f8e-0cee2e3c1a2c","2026-04-28-octolens.md","91486c56-434b-11f1-a349-42b51c65c3df",["D",1784053703462],"---\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\ntags: [engineering]\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).",[],[202,774],"582efd88-edde-4216-87ff-7a801e6d9de1","2026-04-09-code-is-inert.md","df8379a8-3444-11f1-8c58-42b51c65c3df",["D",1784053703462],"---\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\ntags: [essay]\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).",[],[202,781],"474fdabd-e614-406c-bfbf-f5e7c082bebc","2026-04-07-2026-mar.md","5f22419e-32a6-11f1-b17d-42dde27851f2",["D",1784053703462],"---\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\ntags: [company]\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",[],[202,788],"eddb4514-c2f6-4886-aa12-a680284ae1d7","2026-04-02-changelog-04022026.md","aaf58978-2ee1-11f1-b29c-42dde27851f2",["D",1784053703462],"---\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\ntags: [changelog, product]\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.",[],[202,795],"6e90a258-4408-46ee-a266-794a3452c474","2026-03-26-talk-of-the-town-mar-2026.md","58066a92-296a-11f1-956a-42dde27851f2",["D",1784053703462],"---\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\ntags: [customers]\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)!",[],[202,802],"6ea0c112-0579-46fa-9378-3df422ac73ba","2026-03-17-2026-feb.md","4eb04aec-222d-11f1-9654-42dde27851f2",["D",1784053703462],"---\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\ntags: [company]\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",[],[202,809],"10f22348-eaae-4742-abaf-1a9fc7920ba6","2026-03-05-newsletter-26.md","a5f45f20-1cd1-11f1-823d-42dde27851f2",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: Val Town 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\ntags: [newsletter]\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.",[],[202,816],"e9867ab5-4342-4686-a329-a45d9bd87dbe","2026-02-25-byoa.md","47f78fcc-1327-11f1-b866-42dde27851f2",["D",1784053703462],"---\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\ntags: [essay]\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._",[],[202,823],"b73c2514-aa70-46ae-a357-8c150eb48849","2026-02-18-talk-of-the-town-feb-2026.md","8ddbc928-0cfa-11f1-9523-42dde27851f2",["D",1784053703462],"---\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\ntags: [customers]\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!",[],[202,830],"708e695c-aca1-4902-aef4-627718bfc47b","2026-01-23-scoped-databases.md","1c785494-f8a1-11f0-82b8-42dde27851f2",["D",1784053703462],7,"---\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\"\ntags: [product]\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).\n",[],[202,837],"c71de47a-5f79-4750-8794-76a6b996be97","2026-01-22-townie-v5.md","a60442b4-f79c-11f0-b0bc-42dde27851f2",["D",1784053703462],"---\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\"\ntags: [product]\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._",[],[202,845],"7a49ca92-2469-45d4-acef-5f06aef69a81","2026-01-14-catching-stars.md","afbfe174-f160-11f0-b889-42dde27851f2",["D",1784053703462],"---\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\"\ntags: [engineering]\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.",[],[202,852],"f3011a00-201d-4cb0-a8ae-0315429ad2aa","2025-12-14-pickling.md","afbf98cc-f160-11f0-b889-42dde27851f2",["D",1784053703462],"---\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\"\ntags: [company]\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.\n",[],[202,859],"b335bf1b-fe9d-4ee6-a9dd-e9577b9a287b","2025-11-14-mcp.md","4271aba4-c15c-11f0-9b9b-42dde27851f2",["D",1784053703462],"---\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\"\ntags: [product]\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.",[],[202,866],"98f79bd4-cf78-45e9-ba7e-55ffdb496b77","2025-11-04-oss-pledge.md","0091d1b0-b9c2-11f0-a5cb-0224a6c84d84",["D",1784053703462],"---\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\ntags: [company]\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.\n",[],[202,873],"5840b63f-0725-4b78-8ae1-302b9ac1fd40","2025-10-02-in-val-out.md","457e23de-9fb7-11f0-a209-0224a6c84d84",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: In, Val, Out\ndescription: I/O with a val in the middle\npubDate: 2025-10-02:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Pete Millspaugh\ntags: [product]\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.",[],[202,880],"93f1a182-ffb1-493e-b5f9-0757ffca1df0","2025-09-11-gardening-dependencies.md","f60a5560-8f2c-11f0-8176-0224a6c84d84",["D",1784053703462],"---\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\"\ntags: [engineering]\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.\n",[],[202,887],"dd510fcb-70fa-4686-b2a9-4a6bdd14fe3a","2025-09-10-vt-cli.md","54ba329c-8e51-11f0-b7aa-0224a6c84d84",["D",1784053703462],"---\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\ntags: [product]\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

\n",[],[202,894],"13dba41a-2b2a-42aa-814d-900131f1797d","2025-09-09-vtlsp.md","fac033fa-8d82-11f0-aba6-0224a6c84d84",["D",1784053703462],"---\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\ntags: [engineering]\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

\n",[],[202,901],"571a59ce-ffb8-49c9-a6f0-1e899541ac2f","2025-08-12-teams.md","9f1d4c78-7869-11f0-a25b-0224a6c84d84",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: Val Town for Teams\ndescription: Bring Val Town to work\npubDate: 2025-08-13T00:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Steve Krouse\ntags: [product]\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\n",[],[202,908],"2e47f085-4cce-41dd-8db2-8084ee372852","2025-08-12-clay.md","6387a1c2-77a1-11f0-948b-0224a6c84d84",["D",1784053703462],"---\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\ntags: [engineering]\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.",[],[202,915],"215efea6-2bfd-4d42-939c-89ded9ce58e5","2025-07-30-vibe-code.md","464a18f0-6d7f-11f0-95da-0224a6c84d84",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: Vibe code is legacy code\ndescription: Code that nobody understands is tech debt\npubDate: 2025-07-30T00:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Steve Krouse\ntags: [essay]\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._",[],[202,922],"c15f7b55-5012-4a1f-9169-a19b87709bca","2025-06-11-townie-credits.md","6c19acea-6338-11f0-aab7-0224a6c84d84",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: Introducing Townie Credits\ndescription: Townie is now pay-per-use\npubDate: 2025-06-11T00:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Steve Krouse\ntags: [product]\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)",[],[202,929],"f7dc195f-4c0a-4e55-b1d9-797fd8a57439","2025-06-03-newsletter-25.md","ec10da5a-407d-11f0-b7d1-76b3cceeab13",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: Val Town 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\ntags: [newsletter]\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.",[],[202,936],"4ee4bf0f-916c-4d38-9ea7-fd130eca76b2","2025-05-23-glitch.md","8ff9812e-381f-11f0-9656-9e149126039e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: Val Town for Glitch Users\ndescription: Saying goodbye to a platform we admired\npubDate: 2025-05-23T00:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Tom MacWright\ntags: [company]\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/).\n",[],[202,943],"f5453282-fecd-402f-a079-18057b557b9a","2025-04-23-upgrading.md","8338dce4-2057-11f0-94b0-569c3dd06744",["D",1784053703462],40,"---\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\ntags: [product]\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.\n",[],[202,950],"08e34bd5-5b5c-44d4-a2f3-c5e531f6182f","2025-04-08-migration.md","a7fa1b74-5082-4373-b28e-40d99c703083",["D",1784053703462],231,"---\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\"\ntags: [engineering]\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.\n",[],[202,958],"fa50f3ce-4068-401c-8b27-b11c251deda2","2025-04-02-post-mortem-db-migration.md","28e04aea-1001-11f0-aea6-569c3dd06744",["D",1784053703462],"---\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\ntags: [engineering]\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.\n",[],[202,966],"a54ca0c1-5eb2-4e2a-863d-c41704981d10","2025-03-27-api-conundrum.md","86bebec2-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: Solving the internal / external API riddle\ndescription: >-\n Figuring out how to provide an API that's usable by everyone and fast for us\n to iterate on\npubDate: '2025-03-27T04:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: Tom MacWright\ntags: [engineering]\n---\n\nI've been thinking about that [APIs and applications](https://macwright.com/2024/06/21/apis-and-applications) question again for [Val Town](https://www.val.town/). We're trying to resolve two priorities: rapidly developing features, and providing an API for our users. As it turns out, some of our tools are well-suited for rapid development, and others shine when creating externally-consumable REST APIs, but we haven't found a way to do both yet.\n\n## Rapid application development\n\nFor application development, we want to move as fast as possible. A lot of pull requests include both a feature in our [Remix](https://remix.run/)-based frontend and some backend functionality, either in Remix loaders, a [tRPC](https://trpc.io/) route, or, less often, a new route in the [Fastify](https://fastify.dev/) server that powers our [public API](https://docs.val.town/openapi).\n\nSpecifically, the workflow of using tRPC and Remix is pretty spectacular: their homepage example tells most of the story. You write a method on the backend and the frontend tRPC client is immediately able to call it with the correct TypeScript types for both inputs & outputs. It all works without code generation, and minimal boilerplate. The developer experience is extraordinary.\n\n## A public API\n\nOn the other hand, we're also trying to give our users the ability to build on the Val Town platform in all kinds of new ways. When we introduce something like [Projects](https://blog.val.town/blog/projects/), we want users to be able to programmatically create projects and files within them. Our [SDK](https://github.com/val-town/sdk) should let them do that on day one. But right now, it doesn't: we built the application interface for projects using tRPC and Remix, and then implemented the same with Fastify so that we have an [OpenAPI spec](https://www.openapis.org/) that includes it, and then we can generate our SDK with that OpenAPI spec.\n\n## Trying to do both\n\nCould we both iterate quickly on the application layer _and_ provide a lot of functionality programmatically to users? Possibly! But there are a lot of dragons here.\n\n- **Remix loaders** are definitely not a public API. Since the introduction of [Single Fetch](https://remix.run/docs/en/main/guides/single-fetch), loaders don't even output JSON, but they use [turbo-stream](https://github.com/jacob-ebey/turbo-stream). Remix loaders definitely aren’t the REST model.\n- **tRPC is probably a bad way to implement OpenAPI.** tRPC _does technically kinda support OpenAPI_ [via trpc-to-openapi](https://www.npmjs.com/package/trpc-to-openapi), but the first-party [support is archived](https://github.com/trpc/trpc-openapi) and the fork doesn't have much uptake, so this is really a fringe ability that I wouldn't count on. We've experimented with allowing people to make programmatic requests against our tRPC routes, but this always ended up in disappointment. The actual requests and formats that tRPC uses for communication are an implementation detail. tRPC is not a REST provider.\n- **Building Fastify routes and generating SDKs for every feature, before we can even start on frontend development** would introduce a tremendous amount of friction into our development process and create a waterflow between API design and frontend implementation. Imagine having to write a REST API method, merge and deploy it, generate a new SDK and release it as an NPM module, just to install that new SDK version into the application and start building a frontend feature.\n- **The OpenAPI specification [does not support Server-Sent Events](https://github.com/OAI/OpenAPI-Specification/discussions/4171)**. Thankfully, Stainless, which helps us produce our SDKs, [has its own support](https://app.stainless.com/docs/guides/configure#sse-streaming), but it's disappointing that such a central specification for designing APIs won't actually be able to describe our current API surface in full.\n- **Batching is good and we'll lose it.** [tRPC supports batching requests](https://trpc.io/docs/v9/links), and [Remix’s Single Fetch batches requests for nested loaders](https://remix.run/docs/en/main/guides/single-fetch). This is a real benefit for frontend applications like Val Town: we tend to make a lot of HTTP requests, and request overhead is a real problem. Generic request batching is not something you can do with OpenAPI or any of these generated clients.\n\n## Survey of the solution space\n\nHere's a quick table survey of the solution space that I'm aware of:\n\n| Library | OpenAPI | RPC | Maturity |\n| --------------------------------------------------- | ------- | --- | -------- |\n| [tRPC](https://trpc.io/) | ⛔️ | ✅ | A |\n| [Remix](https://remix.run/) | ⛔️ | ✅ | A |\n| [Fastify](https://fastify.dev/) | ✅ | ⛔️ | A |\n| [oRPC](https://orpc.unnoq.com/) | ✅ | ✅ | C |\n| [stl-api](https://github.com/stainless-api/stl-api) | ✅ | ✅ | F |\n| [Hono](https://hono.dev/) | ✅ | ✅ | A |\n\nAs you can see, there are a few systems that try to provide first-class support for _both_ REST-based APIs that we can generate an SDK around, and RPC-like clients with which we can iterate quickly. Unfortunately, Hono, the most established option and one I'm pretty optimistic about - which supports both [OpenAPI](https://hono.dev/examples/zod-openapi) and [RPC](https://hono.dev/docs/guides/rpc#rpc) - has a [fairly severe bug for using the two together](https://github.com/honojs/hono/issues/2525). [oRPC](https://orpc.unnoq.com/) is extremely promising, but a [new and fairly single-handed effort](https://github.com/unnoq/orpc/graphs/contributors). [stl-api](https://github.com/stainless-api/stl-api) is interesting, but in an alpha stage of development with no releases yet and very little development happening.\n\n## Outlook\n\nWe're going to experiment with a strategy to build our SDKs quickly and locally so that we can develop frontend features against the Fastify server. In parallel, I'll probably kick the tires on oRPC and Hono as alternative approaches to this problem.\n\nDecisions like this can cause a lot of churn, which hurts development momentum and makes it harder for everyone to understand the codebase, so it's a decision we're making pretty methodically and incrementally.\n\nHave you seen good solutions to this problem? Let us know!\n",[],[202,973],"02fc93e9-d0ed-4ffe-a0fa-b9fb22d32b7a","2025-03-03-val-town-newsletter-24.md","86be5d06-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: Val Town Newsletter 24\ndescription: >-\n Val Town Projects, Highlight to edit, Logs redesign, Public endpoints with\n private code, and much more\npubDate: '2025-03-03T05:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: Steve Krouse\ntags: [newsletter]\n---\n\n[Val Town Projects](#val-town-projects) have landed. If you like vals, you are going to _love_ Projects. We also shipped [Highlight to Edit with AI](#highlight-to-edit-with-ai), [redesigned Logs](#logs-redesign), enabled [public HTTP endpoints with private code](#public-endpoints-with-private-code), and much more.\n\nThis month, we're fixing many of the frictions y'all are reporting with Projects. Most excitingly, we're [building a CLI to let you edit your Val Town Projects locally](#roadmap), so you can use your favorite text editor and AI tools, like Cursor and Windsurf.\n\nAs always, the highlight of this newsletter is the [community vals](#-community-vals-and-projects). We're so inspired by the creativity of the things you're building. Keep it up!\n\n## Val Town Projects\n\nVal Town Projects unlock a whole new level of complexity for what you can build in Val Town.\n\nIn this video, I demo a Val Town Project that lets you download the source of any Val Town Project as a zip file. I fork the project, run it on my account, edit it to list a smaller, random number of projects, and send a pull request – all in 60 seconds.\n\n

\n\nVal Town Projects are groups of vals versioned collectively and deployed on our serverless platform. They support powerful workflows, such as feature branches and pull requests, that make it easy to build production applications with the classic Val Town simplicity and lightness.\n\nLearn more about Val Town Projects in our [announcement post](../projects) and [docs](https://docs.val.town/projects/).\n\n## Highlight to Edit with AI\n\nWe've [yet again](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/fast-follow) built a popular way to code with AI into Val Town. Select text in any val and then click Edit or Cmd+L to ask AI to rewrite that section of code.\n\n

\n\nThis solves the problem with Townie rewriting too much or our completions not rewriting enough. Now you can highlight exactly what you want edited.\n\nHuge shout-out to the folks at [Marimo](https://marimo.io/) for open-sourcing [this CodeMirror plugin](https://marimo-team.github.io/codemirror-ai/)!\n\n## Logs Redesign\n\nWe've redesigned our logs to be easier to read and navigate – with powerful filters to help you find what you're looking for fast.\n\n

\n\nThe new logs pair beautifully with Val Town Projects, letting you view all the logs across a project at once.\n\n## Public endpoints with private code\n\nAt long last, we've updated val privacy permissions to made it easy for you to create public HTTP endpoints, while keeping your code private.\n\n

\n\nNow `Private` keeps your code private, but your HTTP endpoint open. We've grandfathered old `Private` HTTP endpoints into a `Legacy Private` permission, which preserves the previous behavior by keeping the HTTP endpoint closed.\n\nYou can learn more about val privacy states [in our docs](https://docs.val.town/reference/permissions/). Thanks Robin Sloan, Matt Marcus, and Achille Lacoin for requesting this upgrade 🙏\n\n## Client-side errors in the HTTP preview\n\nIf your Val Town code throws an error on the server, you will see that in our beautifully-redesigned logs. But if your code throws an error on the client side, you'd have to seek in the browser console.\n\nNow, we surface those client-side errors right in bottom of the HTTP preview, so you can see them right where you're working:\n\n

\n\nTo enable this, add this to your HTML:\n\n```html\n\n```\n\nWe've instructed Townie to do this for you automatically for the last couple months (to enable its auto-detection of client-side errors), so some of your vals may already have it installed.\n\n## Markdown editor line-wrapping\n\nYou can now choose to wrap lines in our Markdown editor.\n\n

\n\n## Projects API\n\nThe Val Town Projects Read API is out in beta. You can now list and retrieve public or your own projects and their branches and files. Here are the routes we currently support:\n\n```http\nGET /v1/projects/{project_id}\nGET /v1/projects\nGET /v1/projects/{project_id}/branches/{branch_id}\nGET /v1/projects/{project_id}/branches\nGET /v1/projects/{project_id}/files\nGET /v1/projects/{project_id}/files/{path}\nGET /v1/projects/{project_id}/files/{path}/content\nGET /v1/alias/projects/{username}/{project_name}\n```\n\nIt's already been useful. For example, [the Project that lets you download Projects as zips](https://www.val.town/x/shouser/getProjectsAsZips) is built on our these routes.\n\nYou can view the [API docs](https://docs.val.town/openapi#tag/beta) and [SDK docs](https://github.com/val-town/sdk/blob/6f80c8470f055aa30c5c3cc34fcf715c81df1937/api.md#projects-1) to get started.\n\n## Other updates\n\n- Increased the timeout of script, cron, and email vals on Pro from 5 to 10 min – thanks Nathaneal Silverman for requesting this 🙏\n- Logs show up immediately after a val starts running\n- Fixed a bug where crons would very rarely run twice – thanks Nathaneal Silverman and Sean Piefayth for reporting this 🙏\n- `townie.new?prompt=` and `val.town/townie?prompt=` let you link someone to a new Townie chat with the input box pre-filled – thanks to our friends at Braintrust for requesting this and Nico for making [a Raycast extension for it](https://x.com/nbbaier/status/1895523509104959513) 🙏\n- Ask you to name vals, files, and folders before creating them with random names\n- Added a beautiful heart animation when you like a val\n- Silence a particularly annoying JSX error in the TypeScript editor\n- Moved the val full-screen editor button from the top nav to inside your profile menu\n- Improved the error message when a val hits the timeout limit\n- Improved the error message when you try to schedule a val more frequently than every 15 min on the Free plan\n- Enabled `esModuleInterop` in the TypeScript editor\n- Improved the security of your stored env variables\n- Fixed a bug in our rate-limiter\n- Fixed bug that prevented you from deleting comments on your vals\n- Improved the subject line of notification emails\n- Updated our onboarding survey to better personalize your experience\n\n## Roadmap\n\nWe have [a new perspective building for AI coding at Val Town](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFBfliNf9C4). We have paused all Townie development in favor of building out the Projects API and a CLI to edit vals locally, so you can edit vals from Cursor, Windsurf, VSCode, vim, etc.\n\nHere's what we're working on next:\n\n- Projects Write API\n- Val Town Projects CLI\n- Redesigned account-wide logs\n- Customizable `val.run` domains for Project HTTP vals\n- Faster & scalable runtime\n- Bug fixes to our in-browser TypeScript editor\n- Improved code search\n- Metrics to track your usage and limits\n- Comments on pull requests\n- Team accounts\n- SOC2 compliance\n- …and much more!\n\nPlease [make feature requests and vote](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions?discussions) on what you'd like to see next.\n\n## 🌟 Community vals and projects\n\n- We have a new [Community Showcase](https://www.val.town/explore/community-showcase) page to highlight some community vals and projects we feel inspired by. Go give these vals a like and a fork!\n- [Paul](https://www.val.town/u/pinjasaur) reimplemented [source.unsplash.com with Val Town](https://paul.af/reimplementing-unsplash-source)\n- [Linus Lee](https://www.val.town/u/thesephist) made an [Email Research Agent](https://www.val.town/x/thesephist/researchAgent), a lightweight wrapper around Perplexity's Sonar API\n- [spag](https://spag.cc/) is an awesome tool for uploading and sharing files for music livecoding, made by [Lu Wilson](https://www.val.town/u/todepond) & [Pasta Gang](https://www.pastagang.cc/). You can see all their server code hosted on [spag](https://www.val.town/v/todepond/spag), [spagUpload](https://www.val.town/v/todepond/spagUpload), [spagDelete](https://www.val.town/v/todepond/spagDelete), and [spagList](https://www.val.town/v/todepond/spagList).\n- [Jamie](https://www.val.town/u/jamiedubs) from [Glif](https://glif.app/) made a [Discord bot](https://www.val.town/v/jamiedubs/linkifyDiscordBot) to linkify messages in Discord\n- [Steve](https://www.val.town/u/stevekrouse) wrote about how he [proposed to his girlfriend in Quordle](https://stevekrouse.com/proposal)\n- [Jordan](https://www.val.town/u/katzenj) made a val to parse [Goodreads' RSS feed](https://www.jordankatzen.com/posts/notes/goodreads-rss/) to power his [/reading](https://www.jordankatzen.com/reading/) page\n- We made a new set of [utils to help you build Projects more quickly](https://www.val.town/x/std/utils/), including reading files, serving files, writing tests, etc\n- [Max](https://www.val.town/u/maxm) from Val Town made a status page to check the [statuses of all of Val Town's downstream providers](https://www.val.town/x/maxm/status_status) to help him when PagerDuty wakes him up at 3am\n- [Em](https://www.val.town/u/stainless_em) from [Stainless](https://www.stainless.com/) made [Regex to Brainrot](https://www.val.town/v/stainless_em/regexToBrainrot), which gives you entertaining explanations for regex\n- [Jose Foronda](https://www.val.town/u/joseforonda) made a [Bolivian news digest for social researchers](https://www.val.town/v/joseforonda/newsletter) with Google Gemini\n- [Seflless](https://www.val.town/u/seflless) made a val to [parse Amazon order emails](https://www.val.town/v/seflless/parseAmazonOrderEmail)\n- There were so many adorable forks of [@mewtru's](https://www.val.town/v/mewtru/valentine) [Valentine's card val](https://www.val.town/v/mewtru/valentine) including these from [iLegacyy](https://www.val.town/v/iLegacyy/valentine), [saeed0x53](https://www.val.town/v/saeed0x53/valentine), [arshs13](https://www.val.town/v/arshs13/valentine), [dtang18](https://www.val.town/v/dtang18/willumarrymeoratleastbemyvalentine), [risha_narayanan](https://www.val.town/v/risha_narayanan/valentine), [DannieP](https://www.val.town/v/DannieP/BeMyValentines), and [wabidu](https://www.val.town/v/wabidu/valentine) ❤️\n- [Alex](https://www.val.town/u/genco) from [OneSignal](https://onesignal.com/) made [a queue](https://www.val.town/v/genco/q) and [unique table](https://www.val.town/v/genco/uniq) in Val Town SQLite\n- [Juleeyet](https://www.val.town/u/juleeyet) made a [Language Translator](https://www.val.town/v/juleeyet/LanguageTranslator)\n- [Varun](https://www.val.town/u/varun1352), a grad student at NYU, made a [conversational AI app](https://www.val.town/v/varun1352/AlwaysHere) built with Cerebras\n- [Max](https://www.val.town/u/mbo) from Canva made a [Neocities hit counter](https://www.val.town/v/mbo/neocities_hit_counter)\n- [Geordie](https://www.val.town/u/geordie) created a [Bandcamp CSV processor](https://www.val.town/v/geordie/bandcampcsvprocessor) that processes Bandcamp Sales Reports.\n- [webmonk](https://www.val.town/u/webmonk) made [SmartQuiz](https://www.val.town/v/webmonk/SmartQuiz), an AI-powered quiz generator\n- [Em](https://www.val.town/u/stainless_em) also made a [memoization function](https://www.val.town/v/stainless_em/memoizeByVersion) and an [HTTP cache](https://www.val.town/v/stainless_em/httpCache) to store and retrieve HTTP responses\n- [Steve](https://www.val.town/u/stevekrouse) made a [\"Run on Val Town\"](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/badge) badge for the [Steel TypeScript starter project](https://github.com/steel-dev/steel-cookbook/tree/main/examples/steel-puppeteer-starter)\n- [@g](https://www.val.town/u/g) made a [text-to-speech app](https://www.val.town/v/g/textToSpeechApp)\n- [Kyle](https://www.val.town/u/kbremner) made a [val](https://www.val.town/v/kbremner/storeEmailLinks) that extracts and stores links from emails\n- [Ankur](https://www.val.town/u/s3thi) made a [bookmark sync tool](https://www.val.town/v/s3thi/syncBookmarks) to keep bookmarks consistent across multiple browsers and save them\n- [Victor](https://www.val.town/u/vawogbemi) made [helper functions for building with Twilio](https://www.val.town/x/vawogbemi/TwilioHelperFunctions)\n- [@Skeye](https://www.val.town/u/Skeye) made an [RSS reader](https://www.val.town/v/Skeye/CRON_JavascriptWeekly_RSS_Reader) for the JavaScript Weekly newsletter\n- [@kailhus](https://www.val.town/u/kailhus) made a [Mixcloud live check](https://val.town/v/kailhus/checkMixcloudIsLive) to determine if a specific Mixcloud channel is live\n- [Joey](https://www.val.town/u/jhiller) made a [sauna temperature dashboard](https://val.town/v/jhiller/saunaTemperatureDashboard) that displays real-time temperature data from his sauna\n- [@panphora](https://www.val.town/u/panphora) made a [Bluesky phrase tracker](https://www.val.town/v/panphora/bsky_phrase_tracker) to monitor mentions via email\n- [@jxxe](https://www.val.town/u/jxxe) made [LetMeIntoLinear](https://www.val.town/v/jxxe/LetMeIntoLinear), to snatch a spot in the Linear Algebra course at Brown\n- [Wolf](https://www.val.town/u/wolf) made a [Bing Image of the Day history tracker](https://val.town/v/wolf/bingImageOfDayHistory)\n- [Steve](https://www.val.town/u/stevekrouse) and Rich Harris made a [Svelte starter template](https://val.town/v/stevekrouse/svelteStarter) for Projects\n- [Justin](https://www.val.town/u/rowdypow) made [Neighbor Solutions](https://val.town/v/rowdypow/neighborsolutions), a platform for connecting neighbors and sharing local resources.\n- [@hilmanski](https://www.val.town/u/hilmanski) made a [Google Rank Tracker](https://www.val.town/v/hilmanski/Google_Rank_Tracker) to monitor website rankings for specific keywords.\n- [John](https://www.val.town/u/johndevor) built [Globe](https://www.val.town/v/johndevor/Globe), a 3D globe visualization using Three.js to display country information.\n- [wilt](https://www.val.town/u/wilt) created an [email to Discord webhook](https://val.town/v/wilt/emailToDiscordWebhook) that forwards incoming emails to a Discord channel.",[],[202,980],"77a9e688-cdb4-43ca-8142-c5f4a7088ca0","2025-01-31-projects.md","86be19ae-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: Introducing Val Town Projects\ndescription: >-\n Dramatically increasing the scope of what you can build in Val Town, Projects\n are groups of vals, files, and folders, versioned collectively\npubDate: '2025-01-31T05:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: Steve Krouse\ntags: [product]\n---\n\n*Since we published this blog post, we decided to unify our two primitives—vals and projects—into a single primitive: the **val**, with the best features of both. Read more about how we are upgrading all vals on our platform [here](/upgrading).*\n\n

\"Yonge — \n [Yonge Street Toronto](https://www.val.town/x/vawogbemi/yongeStreetToronto),\n a blog & newsletter project by [Victor](https://www.val.town/u/vawogbemi)\n

\n\nToday we're releasing Val Town Projects in public beta to unlock a whole new level of complexity for what you can build in Val Town. Projects are groups of vals, files, and folders that are versioned collectively, and deployed on our serverless platform. They support powerful workflows, such as feature branches, that make it easy to build and deploy large applications.\n\n## Vals are too small\n\nProjects solve the biggest problem with Val Town: vals are too small. A [val](https://docs.val.town/vals/) is just a single file.\n\nDespite that, you all have built incredible things with vals. Recently we've seen [a transcription app](https://www.val.town/v/yawnxyz/scribe), [a p2p file transfer service](https://www.val.town/v/loading/file), [a Linear & Github daily LLM summarizer](https://www.val.town/v/danphilibin/what_did_i_work_on_today), [citizen data journalism](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1854255504681210055), and [much](https://blog.val.town/blog/val-town-newsletter-23/#-community-vals) [more](https://blog.val.town/blog/val-town-newsletter-22/#-community-vals).\n\nBut vals become unwieldy after a couple hundred lines of code. The pain is especially acute when using an LLM to edit or rewrite hundreds of lines in a single val file.\n\n

\"A — \n [A Personal CRM](https://www.val.town/v/juecd/CRM) by [Catherine\n Jue](https://www.val.town/u/juecd) - built mostly by Townie AI. It became\n unwieldy after a thousand lines.\n

\n\nUnfortunately, things get _worse_ if you break up a single val into multiple vals that import each other. For example, I broke up the [Date Me Directory](https://val.town/v/stevekrouse/dateme), an alternative dating website, into a handful of vals, one for each page in the site. Whenever I want to make a change without affecting production, I need to manually fork each of those vals one-by-one, and then manually update all the imports in each of them to point to the forked versions. Then getting the changes back into the production vals was similarly miserable.\n\n

\n\nInstead most users either stuff all their code into a single super long val or just made all their changes directly to their main production vals (sometimes breaking it briefly). Or they moved off Val Town entirely. We needed a solution to dramatically increase the scope of what you can build on Val Town.\n\n## Enter Val Town Projects\n\nVal Town Projects are groups of vals, files, and folders that are versioned, branched, forked, and merged collectively. With Projects, you can create feature branches and test changes without affecting production.\n\nAs you may know, Val Town deploys your code in 100ms. This is a magical way to code _directly in the cloud_ – [instead of on localhost and deploying to the cloud later](https://dx.tips/the-end-of-localhost). This kind of live feedback loop is incredibly fun. It's almost addicting. It also means that you are building in the exact same environment that you deploy in, cutting out all the complexity of managing multiple environments.\n\nBut just because you're deploying to the _cloud_ on every save doesn't mean you want to deploy to _production_ on every save. Val Town Project branches give you the best of both worlds: you can rapidly prototype in the exact same environment that you'll deploy to, but without affecting production. It's like localhost and PR previews had a baby: super fast iteration cycles, paired with immediately hosted URLs you can share.\n\nAnd the final kicker is scale. Once your app is running on Val Town, it's fully deployed and you can rest easy. You don't have to worry about provisioning more or less compute: our serverless platform will automatically scale your app to handle any number of users. To be clear, our Scale Plan is slated to launch in Q2 2025. Currently, Val Town scales to 100k and 1m runs per day on [the Free and Pro plans](https://www.val.town/pricing), respectively.\n\n## Projects are not git repos\n\nWe considered building Projects as git repos, but decided that becoming a git host at scale was too much complexity for the small subset of git's features that we wanted (diffs, branches, merges). We realized that it'd be much simpler to build our own version control system.\n\nThis sounds like sacrilege – even to us. Everyone at Val Town is a happy git user. Yet if you think about it, many pro tools had to build their own version control, including Google Docs, Figma, and Notion. We feel heartened to hear how speculative and uncertain this decision felt at Figma – to build their own multiplayer system instead of using OTs (operational transforms), which was the standard at the time given its success in Google Docs.\n\n\n\n> As a startup we value the ability to ship features quickly, and OTs were unnecessarily complex for our problem space. So we built a custom multiplayer system that's simpler and easier to implement.\n>\n> At the time, we weren’t sure building this feature was the right product decision. No one was clamoring for a multiplayer design tool—if anything, people hated the idea.\n>\n> ...Our bet paid off, and these days it’s obvious that multiplayer is the way all productivity tools on the web should work, not just design.\n>\n> – Evan Wallace, Co-founder, Figma, [_How Figma’s multiplayer technology works_](https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology-works/)\n\nWe too built something that nobody was clamoring for, but that we hope will seem obvious in the retrospect. Experienced programmers will feel right at home in Val Town Projects – branching, forking, merging, and pull requesting – collaborating directly within the same platform that you're iterating and deploying on.\n\nNew programmers might never need to learn git at all. I can still remember the frustration of learning git for the first time, and I'm excited to think that we might be able to save a new generation of programmers from that pain. Particularly in this new age of LLM programming, we think there's an opportunity to build something simpler.\n\nAnd if you really need git, Projects are git-friendly, so we will soon build a way to sync them to and from a git repo. We're racing to release a Beta API for Projects, which will allow you to have full control over your source code, sync to and from a git repo, and wherever else you want.\n\nLearn more about Val Town Projects [here in our docs](https://docs.val.town/projects).\n\n## What you can build\n\nUp till now, Val Town has excelled at small pieces of code, such as little integrations and automations, such as [social media monitoring, data sync, and single-page sites](https://www.val.town/examples/use-cases). We're excited to see what you can build with a much larger scope in Projects, such as:\n\n- internal tools\n- durable workflows\n- a backend for your app\n- API prototypes – like [Campsite](https://www.campsite.com/blog/how-we-prototype-integrations-with-val-town), [Glif](https://www.val.town/u/jamiedubs)\n- a starter template for your API – like [PostHog](https://posthog.com/tutorials/rss-item-capture), [Framer](https://www.framer.com/developers/fetch/examples), [tldraw](https://x.com/tldraw/status/1869770077828272134), [Browserbase](https://www.val.town/u/browserbase),\n- multi-page, full-stack apps\n\nWe want to highlight the biggest Project built so far. [Nathanael](https://nates.foo/about) is building [JournalGroove](https://www.journalgroove.org/), an app to help people get more insight from their journaling practice. The frontend of the app is simply Notion, and the backend is hosted on Val Town. Nathanael has a series of [cron vals](https://docs.val.town/vals/cron/) that run throughout the day to process your latest journal entries and deliver personalized, AI-generated reports back into your private Notion space.\n\nBefore Projects, Nathanael had dozens of vals scattered across folders, and versioned separately. He was able to migrate them all into a single Val Town Project in about 30 minutes.\n\n

\"\" — \n [JournalGroove](https://www.journalgroove.org/) - a project to help people\n get more insight from their journaling practice by [Nathanael\n Silverman](https://nates.foo/about)\n

\n\n> \"Val Town enabled me to grow this from an idea into a fully-fledged project much faster than I would have expected. I like that Projects are separate from my other random vals. And I look forward to using branches, eventually collaborating with other people.\"\n>\n> \\- [Nathanael Silverman](https://nates.foo/about)\n\n## Start building\n\nYou can start building with Projects right now.\n\n

\n\nWe can't wait to see what you build! If you're new to Val Town, you can [sign up free here](https://www.val.town/auth/signup).\n",[],[202,987],"a745c90b-da0a-4019-ae2a-bf8a069ba40c","2025-01-22-val-town-newsletter-23.md","86bdbacc-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: Val Town Newsletter 23\ndescription: 'Projects beta, Deno 2, Use cases, and more'\npubDate: '2025-01-22T05:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: Steve Krouse\ntags: [newsletter]\n---\n\n🥳 Happy 2025! Last year, our product grew from a JavaScript playground to a stable FaaS (Functions as a Service) platform that thousands of engineers use in personal and professional contexts. Some highlights from 2024:\n\n- Raised [our seed round](/seed)\n- [Max](https://maxmcd.com/), [Jackson](https://jxnblk.com/), [Justin](https://just-be.dev/), [Sophie](https://sophiehouser.com/), and [Charmaine](https://www.charmaineklee.com/) joined our team\n- Our infra became [fast](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions/113#discussioncomment-10813787) and stable\n- Launched [Townie](/townie), a shockingly useful code assistant\n- 23k of you made 135k vals that've run 214m times\n\nWe have big plans for 2025. By the end of this year, we aim to be a mature cloud platform that serious engineering organizations use for core infrastructure. Here's some of the highlights:\n\n- Projects – groups of vals, files folders – with forks & 3-ways merges (currently in private beta)\n- Scalable infra & usage-based billing\n- Team accounts for companies to collaborate\n- Improvements to Discovery, Search, Townie, Observability\n- Continuing to [fast-follow with LLMs](/fast-follow/)\n- SOC 2\n\nWe have two new additions to the Val Town team! [Sophie](https://sophiehouser.com/) is a designer, programmer, and artist, who just moved from Berlin to join us here in Brooklyn. She's best-known for [a viral app she made as a teenager](https://sophiehouser.com/tampon-run-), but most recently worked with Nike and Delivery Hero. [Charmaine](https://www.charmaineklee.com/) is a technical product manager, with a deep background in developer tools. She's worked at Snapchat, Unity Labs, and Microsoft. We're thrilled to have them both on board.\n\n## Val Projects Beta\n\nVals are great for small projects, but what if you want to build something bigger?\n\n**Introducing Val Projects**, a new way to organize multiple vals, files, and folders into a single place. Where a Val Town Val is like a GitHub Gist, a Val Town Project is like a GitHub Repo.\n\n $\"Val$ \n\nProjects support:\n\n- Static assets, like images, videos, CSS, HTML, and more\n- Multiple files and folders\n- Scoped environment variables (that code outside the project _can't_ access)\n\nProjects will soon support:\n\n- Branches, forking, pull requests, and three-way merges\n- Townie, with the ability to understand and edit multiple files\n\nProjects are currently in private beta. We're looking for more passionate Val Town users to try it out and give feedback. If you're a Pro user, please reach out to steve@val.town, and we'll add you to the beta.\n\n## Templates\n\n\"What can I do with Val Town?\" We get this question a lot, so we made [a page to help answer it](https://www.val.town/examples/use-cases).\n\n $\"Val$ \n\n[Check it out](https://www.val.town/examples/use-cases) and see if it sparks any ideas for you! Maybe you'll find a val that's perfect for your needs and you can fork it and make it your own. If you don't find what you're looking for, let us know. If you want to submit a val to be included, we'd love that too!\n\n## Upgraded to Deno 2\n\n[Deno 2](https://deno.com/blog/v2.0) is out, and Val Town is now running it. We're currently on Deno v2.1.2, but you can always check which version we're running [here](https://www.val.town/v/std/deno_version).\n\nIn addition to some performance and security upgrades, Deno 2 also includes a couple exciting features:\n\n- `process` and `Buffer` are now globally available, which means you don't have to import them anymore, which increases compatibility with Node.js code ([example](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/processBufferDeno2Example))\n- WebAssembly imports are supported out-of-the-box ([example](https://www.val.town/v/just_be/deno2wasmExample))\n\n## Updated pricing\n\nWe made three changes to our pricing:\n\n1. We now have a yearly plan for $100! This is a 20% discount on our monthly plan 🥳\n2. We've explicitly listed custom domains on the Pro plan, with a limit of 10\n3. We've changed the val runs limits from per minute to per day. Now you get:\n - Free: 100k runs / day\n - Pro: 1m runs / day\n\n $\"Val$ \n\nOne final word to the wise: we plan to increase our pricing soon, but existing customers will keep the same price, so sign up soon!\n\n## Blogs, podcasts, and livestreams\n\nThere's been a lot of great content about Val Town recently, a podcast, a livestream, 5 blogs, and (unfortunately) 2 post-mortems:\n\n- 📺 [Every Podcast: Do a 60-Minute Coding Task in 60-seconds](https://x.com/danshipper/status/1864324178901651828) with Steve Krouse\n- 📺 [Finsweet livestream: Exploring Val Town to supercharge your Webflow projects ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm-yqc8Hve8) ft. Steve Krouse\n- 📝 [Turning data into calendar feeds](https://mattrossman.com/2025/01/06/turning-data-into-calendar-feeds) by Matt Rossman about how to get any data onto any calendar app supports iCal (which is all of them) super quickly\n- 📝 [Reimplementing Unsplash Source](https://paul.af/reimplementing-unsplash-source) by Paul Esch-Laurent about reimplementing the now discontinued Unsplash Source API\n- 📝 [Using Val Town to chart dependency bloat](https://blog.val.town/blog/devstats/) by Tom MacWright about [Devstats](https://www.val.town/v/tmcw/devstats), a val lets you post statistics from your GitHub Actions runs to build charts of change over time\n- 📝 [Bandcamp wrapped](https://macwright.com/2024/12/06/bandcamp-wrapped) by Tom MacWright about a val that generates a Spotify Wrapped-style report for your Bandcamp purchases\n- 📝 [What we learned copying all the best code assistants](https://blog.val.town/blog/fast-follow/) by Steve Krouse\n- 📝 [Post-mortem: esm.sh breaking changes](https://blog.val.town/blog/post-mortem-esm-sh/) – esm.sh unexpectedly released breaking changes that impacted 2% of Val Town users\n- 📝 [Post-mortem: Exhausted Host Connection Pool](https://blog.val.town/post-mortem-host-connection-pool) – one of our servers had degraded performance due to a deadlock\n\n## Other updates\n\n- The logged-in Val Town homepage is now the dashboard, which shows your recent vals and projects. You can find the old homepage at [val.town/home](https://www.val.town/home).\n- We updated val Run & Save buttons to be easier to find, and provide more immediate feedback\n\n## 🛣️ Roadmap\n\n- Val Projects\n- Faster & scalable runtime\n- Observability upgrades: searchable & filterable logs and traces\n- Metrics to track your usage and limits\n- New Explore page for discovering vals\n- Improved code search\n- Comments on pull requests\n- Team accounts\n- Ability to follow a Val Town user\n- SOC2 compliance\n- …and much more!\n\nPlease [make feature requests and vote](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions?discussions) on what you'd like to see next.\n\n## 🌟 Community vals\n\n- Steve relaunched [Cerebras Coder](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/cerebras_coder), an app that generates websites in under a second. Over 100k projects have been created with it!\n- [Paul](https://www.val.town/u/paulkinlan), who leads Chrome’s Developer Relations team, made an [Email Summary Service for newsletters](https://paul.kinlan.me/projects/email-summary-service/)\n- [Michael](https://www.val.town/u/michaelfromyeg) from Notion made a [Notion web clipper](https://x.com/michaelfromyeg/status/1873087505224089742) to save Notion content to Wallabag\n- [Ellie Huxtable](https://www.val.town/u/ellie/forks) added a [“recent listening” widget](https://x.com/ellie_huxtable/status/1866590562620420550) to their website\n- [Sam](https://www.val.town/u/samkingco) powers the “Latest YouTube video” part of his site with data from a val (post on bluesky)\n- [Bao](https://www.val.town/u/bao), an iOS engineer at Notion, created the [Cipher Challenge](https://www.val.town/v/bao/cipher), a game to decode a letter substitution cipher as quick as you can. It's even multiplayer! ([post on bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/baolei.org/post/3leqdekcylk2g))\n- [Bryce](https://www.val.town/u/amoeba) made [a daily email digest of a github repo’s activity](https://www.val.town/v/amoeba/githubRepoDailyEmailDigest) ([post on bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/stevekrouse.com/post/3ldsxj5xgrk2l))\n- [Morry](https://wttdotm.com/) made a website where people can [take pictures of his cats in his window and submit them via QR Code + email](https://x.com/WTTDOTM/status/186654745801826339)\n- [Prasham](https://www.val.town/u/prashamtrivedi) made a [Val Town README Generator](https://www.val.town/v/prashamtrivedi/valreadmegenerator) - type in your username and val’s name and it’ll generate a readme with AI you can copy and paste\n- [Max](https://www.val.town/u/maxm) used vector embeddings to get [\"vibes\" search on emojis](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/emojiInstantSearch)\n- [John](https://www.val.town/u/johnphamous) made cron vals to [snipe hard to get nintendo museum tickets](https://x.com/JohnPhamous/status/1877781209750913223)\n- [Jan](https://www.val.town/u/yawnxyz) made a [fresh - an invoice generator](https://www.val.town/v/yawnxyz/fresh)\n- [Prasham](https://www.val.town/u/prashamtrivedi) made [a calendar app for viewing ICS files](https://www.val.town/v/prashamtrivedi/icsviewer)\n- [Steve](https://www.val.town/u/stevekrouse) made a val that shows [the top 100 Val Town users by number of public vals](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/prolific) - did you make the cut? ([tweet](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1879282475823952138))\n- [Steve from tldraw](https://www.val.town/u/steveruizok) made an [example custom endpoint for tldraw computer’s data component](https://x.com/tldraw/status/1870477971519406316). Jordan agrees that [tldraw and Val Town are besties](https://bsky.app/profile/jdan.me/post/3lefgekm73s2u)\n- [Victor](https://www.val.town/u/vawogbemi/) made Let Him Cook, which lets you [query database with natural language](https://www.val.town/v/vawogbemi/lhc) via email\n- [Mixer](https://www.val.town/u/mixer) made a val to show their [Spotify Listening History](https://mixer-listening.web.val.run/)\n- [Trent](https://www.val.town/u/tr3ntg) built [a val that calls him via Twilio whenever it receives a webhook](https://www.val.town/v/tr3ntg/makeCallOnEmail)\n- [Charmaine](https://www.val.town/u/charmaine) [made Townie her personal illustrator](https://x.com/charmaine_klee/status/1880307658013466712)\n- [Steve](https://www.val.town/u/stevekrouse) made [an Anonymous doc publishing tool](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1874921337300623825)\n- [Colin](https://www.val.town/u/colin) from Zod built Josh Goldberg [a mood diary](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1865049638429946311)\n- [David](https://www.val.town/u/dthyresson) made [AI Rapped 2024](https://dthyresson-ai_rapped_2024.web.val.run/)\n- [Danny](https://www.val.town/u/postpostscript) made Interruptible Chain, a simple interface for [pausing and resuming execution chains](https://www.val.town/v/postpostscript/interruptibleChain)\n- [Vlad](https://www.val.town/u/vlad) made a val that converts [Bluesky Threads to RSS](https://vlad-blueskythreadtorss.web.val.run/)\n- [Nolen](https://www.val.town/u/itseieio) [made the opengraph image for everyuuid.com](https://x.com/itseieio/status/1866167891550179352) with [a Townie app he made](https://www.val.town/v/itseieio/opengraphImageCreator)\n- [Charmaine](https://www.val.town/u/charmaine) added a new [Reddit Keyword Alerts template](https://www.val.town/v/valdottown/templateRedditAlert) with an [SMS version](https://www.val.town/v/charmaine/redditKeywordSMS)\n- [Victor](https://www.val.town/u/vawogbemi/) made [BYOB, Build Your Own Bot](https://www.val.town/v/vawogbemi/BYOB)\n- [Boris](https://www.val.town/u/boristane/) made a [cyberpunk weather display](<(https://x.com/boristane/status/1868010048225776000)>) with Townie\n- [Jackson](https://www.val.town/u/jxnblk) made GitHub Sync to [sync vals from Val Town to GitHub and back](https://www.val.town/v/jxnblk/gitHubSync)\n- [Chet](https://www.val.town/u/chet) made a [Landscape Lighting Calculator](https://x.com/ccorcos/status/1867769136274977119) with Townie in minutes\n- Mariano [showed his users how to extend his app with a val](https://bsky.app/profile/marianoguerra.org/post/3lczyqqg6gs2y)\n- [Danny](https://www.val.town/u/postpostscript) made expiringBlob, [create-and-forget blobs using UUIDv7](https://www.val.town/v/postpostscript/expiringBlob)\n- [Adtiya](https://www.val.town/u/adiadd) from AWS made a site that [gives you ideas from arXiv papers](https://x.com/adiaddxyz/status/1871302483022426476)\n- [Peter](https://www.val.town/u/peterqliu) made a dashboard that shows [the most popular wikipedia articles in a given time range](https://peterqliu-ww_top1k_dashboard.web.val.run/)\n- [Inferable](https://www.val.town/u/inferable) made an [integration with Val Town to create AI agents](https://x.com/inferablehq/status/1879876394001555893)\n- [John](https://x.com/John__Wetzel) embraced Scott Belsky’s DIY software and made a [1000 hours outside challenge tracker](https://x.com/John__Wetzel/status/1876000610413396075)\n- [Jamie](https://www.val.town/u/jamiedubs) from [Glif](https://glif.app/) made [a val that fetches details about media files](https://www.val.town/v/jamiedubs/mediainfo) (images, video, audio, etc) using Mediainfo.js. e.g. codecs used, duration, file sizes, ID3 tags, etc.\n- [mint](https://www.val.town/u/mintexists) made a [Annas Archive/Libgen+ OPDS library catalog](https://www.val.town/v/mintexists/libgenopds) ([tweet](https://x.com/eva_exists/status/1876104402605617277))\n- [Dave](https://www.val.town/u/dave_smith) made [a holiday drink menu](https://www.val.town/v/dave_smith/holidaycocktailmenu) with Townie ([post on bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/davesmith.dev/post/3ldycgviygs2v))\n- [Dean](https://val.town/u/loading) made [a game out of captchas](https://loading-captcha.web.val.run/)\n- Ben made [a site for friends to cast predictions on the game awards](https://gameawards.mitchinson.dev) ([post on bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mitchinson.dev/post/3ld7asiu4zs23))\n- [Arfan](https://www.val.town/u/arfan) made [a kanban board todo list](https://www.val.town/v/arfan/kanbanTodoList) (as of this writing it was broken, but [this fork works](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/kanbanTodoList))\n- [dh1011](https://www.val.town/u/dh1011) made [a tool to extract important quotes from an article](https://www.val.town/v/dh1011/quoteExtractor)",[],[202,994],"4bab746f-0da7-4e3d-a9f8-5189f68a06c6","2025-01-16-post-mortem-esm-sh.md","86bd9e0c-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: 'Post-mortem: esm.sh Breaking Changes'\ndescription: >-\n Some vals experienced lockfile and React errors due to breaking changes in\n esm.sh\npubDate: '2025-01-16T05:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: Steve Krouse\ntags: [engineering]\n---\n\nYesterday [esm.sh](https://esm.sh) deployed breaking changes that caused two kinds of errors for our users: lockfile errors and client-side React errors. The first error was resolved by esm.sh rolling back the change related to React version pinning. The second error was resolved by us manually regenerating all affected lockfiles. We are working to upgrade our systems with the esm.sh maintainer to ensure this doesn't happen again.\n\n### Timeline\n\n

\n $\"Chart$ \n

\n\n- **12:00am ET** - Vals started experiencing lockfile errors. Some vals using client-side React stopped working.\n- **4:09am ET** - esm.sh maintainer [announced the changes in the Val Town Discord](https://discord.com/channels/1020432421243592714/1020432421243592717/1329014642223218741)\n- **9:36am ET** - esm.sh begins [rolling back the change related to React version pinning](https://github.com/esm-dev/esm.sh/pull/1032)\n- **10:34am ET** - All client-side React vals resume working\n- **10:39am ET** - We stopped sending unnecessary lockfile error emails to users (because the lockfiles would automatically regenerate)\n- **4:00pm ET** - We manually regenerated the lock files for all remaining affected vals. Most lockfile errors were resolved.\n\n### Impact\n\nThese breaking changes impacted approximately 2% of Val Town users.\n\n#### Lockfile errors\n\nThe lockfile errors happened the first time a val using esm.sh was run yesterday, because [esm.sh changed the URL structure of their imports](https://github.com/esm-dev/esm.sh/releases/tag/v136), which results in a lockfile integrity error.\n\nSo on first run, the val would throw an error. Then we'd send an error email to the user. Some users received many such error emails. The lockfiles would automatically regenerate, so the error emails were unnecessary. At 10:39am we decided to silence lockfile error emails.\n\nThis lockfile error would only happen the first time a val was run after the esm.sh change. However, we still wanted to prevent this error, so we manually regenerated the lockfiles for all remaining affected vals. After 5pm ET, almost all lockfile errors were resolved. We are still tracking some remaining few errors per hour that are still happening.\n\n#### Client-side React errors\n\nThe client-side React errors were unrelated to the lockfile errors, but were also bundled into the v136 esm.sh release. In v136, esm.sh stopped pinning `react-dom` to use the same version of `react` automatically, which is behavior that many vals were unintentionally relying on. This issue was more easily resolved, when by simply having [esm.sh roll back that change](https://github.com/esm-dev/esm.sh/pull/1032).\n\n### Next Steps\n\nWe take stability extremely seriously and we're sorry for the downtime this caused. We're taking steps to ensure this doesn't happen again:\n\n1. We're working with esh.sh’s creator to ensure this doesn't happen again.\n2. Longer term, we're planning to replicate all your backend dependencies on our infrastructure, so we can control any infrastructure updates that may affect val reliability. We're also exploring patterns to make frontend dependencies more reliable.\n3. Shorter term, we're going to rewrite lockfile errors to be less confusing, so that if val has integrity errors, it'll be much clearer what happened and what action you need to take, if anything.\n\nIf you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to me directly at steve@val.town.\n",[],[202,1001],"15cbc39d-7182-4240-ae6e-2ac824b14dfd","2025-01-03-fast-follow.md","86bd3534-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: What we learned copying all the best code assistants\ndescription: >-\n From GitHub Copilot to ChatGPT to Claude Artifacts, how Val Town borrowed the\n best of all the code generation tools\npubDate: '2025-01-03T05:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: Steve Krouse\ntags: [engineering]\n---\n\nSince the beginning of Val Town, our users have been clamouring for the state-of-the-art LLM code generation experience. When we launched our code hosting service in 2022, the state-of-the-art was GitHub Copilot. But soon it was ChatGPT, then Claude Artifacts, and now [Bolt](https://bolt.new/), [Cursor](https://www.cursor.com/), and [Windsurf](https://codeium.com/windsurf). We've been trying our best to keep up. Looking back over 2024, our efforts have mostly been a series of _fast-follows_, copying the innovation of others. Some have been successful, and others false-starts. This article is a historical account of our efforts, giving credit where it is due.\n\n### GitHub Copilot Completions\n\nThe story starts, of course, with GitHub Copilot. From day 1, Val Town users asked for a GitHub-Copilot-like completions experience.\n\nWe were wary of building this ourselves, but one day we stumbled upon Asad Memon’s [codemirror-copilot](https://github.com/asadm/codemirror-copilot), and hooked it up. That gave us our first taste of LLM-driven autocomplete, but behind the scenes, it was using ChatGPT. The prompt essentially asked ChatGPT to cosplay as an autocomplete service and fill in the text at the user’s cursor. So it was fairly slow, occasionally the model would forget its role and do something unexpected, and it didn't have the accuracy of a purpose-built autocomplete model.\n\nWe wanted a faster, more accurate autocomplete sytem, one that used a model trained for the task - which is technically called ['Fill in the Middle'](https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.14255). Finding an option that we could use within a product like Val Town was tricky – Copilot and most of its competitors lack documented or open APIs. But [Codeium](https://codeium.com/) did, and they also had very good accuracy and performance. We [launched Codeium completions](https://blog.val.town/blog/val-town-newsletter-16/#-codeium-completions) in April 2024 and open-sourced our [codemirror-codeium](https://github.com/val-town/codemirror-codeium) component. It's been pretty great. It's enabled by default for new users.\n\n![Codeium](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/val-town-newsletter-16/codeium.png)\n\n### ChatGPT\n\nThen came ChatGPT. We found our users asking it to write Val Town code, and copying and pasting it back into Val Town. We figured we could automate that process for our users: provide an interface with a pre-filled system prompt and a one-click way to save the generated code as a val. The [first version of Townie](https://blog.val.town/blog/val-town-newsletter-18/#-townie) was born: a simple chat interface, very much inspired by ChatGPT, powered by GPT-3.5.\n\n![Townie](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/val-town-newsletter-18/townie.png)\n\nIt was just ok. It didn't get much use, mostly because it was hard to iterate on its results. Getting good results from an LLM usually requires a conversation because programming-via-English is pretty imprecise, and you need follow-up requests to clarify your needs.\n\n### ChatGPT Tool Use\n\nEarlier this year, ChatGPT Function Calling, now called 'tool-use', was seen as the next big thing. The promise was that with a good OpenAPI spec, AI would be able to do just about anything on Val Town. So we dutifully cleaned up our OpenAPI spec, and [rebuilt Townie around it](https://blog.val.town/blog/openapi/#our-ai-townie-can-now-call-our-rest-api).\n\n\n\nIt was, ahem, fine. Function calling was a disappointment. You do all the work to provide the LLM with a strict definition of what functions it can call and with which arguments. But even with all of that, the LLM would hallucinate functions that didn't exist. Function calling has improved since, with the introduction of [Structured Outputs](https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/function-calling#structured-outputs).\n\nBut for us, the issue was that the interface was too generic. In theory, it was capable of doing anything (editing your blobs or sqlite data), but it wasn't very useful at any specific thing. Most notably, it wasn't a good interface for iterating on code. It could write a first version of code, but it wasn't optimized to let you run that code, see the output, debug it, let you ask the AI for more help. In other words, the feedback loop was bad.\n\n### Claude Artifacts\n\nWe had begun to see the potential of Claude for code generation with the amazing results produced by [Websim](https://websim.ai/). But it was the [launch of Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude Artifacts](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-5-sonnet) that really got our attention. Claude 3.5\nSonnet was dramatically better at generating code than anything we'd seen before. It blew all of our minds. And Claude Artifacts solved the tight feedback loop problem that we saw with our ChatGPT tool-use version. And thus after about a month of prototyping and building, the [current version of Townie](https://blog.val.town/blog/codegen/) was born in August 2024.\n\nFor a couple weeks there, it felt like we had one of the best tools in the space. Townie can generate a fullstack app, with a frontend, backend, and database, in minutes, and fully deployed. The space has since gotten crowded. Live by the fast follow; die by the fast follow.\n\n### Our Contributions\n\nWhile we were out in front, we invested in trying to stay there, and we made some contributions of our own that have since found there way into other tools in the space.\n\n#### Speed\n\nThe biggest problem with all current codegen systems is the speed of generation. It takes minutes to generate just a couple hundred lines of code. If you regenerate the whole file every time – which is how most systems work – that means minutes between every feedback loop. (Not to mention the cost of regenerating the whole file every time, even when you are making a small change.)\n\nWe worked hard to get the LLM producing diffs, based on [work we saw in Aider](https://aider.chat/docs/unified-diffs.html). We were able to get it working most of the time, but not reliably enough. It's now off by default, but you can ask Townie to \"reply in diff\" if you'd like to try your luck with it.\n\nOur system prompt has always been open (you can view it in your Townie settings), so you can see how we're doing that. Here's the relevant section:\n\n````md\nFollow the requirements above and respond by generating code in a format based on whether or not the user explicitly requests diff format in their most recent prompt:\n\n- If the user does not explicitly request diff format in their prompt, generate the entire val:\n Use as the basis for generating code if it is provided.\n Write code that is complete and directly runnable.\n DO NOT omit code or use comments such as \"more content here\" or \"code remains unchanged.\"\n Write the code in `val code fences.\nInclude the val type as metadata on the code fence, e.g.: `val type=script\n If this is a new val, decide what val type is appropriate based on the user's prompt. Default to choosing http type vals unless the user has requested specific functionality that requires a different type.\n\n- If the user requests diff format in their prompt, follow these steps:\n Write a valid unified diff with change hunk headers. The file headers can be omitted.\n Base the diff off of the tags below.\n Use the ```diff language code fence.\n````\n\nWe've gotten scared off of investing more time in diffs right now, but I expect it may have been solved by others in the space already, or will be shortly. Anthropic's long-rumored \"fast-edit mode\" solves this problem in one fell swoop. OpenAI launched their own [Predicted Outputs](https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/predicted-outputs), which is also compelling, but then we'd have to switch to OpenAI. Or maybe the solution is simply faster models, smaller, mini-models, or faster chips, like Groq or Cerebras. A couple weeks ago I built [Cerebras Coder](https://cerebrascoder.com) to demonstrate how powerful an instant feedback loop is for code generation. [Try it out yourself](https://cerebrascoder.com) or [fork it here](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/cerebras_coder).\n\n

\n\nDeepSeek [recently open-sourced an almost-Sonnet-3.5-level model that's twice as fast and trained for only $6m](https://x.com/deepseek_ai/status/1872242657348710721). A boy can dream of a world where Sonnet-3.5-level codegen (or even smarter!) is available on a chip like Cerebras at a fraction of Anthropic's cost. I think that would unleash a whole new class of innovation here.\n\n#### Autodetecting errors\n\nWe did contribute one possibly-novel UI interaction, where the LLM automatically detects errors and asks you if you'd like it to try to solve them. We detect server-side errors by polling our backend for 500 errors in your logs. We detect client-side errors in the iframe by prompting Townie to import [this client-side library](https://www.val.town/v/std/catch), which pushes errors up to the parent window.\n\n

\n\nIt's not _particularly_ novel (in that others would have thought of this if we didn't), but maybe the folks at [Anthropic](https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/9949260-try-fixing-with-claude-for-artifact-errors) or Bolt saw our implementation and it inspired their own. I'd like to think we're not _only_ free-riding in this space.\n\n### Hosted runtime and included APIs\n\nMaybe some of our UI ideas made it into GitHub Spark too, including deployment-free hosting, persistent data storage, and the ability to use LLMs in your apps without your own API key – their versions of [@std/sqlite](https://docs.val.town/std/sqlite/) and [@std/openai](https://docs.val.town/std/openai/), respectively. In other words, you can say, \"make me a ChatGPT clone with persistent thread history\", and in about 30 seconds, you'll have a deployed app that does exactly that.\n\n

\n\nBut we're not the first hosting company to provide an LLM tool; that\nhonor likely goes to Vercel's [v0](https://v0.dev/).\n\n### Cursor\n\nThe next big thing was [Cursor](https://www.cursor.com/). I must admit that I never personally fell in love with it, but given how many people I respect love it, I think that's a me-problem. I think Cursor is best for development in larger codebases, but recently my work has been on making vals in Val Town which are usually under 1,000 lines of code. (Our upcoming launch of multi-file Projects, now in private beta, will change this.) However Cursor is a real pioneer in the space, and has some UI interactions there that we have an eye to copy.\n\n### Windsurf\n\nOver the holiday, I fell in love with [Windsurf](https://codeium.com/windsurf) by the folks at Codeium. Its Cascade feature is a chat interface, which has tool use and multi-turn agentic capabilities, to search through your codebase and edit multiple files. It feels a bit like we're coming full-circle back to when we did our tool-use version of Townie. However, I think we now all understand that you can't simply give your OpenAPI spec to an LLM and expect good results. The magic of Windsurf is that they carefully crafted what actions their agent can take, and that it can take multiple actions in a row without your input.\n\nI am salivating at the idea of giving Townie some of these capabilities. Imagine if Townie could search through all public vals, and maybe even npm, or the public internet, to find code, docs, and other resources to help you.\n\n### Devin\n\nWatching Windsurf take multiple actions on my behalf without my input is very inspirational. I'm dreaming of a world where Townie not only detects errors, but also automatically tries to fix them, possibly multiple times, possibly in parallel across different branches, without any human interaction. Here, of course, we'd be getting into territory mostly explored by the folks at [Devin](https://devin.ai/).\n\nFor starters, we could feed back screenshots of the generated website back to the LLM. But soon you'd want to give the LLM access to a full web browser so it can itself poke around the app, like a human would, to see what features work and which ones don't. Maybe then it'd even write some tests, also like a human would, to make sure things don't break as it continues to iterate.\n\nI have a vague sense by the end of this year that you'll be able to tell Townie to \"make a fully realistic Hacker News Clone, with user accounts, nested comments, upvotes, downvotes\" and it could iterate for potentially hours on your behalf. You could even go to bed and wake up with it done.\n\n### Collaboration and competition\n\nIs this fast-following competitive or is it collaborative? So far it's been feeling mostly collaborative. The pie is so freaking large -- there are millions and maybe billions who are jumping at the chance to code -- that we're all happy to help each other scramble to keep up with the demand. I love that, and hope it remains this way. We at Val Town certainly don't keep (m)any secrets. Our system prompt is open, and we blog about all our interesting technical choices. This very post is a case in point.\n\n### Should we bow out?\n\nAll this copying, and how fast everything is moving begs the question: Should we get out of this race entirely? How can we hope to compete against better funded competitors? Should we instead focus on improving our core differentiator, and do a better job integrating with AI editors like VSCode, Cursor, Windsurf, and Bolt? Maybe! We're planning to dip our toes into integrating: we plan to improve our local development experience, which would allow editors like VSCode, Cursor, and Windsurf to directly edit files in Val Town. We also plan to improve our API, so tools like Bolt could \"deploy to Val Town\", like they currently deploy to Netlify.\n\nHowever, it still feels like there's a lot to be gained with a fully-integrated web AI code editor experience in Val Town – even if we can only get 80% of the features that the big dogs have, and a couple months later. It doesn't take _that_ much work to copy the best features we see in other tools. The benefits to a fully integrated experience seems well worth that cost. In short, we've had a lot of success fast-following so far, and think it's worth continuing to do so.\n\n### Townie\n\nIf you've made it this far in the article, you should really [try out Townie](https://www.val.town/townie). It's still is one of the best tools to create fullstack web apps. Make yourself a ['what did I work on today' app that pulls from Linear and GitHub](https://www.val.town/v/danphilibin/what_did_i_work_on_today) or [a tool to extract dominant colors from an image](https://x.com/destroytoday/status/1856709997737984089) or [an AI clone for your personality](https://deeperfates.com/). Your imagination is the limit. And if you do, please let me know (steve@val.town) what features from other tools you'd like to see in Townie. We're eager to learn from you.\n\n_Thanks [Tom MacWright](https://macwright.com/), [JP Posma](https://janpaulposma.nl/), and [Simon Willison](https://simonwillison.net/) for feedback on drafts of this article._",[],[202,1008],"0209afcb-292d-4b8f-9704-51680c822330","2024-12-31-post-mortem-host-connection-pool.md","a13fc228-7bd9-11f1-8271-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: 'Post-mortem: Exhausted Host Connection Pool'\ndescription: A single degraded host impacted certain Vals for some time.\npubDate: '2024-12-31T05:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: Max McDonnell\ntags: [engineering]\n---\n\n_An\n[earlier version of this post](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-blog/commit/1059e2aff2973aa841b06c46c1ce6c3e680d2d45)\nposited that the cause of this downtime was a degraded host network. We now\nthink that initial hypothesis was incorrect, so we have updated this post with\nour current understanding of the cause._\n\n### Timeline\n\nAt 12:15am ET a flurry of requests made many parallel edits to a Val. This\npattern of requests caused a few database queries to deadlock. Our database\nconnection pool lacked query timeouts and these locked connections permanently\noccupied slots in our connection pool.\n\nOne of our servers entirely exhausted its database connection pool and started\nto experience long delays on both inbound and outbound requests. Vals on that\nserver experienced network timeout errors and other issues. Some existing\nconnections continued to serve requests and some inbound and outbound requests\nwere successful, but most requests stalled indefinitely in a pending state. Our\nhealth checks for this server did not check database state so the server\nremained in degraded state for some time.\n\nThis persisted until 7:04am ET when we manually terminated the server after a\nuser report.\n\n### Impact\n\nWe make our best effort to route Val requests to the same hosts so that they can\nbe picked up by a warm worker. As a result, certain Vals were repeatedly routed\nto this host and experienced extended degradation. Those Vals failed to start\nentirely, or experienced issues when trying to make outbound requests.\n\n### Next Steps\n\nWe care deeply about reliability and are working to prevent this type of failure\nin the future.\n\n- We've updated our health checks to incorporate the health of the database\n connection pool, and we've added timeouts to pool queries.\n- We've identified the cause of the deadlock, added tests, and changed the logic\n to be sure it can't deadlock again.\n- Our external val execution health checks were\n being routed to other hosts. We've updated these checks to make sure that\n every host is hit with each health check request.\n\nMore generally, the lack of timeouts caused the server to reach capacity without\nexhibiting backpressure. We'll be doing a more extensive review to be sure that\nservers reaching capacity start to reject requests instead of queuing\nindefinitely.\n\nWe are also in the middle of an ongoing effort to remove database queries from\nthe path of Val requests. In the future a failure like this would only lead to\nAPI downtime and not Val execution downtime.\n",[],[202,1015],"2991a525-5b34-4273-91a3-08f10cb57e3e","2024-12-13-devstats.md","86bcdd14-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: Using Val Town to chart dependency bloat\ndescription: Building a simple aggregate view of our codebase\npubDate: '2024-12-13T05:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: Tom MacWright\nthumbnail: 'https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/devstats/screenshot.png'\ntags: [engineering]\n---\n\n[Devstats](https://www.val.town/v/tmcw/devstats) is a Val that you can use to easily track send point-in-time statistics from your GitHub Actions (or other CI) runs and turn them into pretty charts. Here's ours!\n\n![Devstats](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/devstats/screenshot.png)\n\nSo far, we're using it to track dependency bloat. Much has been written about dependency bloat. A lot of web projects end up with a multi-gigabyte `node_modules` directory filled with agglomerated complexity.\n\nMaking a pretty chart of our `node_modules` size over time doesn't force us to cut weight, but it does help motivate such efforts: who doesn't like to see a big drop in a chart after making some strategic cut?\n\nThere are many other analytics stacks that we could've used for this, but I wanted to make something dead-simple:\n\n- schemaless, so you can send any statistic without having to declare it beforehand\n- using a barebones HTTP request to send statistics, so all you need is cURL\n\nSo, devstats was born! I see it as a very basic riff on the legacy of [StatsD](https://www.etsy.com/codeascraft/measure-anything-measure-everything/) and [RRDtool](https://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/) but over HTTP and with a less [fancy wire protocol](https://github.com/b/statsd_spec).\n\nHere's what our GitHub Actions configuration has at the very end\nto send statistics to devstats:\n\n```yaml\n- name: devstats\n run: |\n curl -X \"POST\" \"https://tmcw-devstats.web.val.run/\" \\\n -H 'Authorization: Bearer ${{ secrets.DEVSTATS_TOKEN }}' \\\n -H 'Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8' \\\n -d $\"{ \\\"name\\\": \\\"node_modules_kb\\\", \\\"value\\\": $(du -sk node_modules | awk '{print $1}') }\"\n curl -X \"POST\" \"https://tmcw-devstats.web.val.run/\" \\\n -H 'Authorization: Bearer ${{ secrets.DEVSTATS_TOKEN }}' \\\n -H 'Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8' \\\n -d $\"{ \\\"name\\\": \\\"package_lock_lines\\\", \\\"value\\\": $(wc -l package-lock.json | awk '{print $1}') }\"\n curl -X \"POST\" \"https://tmcw-devstats.web.val.run/\" \\\n -H 'Authorization: Bearer ${{ secrets.DEVSTATS_TOKEN }}' \\\n -H 'Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8' \\\n -d $\"{ \\\"name\\\": \\\"package_lock\\\", \\\"value\\\": $(wc -l package.json | awk '{print $1}') }\"\n```\n\nNot bad! `curl` is already available, so this is all you need\nto start tracking your `node_modules` size, `package.json` lines,\nand `package-lock.json` lines over time. This is all using Linux\nutilities like `du`, `awk`, and `wc`, but you could do the same\nwith JavaScript or any other language to calculate more complex\nmetrics.\n\n## Using it\n\nTo use devstats yourself, just\n\n1. [Fork the val. You can rename it, and so on!](https://www.val.town/v/tmcw/devstats)\n2. Come up with a random authentication token, and [add it to your repository secrets](https://docs.github.com/en/actions/security-for-github-actions/security-guides/using-secrets-in-github-actions) and to your [Val Town environment variables](https://docs.val.town/reference/environment-variables/)\n3. Add a step like shown above to your GitHub Actions configuration.\n\n_Not sure how to generate a random authentication token?_ One way is to run OpenSSL:\n\n```\nopenssl rand -hex 20\n```\n\nThat's it! The 'wire format' for devstats is simply sending an object\nlike this:\n\n```json\n{\n \"name\": \"coffees\",\n \"value\": 10\n}\n```\n\nYou can send any `name` you want and it'll be added to the dashboard.\n\n## How it works\n\nThis val uses our [SQLite](https://docs.val.town/std/sqlite/) support as its database, [Observable Plot](https://observablehq.com/plot/) for charts, and [Hono](https://hono.dev/) to do some routing and rendering.\n\n## Notes\n\nYou might be wondering: Val Town's `node_modules` directory is around 900 megabytes: what's in there! I'll give you a peek into our top-10 module (namespaces):\n\n```\nval.town/node_modules\n$ du -sk * | sort -n -r | head -n 10\n47592\t@opentelemetry\n40132\t@sentry\n33012\tlucide-react\n24700\t@clerk\n24136\t@ai-sdk\n23568\t@biomejs\n23168\ttiktoken\n22200\ttypescript\n21044\t@heroicons\n20616\thappy-dom\n```\n\nWe spend a lot of megabytes on our monitoring stack, using [Open Telemetry](https://github.com/open-telemetry) and [Sentry](https://sentry.io/), and another chunk on the icon sets [Lucide](https://lucide.dev/) and [heroicons](https://heroicons.com/). We use [tiktoken](https://github.com/dqbd/tiktoken) to truncate text before sending it off to be encoded for [semantic search](https://blog.val.town/blog/val-vibes/).\n\n### One issue: triple distributions\n\nJavaScript has been in a painful transition phase between module systems, moving from CommonJS, which was Node.js's module system for many years, to ESM, which is standardized and designed to also work in browsers. This is one of the culprits behind our `node_modules` size.\n\nOpen Telemetry is a pretty heavyweight dependency for us. One issue is that they ship each line of code [three times](https://unpkg.com/browse/@opentelemetry/otlp-transformer@0.56.0/build/): not just dual modules between [CommonJS & ESM](https://nodejs.org/api/esm.html), but also an esnext build for bleeding-edge JavaScript features, and they include source maps for all three versions.\n\nLucide does the same thing with a triple build, but for ESM, CommonJS, and [UMD](https://github.com/umdjs/umd) module types. Heroicons does a double build, for CommonJS and ESM.\n\n### Another: big binaries\n\nAnother big issue we have – that probably many other projects have as well – is the big binaries embedded in some NPM modules.\n\nSentry includes a binary distribution of their [CLI, a native Rust tool](https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-cli), which weighs 16MB. [Biome](https://biomejs.dev/), which we use to lint and format our code, is another 23MB.\n\n### Lots of copies of esbuild\n\nThe biggest challenge that isn't on this list is [esbuild](https://esbuild.github.io/), which is used internally by lots of modules that we depend on.\n\n![Grand Perspective](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/devstats/grandperspective.png)\n\nThat's [Grand Perspective](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrandPerspective) showing all of the files in `node_modules` as a treemap, with the seven copies of `esbuild` glowing.\n\nAll in all, we spend about 94MB of space storing 7 versions of esbuild and another 3 versions in sub-packages, a fact that I figured out\nusing this epic (for me) chain of Linux commands:\n\n```\nfind . -type f -name 'esbuild' |\n xargs du -sk * |\n sort -n |\n grep \"esbuild$\" |\n awk '{print $1}' |\n awk '{s+=$1} END {print s}'\n```\n\nThe problem with esbuild for us is that some transitive dependency will depend on an old or specific version of esbuild, and NPM will dutifully download and store multiple copies of esbuild to satisfy all consumers. Absent some coordination from all the community, we might have to use an [override to pin esbuild to a specific version](https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v9/configuring-npm/package-json#overrides), and hope that our dependencies don't really need such a specific version range.\n\n### Endnotes\n\nLike most decisions, there were good reasons behind all of these. Hybrid CommonJS + ESM modules make sense for a [still-divided world](https://github.com/wooorm/npm-esm-vs-cjs) of people using NPM modules. Using a conservative version range for esbuild makes sense to limit the chances that your module will unexpectedly break on a new esbuild release. NPM's ability to download multiple versions of a transitive dependency is [actually great and solves a problem inherent in other systems like pip and Cabal](https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2016/08/24/understanding-the-npm-dependency-model/).\n\nSo, there aren't many opportunities to point fingers. So far I haven't found any NPM modules that accidentally included a 40MB MP4 video of _Buffy The Vampire Slayer_ and that's why they were bloated. We've used [knip](https://knip.dev/) to identify a handful of dependencies that we forgot to remove once we stopped using them. Most of the big stuff in `node_modules` is there for a reason.\n\n---\n\nSo, it's definitely a goal to cut big dependencies that we aren't using and slim down the ones that we need to use. Devstats is helping with that, and we're working on more developer tooling for building Val Town _with_ Val Town!\n",[],[202,1022],"6a23cd23-3556-4a86-8831-7c738394fe44","2024-12-02-val-town-newsletter-22.md","86bc052e-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: Val Town Newsletter 22\ndescription: 'Townie upgrades, Scoped API permissions, Fal partnership'\npubDate: '2024-12-02T05:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: Steve Krouse\ntags: [newsletter]\n---\n\n\n\nVal Town is growing up! We're working on features and infra that will fundamentally unlock the scope and scale of what you can build in Val Town. We have two major efforts running in parallel: projects and scalability.\n\n_Projects_ are containers for multiple vals, folders, and files. The enable you to create infinitely complex real-world apps, instead of being limited to a single long val. Internal to a project, vals will use relative imports (ie `./foo/bar`), so they can be forked as a unit, and merged back in as a unit. Projects will also improve Townie's ability to help write your vals in more modular files, so that it doesn't have to regenerate all the code on every change.\n\n_Scalability_ will enable you to run production workloads in Val Town, with usage-based pricing, custom alerts, and caps.\n\nWe hope to have both of these efforts live in the coming months. In the meantime, we've shipped many other features and improvements, including a dozen Townie upgrades, scoped API permissions, a partnership with Fal, and more.\n\n[Justin Bennett](https://just-be.dev) has joined our team! He is well-known for the [DevtoolsFM podcast](https://www.devtools.fm/), and was most recently at [The Recurse Center](https://www.recurse.com/), [Membrane](https://www.membrane.io/), and [Oxide](https://oxide.computer/). We've known Justin for years, and are thrilled he's on the team.\n\nAs per usual, the [highlight of our newsletter is at the bottom: a list of the most interesting community vals we've seen this month](), including a bunch working with the Bluesky API, a Val Town clone built on Val Town, Stripe examples, virtual money, data journalism, lightning-fast Cerebras 2k-tokens-per-second demos, and dozens more!\n\n## 🤖 Townie upgrades\n\nTownie has been massively upgraded this month. We shipped some of the most common feature request and fixed the worst bugs.\n\n

\n\n_This video shows me adding analytics to [Cerebras Coder](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/cerebras_coder), a minimal Townie clone, powered by [Cerebras](https://cerebras.ai/)'s lightning-fast inference. The video shows switching from Haiku to Sonnet; Townie detecting a server-side error; fixing it upon request; fixing another bug; viewing older versions of the val; and a notice to start a new chat because longer chats make Townie dumber._\n\n- By far the most common feature request for Townie has been the ability to preview the older versions of HTTP vals. This is now live! There's a dropdown in the bottom of the Preview tab in Townie to select an older version to preview, with the ability to restore that version. Thanks [Charlie](https://www.val.town/u/dcm31) for the tip to add the Restore button, and [Matt](https://www.val.town/u/neverstew) for the feedback on the wording of the button 🙏\n- In order to make Townie sustainable, we rolled out usage limits. Now free-tier users can try out Townie for about a dozen messages on a Haiku, a cheaper (albeit still fantastic) model. We hope this will help you get a sense of what Townie can do, and encourage you to upgrade to Pro if you want to use it regularly. If you find that you're hitting your limits as a Pro user, please reach out to me at steve@val.town with more context on your use case. We're eagerly looking for feedback on a higher-level Pro tier or usage-based pricing.\n- We deployed Anthropic prompt caching ([try it on Val Town](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/anthropicCaching)), which saves 40% on cost, and improves latency by up to 85% for long prompts.\n- We rolled out Sonnet 3.5 New, which is supposed to be even better at coding, but unfortunately had to rollback to Sonnet 3.5 Old, because the New version was resistant to writing very large blocks of code in their entirety. It added a lot of `// code remains unchanged here`. We fixed that issue with Anthropic's help, and are working through a couple other system prompt issues with Sonnet 3.5 New, and hope to get it rolled out in the coming weeks.\n- Townie now detects many client-side and server-side errors automatically, and has a clean UI to view the errors to help you decide if you want to debug them manually, dismiss them, or ask Townie to solve them for you.\n- At long-last we fixed bugs with the Townie code editor getting out of sync or showing \"unsaved changes\" when there weren't any.\n\nIf you'd like to read more about behind-the-scenes of Townie, Tom gave a talk, which he turned into a blog post: [Building a Code Writing Robot](https://blog.val.town/blog/building-a-code-writing-robot/).\n\n## 🔐 Scoped Permissions\n\nWe added API scopes to Val Town API tokens to give you more granular control over our REST API.\n\nWe have read/write scopes for:\n\n- `val` – [vals](https://docs.val.town/openapi#tag/vals)\n- `user` – [user account details](https://docs.val.town/openapi#tag/me)\n- `blob` – [blob storage](https://docs.val.town/openapi#tag/blobs)\n- `sqlite` – [sqlite database](https://docs.val.town/openapi#tag/sqlite)\n- `email` – [ability to send emails](https://docs.val.town/openapi#tag/emails)\n\nThe [API tokens page](https://www.val.town/settings/api)\nnow lets you view and configure the scope of each token.\nYou can also configure the scope of for each individual val on its settings page.\n[Learn more ➡](/api-token-scopes/)\n\n## 🌄 Fal Partnership\n\nWe announced a partnership with [Fal](https://fal.ai/), to bring their\nlightning-fast image generation API to Val Town users.\n[Learn more ➡](/fal/)\n\n

\n \n $\"Simplest$ \n

\n Simplest possible Fal app\n

\n \n

\n\n

\n \n $\"Simplified$ \n

\n \"Faltown\" – variants, API client, blob storage\n

\n \n

\n\n## Updated Pricing Page\n\nWe've made some long-overdue updates to our [pricing page](https://www.val.town/pricing).\n\n $\"Val$ \n\nHere's what changed:\n\n- Expanded the Pro tier from 100 to 500 HTTP val req/min – thanks [Izu](https://www.val.town/u/izuchukwu) for the request 🙏\n- Listed custom domains on the Pro tier\n- Lowered the number of private or unlisted vals on the Free tier from 100 to 10. (We have yet to enforce this. When we enforce it, we will grandfather in any vals created before.)\n- Removed some stale limitations we never enforced\n\nWe don't enforce all of these limits today. For example, Free tier users can make over 10 runs per minute. We're figuring out the right balance between signalling what we can support at scale, without adding unnecessary friction for users.\n\n## Blob Storage admin\n\nWant to view and edit the blobs stored in your [Val Town Blob Storage](https://docs.val.town/std/blob/)? Now you have two great options.\n\n

\n \n $\"Blob$ \n

\n Blob storage in Val Town Settings\n

\n \n

\n\n

\n \n $\"Blob$ \n

\n \"Blob Admin\" - built in userspace, forkable, customizable, more features, more bugs\n

\n \n

\n\n## 📺 Videos\n\nVideos are a great way to learn the pro tips & tricks for Val Town. This month I live coded with three wonderful guests:\n\n- **[Creating customer-enrichment workflows](https://www.youtube.com/live/wOyfS9-Q01I) with [Justin Duke](https://jmduke.com/)**, founder of [Buttondown](https://buttondown.email/)\n- **[Live coding viral AI apps with](https://www.youtube.com/live/plubVSqiQAw) with [Hassan](https://x.com/nutlope)**, of [TogetherAI](https://www.together.ai/)\n- **[Prototyping Markdown Extensions](https://www.youtube.com/live/oBuJoVV_yWc) with [Boris Berenberg](https://www.nothingeasyaboutthis.com/)**\n\nWe were also featured in [three](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5SfOA7gGfw) [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9NyuajxjrI) [videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMHDBQp5hbE), which led to thousands of new subscribers. If that includes you – welcome! Thanks AICodeKing, Julian Goldie, and Emre Kabli for the videos 🙏\n\n## 🎉 Other updates\n\n- You can now view all your vals on your own profile page – even private ones – configurable via a filter – thanks [Fabian](https://fabian.ai/) for the request 🙏\n- Simplified and unified buttons to edit a val's name, type, etc – thanks [Fabian](https://fabian.ai/) for the request 🙏\n- Allow cron vals to be paused but remain cron-type - thanks [Jan](https://www.val.town/u/yawnxyz) for the request 🙏\n- The 'Recent vals' section on your private dashboard now shows private and unlisted vals (before it only showed your public vals) – thanks [Arti](https://www.val.town/u/artivilla) for the bug report 🙏\n- [Others' val code is now focusable and searchable](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1851670974019559621)\n- HTTP errors now always have stacktraces, which link directly to val source lines\n- Improved val generated names and validation\n- Fix our CORS headers – thanks [Andreas](https://www.val.town/u/rozek) 🙏\n- Improved our Custom Domains UI and docs\n- Added buttons to the val versions page to preview old versions, view their code, and delete them\n- Fixed the logs, removing old traces that stalled\n- Fixed cron UI bug\n- Discontinued Eval API and upgraded all HTTP vals to the new concurrent runtime\n- [Fixed beta & structured outputs for std/openai](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/openai_structured_output_demo) – thanks [Alfonso](https://www.val.town/u/alfongj) for the bug report 🙏\n- Added a link to edit your profile photo on the profile settings page – thanks [Ivan](https://www.val.town/u/spiralganglion) for the bug report 🙏\n- Removed all browser `alert` and `confirm` in favor of proper modals\n- Improve import autocomplete for vals in context\n- Fix log association for replayed val traces\n- Button to start a Townie chat from the blue `New` button in the top-right, in the navbar\n- HTTP Preview Share button & modal (to make it clearer that HTTP vals are deployed and sharable) – thanks [Rudd](https://www.val.town/u/rudd) for the suggestion 🙏\n- Made the [Dashboard](https://www.val.town/dashboard) load up to 5x faster\n- Made HTTP Preview iframes lazy load, so your focus won't be stolen by a val that's not in view – thanks [Troy](https://val.town/u/trob) for the bug report 🙏\n- Add Cmd+K actions for opening the focused val in the full-screen editor or in its detail page – thanks [Arti](https://www.val.town/u/artivilla) for the suggestion 🙏\n\n## 🛣️ Roadmap\n\n### Projects\n\nOur biggest effort coming up is _Projects_ - groups of vals, files, folders that will be forkable as a unit and mergeable as a unit, supporting relative imports, and more. Where a val is like a Github gist, a Project is like a Github repo. Projects will enable you to build infinitely complex real-world apps in Val Town. We're excited to share something hopefully in Dec 2024, and if not in Jan 2025.\n\n $\"Screenshot$ \n\nWe shared the above screenshot of an example Projects a couple weeks back in our Discord. One of our users, [Victor], was so inspired that he's started building larger projects in Val Town already in advance of Projects, living in the future by pretending that they already exist. His most recent large val project was [NotUber](https://vawogbemi-notuber.web.val.run/), a surprisingly full-featured Uber/Lyft clone. The best part is that he built [another val that acts as the 'project view' for the 8 vals that NotUber depends on](https://vawogbemi-notuberfolder.web.val.run/). We love Victor's vision, and we can't wait to see what everyone else builds once Projects ship for real!\n\n### Scale\n\nWe're also working on _Scale_ – a new infra architecture that will enable you to run production workloads in Val Town, with scale to infinity, usage-based pricing, with usage alerts, and caps. Websocket-type vals will also launch with this effort.\n\n### Other features coming soon\n\n- Val- & Project- scoped environment variables\n- Searchable & filterable logs and traces\n- /explore - a new page to find interesting vals\n- Allow hyphens in val names\n- Improved code search\n- Comments on pull requests\n- Ability to follow a user on Val Town\n- Team accounts\n- SOC2 compliance (I told you we're growing up!)\n- ...and much more!\n\nPlease [make feature requests and vote](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions?discussions) on what you'd like to see next.\n\n## 🌟 Community vals\n\n- [Dan](https://www.val.town/u/danphilibin), an engineer at [Campsite](https://campsite.com), wrote [How we prototype API integrations with Val Town](https://www.campsite.com/blog/how-we-prototype-integrations-with-val-town) – it's an excellent read about how they \"speedrun prototypes of bots, features, and 3rd party integrations\" ([tweet](https://x.com/DanPhilibin/status/1852052119521542552))\n- [Max](https://val.town/u/maxm) built [Val Town Town](https://blog.val.town/blog/val-town-town/) – a clone of Val Town, built in Val Town! If you want to run your users' or AI-generated server-side JavaScript, now you can do that in Val Town by forking and customizing Val Town Town\n- [Victor](https://www.val.town/u/vawogbemi) added [Stripe to our docs](https://docs.val.town/integrations/stripe/) showing how you can accept payments in Val Town in minutes\n- Daniel created [an app that helps industrial robot programmers visualize their program call graph](https://bsky.app/profile/stevekrouse.com/post/3lbu7qbq6mc2b)\n- [osspledge.com](https://osspledge.com/)'s redirect to [opensourcepledge.com](https://opensourcepledge.com/) is [hosted on Val Town](https://www.val.town/v/vladh/opensourcepledgeRedirect?v=5) (_[Join the pledge here](https://opensourcepledge.com/join/)!_)\n- In honor of Bluesky, here are all the awesome Bluesky vals:\n - [Dean](https://www.val.town/u/loading) built [WinSky](https://loading-xp.web.val.run/), a Windows XP-styled BlueSky client that you can OAuth into with your Bluesky account, make posts, etc!\n - [Stef](https://www.val.town/u/stef) built a [Bluesky feed generator](https://www.val.town/v/stef/feeds) that subscribes to a feed of posts without the letter 'E', forked from [@nws/feeds](https://www.val.town/v/nws/feeds), forked from [@jordan/feeds](https://www.val.town/v/jordan/feeds)\n - [Jonas](https://www.val.town/u/jonasmerlin) made a [Bluesky bot template](https://www.val.town/v/jonasmerlin/bluesky_bot_template) ([original post](https://bsky.app/profile/jonasmerlin.bsky.social/post/3lcdnfizwrs2a))\n - [Wilhelm](https://www.val.town/u/wilhelm) is [mirroring his Bluesky posts](https://www.val.town/v/wilhelm/bsky). It's easy to fork it and mirror your own posts! I did [here](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/bsky).\n - [@karkowg](https://www.val.town/u/karkowg) built a beautiful [Matrix-style Bluesky firehose visualization](https://www.val.town/v/karkowg/theOneSky)\n - [Wilhelm](https://www.val.town/u/wilhelm) figured out how to [make a val http endpoint your Bluesky handle](https://www.val.town/v/wilhelm/did)!\n - [Steve](https://www.val.town/u/stevekrouse) created a [Bluesky Firehose](https://val.town/v/stevekrouse/firehose) visualizer that displays real-time updates from the Bluesky network, with word cloud\n- [Robin Sloan is tracking solar storms with a cron val!](https://bsky.app/profile/stevekrouse.com/post/3lbuwlperjc2b)\n- [Jan](https://www.val.town/u/yawnxyz) built [Scribe](https://yawnxyz-scribe.web.val.run/), a SuperWhisper / Granola alternative that transcribes your voice in realtime, powered by Huggingface, VAD, and Groq\n- [Arti](https://www.val.town/u/artivilla) built a [Farcaster Keyword Alerter](https://www.val.town/v/artivilla/farcasterKeyHook), which sends Slack notifications when a keyword is mentioned on Farcaster, powered by [Neynar](https://neynar.com/) ([original post](https://warpcast.com/artivilla.eth/0x1bc32ac7))\n- [Steve](https://www.val.town/u/stevekrouse) built a website showcasing [how Val Town uses Val Town to build Val Town](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/dogfooding)\n- [Nulo](https://www.val.town/u/nulo) is [tracking and graphing tweets and likes for President Milei of Argentina to expose bots and archive deleted tweets](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1854255504681210055)\n- [Charlie](https://www.val.town/u/dcm31) made [a hilarious short-video about a tour-guide app with various intelligence levels](https://www.tiktok.com/@charliemocomedy/video/7441621954571832619). The app in the video was made with Townie!\n- [Peter](https://www.val.town/u/peterqliu) built a [mayor_setup](https://www.val.town/v/peterqliu/mayor_setup), a val that gives you a bird's eye view across all your vals, lets you organize vals into composable collections, batch actions on multiple vals, and uninstall itself with no trace left behind\n- [Jon](https://www.val.town/u/jonbo) built [a custom Twitter Alert bot that detects when specific accounts tweet relevant phrases, and uses an LLM to decide which Discord channel to send the alert to](https://www.val.town/v/jonbo/cabinAdjacentTweets)\n- [Max](https://www.val.town/u/maxm) built [WIDE](https://maxm-wide.web.val.run/), a service to write and query unstructured data, powered by Clickhouse, powered by his new [ValSession](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/valSession) authentication method\n- [@trob](https://www.val.town/u/trob) built an [interactive prompt-to-code app](https://www.val.town/v/trob/prompt_to_code_auto_refresh_codebed) that generates JavaScript code from prompts and allows previewing the output with user input. [James](https://www.val.town/u/JamesAndrew) forked it, and made a [Three.js Scene Generator](https://www.val.town/v/JamesAndrew/tenaciousPlumWoodpecker) to create 3D scenes by via natural language prompts. We love when people build on each other's work!\n- [Dean](https://www.val.town/u/loading) built a [peer-to-peer file transfer app](https://www.val.town/v/loading/file) using WebRTC\n- [Wolf](https://www.val.town/u/wolf) built [a magic importer](https://www.val.town/v/wolf/UseDynamic) that lets you dynamically generate functions at runtime in the import URL, powered by an HTTP val! ([Discord discussion](https://discord.com/channels/1020432421243592714/1279542466357366804/1295911703040622662))\n- \"Who needs blockchain when you have Val Town SQLite?\" – [Jamie](https://www.val.town/u/jamiedubs) built [Glifbux](https://www.val.town/v/jamiedubs/glifbux), virtual money on Val Town\n- Steve built [three vals to demo the insanely-fast Cerebras inference](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1851994923957985567) – [Cerebras Searcher](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/cerebras_searcher) to search and summarize the web, [Cerebras Coder](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/cerebras_coder) to generate full websites in miliseconds, and [Cerebras Debater](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/cerebras_debater) to get to the bottom of age old questions\n- SimpleScraper wrote [\"Building a free beach-chair detector using Simplescraper, LLMs and public webcams\"](https://simplescraper.io/blog/building-beach-chair-detector-ai-webcam) powered by a cron val and @std/openai\n- [Dan](https://www.val.town/u/danphilibin) built a [What did I work on today?](https://www.val.town/v/danphilibin/what_did_i_work_on_today) in 6 prompts with Townie, which pulls from Github and Linear to generate a daily summary of what you worked on ([tweet](https://x.com/DanPhilibin/status/1849823537034305704))\n- [Juan](https://www.val.town/u/juansebsol) built a [D3.JS Defi pool explorer](https://juansebsol-blockchainecosystembubblemap.web.val.run/) to visualize Blockchain Pool APYs\n- [Cam](https://www.val.town/u/cameronpak) made a [Tool Drawer](https://www.val.town/v/cameronpak/tooldrawer) to showcase the apps on the [Techless Wisephone II](https://www.wisephone.com/)\n- Jonnie Hallman [built a tool with Townie to extract the dominant colors from an image](https://x.com/destroytoday/status/1856709997737984089)\n- [Juan](https://www.val.town/u/juansebsol) built a [EchoSearch](https://juansebsol-echosearch.web.val.run/), a site that lets you search across Reddit, HN, Github Discussions, StackOverflow all at the same time\n- @deepfates built [deeperfates.com](https://deeperfates.com/), their AI clone\n- [Victor](https://www.val.town/u/vawogbemi) built [TaylorSwiftMoments](https://www.val.town/v/vawogbemi/taylorswiftmoments), an image generator that allows you to create visuals inspired by different Taylor Swift eras with enhanced prompts\n- [Steve](https://www.val.town/u/stevekrouse) built a [Proxied Web Browser](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/dns_record_debugger) for debugging DNS records, so you can view web pages without DNS caching issues\n- [Jan](https://www.val.town/u/yawnxyz) built a [Open Graph Image Generator](https://www.val.town/v/yawnxyz/og) using satori and a Deno-friendly SVG WASM, cached with Val Town Blob Storage\n- [Steve](https://www.val.town/u/stevekrouse) showed [how to use OpenAI Structured Output with zod](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/openai_structured_output_demo) to ensure responses are in the right JSON format\n- [vprtwn](https://www.val.town/u/vprtwn) created a [typing practice app with word generation and stat tracking](https://vprtwn-svaltown.web.val.run/) for the [Svalboard](https://svalboard.com/)\n- [Andre](https://www.val.town/u/andreterron) built a [Bomb Cyclone Power Outage Tracker](https://www.val.town/v/andreterron/bombCycloneOutageTracker) to help everyone estimate when power will be restored\n- [@g](https://www.val.town/u/g) built a [GitHub Line Counter](https://g-countgithublocui.web.val.run/) that efficiently counts the lines of code in any GitHub repository from your browser, powered by a [val](https://www.val.town/v/g/countGithubLOCUI)\n- [@bladesquad](https://www.val.town/u/bladesquad) built a [React app for reporting stray cats and finding nearby emergency vet contacts in Algeria](https://www.val.town/v/bladesquad/thrillingAmaranthKiwi)\n- [Max](https://www.val.town/u/maxharper26) built an [API to set up data to a Vercel database](https://www.val.town/v/maxharper26/api_v1)\n- [@trollishka](https://www.val.town/u/trollishka) built a [AI powered gift suggestion app](https://trollishka-giftsuggestionapp.web.val.run/) – with RAG powered by the Serp API\n- [Steve](https://www.val.town/u/stevekrouse) built a [tool to compare the speed and output of different Anthropic models](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/claude_speed_test)\n- [Michael](https://www.val.town/u/michaelwschultz) built a [val that generates an image displaying current weather information](https://www.val.town/v/michaelwschultz/generateframeImage) for his e-ink display\n- [Nico](https://www.val.town/u/nbbaier) built [simpletext](https://www.val.town/v/nbbaier/simpletext), an implementation of the [simpletext](https://github.com/jonfraser/simpletext) by jonfraser\n- [Jan](https://www.val.town/u/yawnxyz) built a [Collaborative JSON Viewer](https://www.val.town/v/yawnxyz/jsonpub), powered by [InstantDB](https://www.instantdb.com/) ([tweet](https://x.com/yawnxyz/status/1860133805442703553))\n- [@trob](https://www.val.town/u/trob) built an [interactive prompt-to-code app](https://www.val.town/v/trob/prompt_to_code_auto_refresh_codebed) that generates JavaScript code from prompts and allows previewing the output with user input.\n- [Jan](https://www.val.town/u/yawnxyz) built a [GitHub Repository Parser](https://www.val.town/v/yawnxyz/githubParser) to get the number of bytes and tokens in a repo (to estimate cost for sending a whole repo to an LLM)\n- [Tanner](https://www.val.town/u/spinningideas) built a [Web Page Summarizer](https://www.val.town/v/spinningideas/webpage_summarizer) that concisely summarizes the content of any website using OpenAI's language model\n- [Regina](https://www.val.town/u/reginafoley) created a [Flashcard App](https://www.val.town/v/reginafoley/createflashcardsval) that allows users to study with flashcards from a CSV file\n- [Mike](https://www.val.town/u/mikehiggins) created [a 90s-style text analyzer](https://www.val.town/v/mikehiggins/sanguinecyanmastodon) that calculates word frequencies, TF-IDF scores, sentiment analysis, and generates fun facts\n- [Max](https://www.val.town/u/maxm) built a [Simple Wikipedia Instant Search](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/simpleWikipediaInstantSearch) to search Wikipedia articles with fuzzy matching and instant results.\n- [@janu](https://www.val.town/u/janu) built a [passworded Bitcoin price dashboard](https://www.val.town/v/janu/dataDash) that displays the current price, 24-hour change, and a chart of the last 30 days.\n- [Prasham ](https://www.val.town/u/prashamtrivedi) built [summarizeHn](https://www.val.town/v/prashamtrivedi/summarizehn) which summarizes Hacker News discussions using Gemini Models\n- [Daniel](https://www.val.town/u/danieladmsf) created a [Seller Dashboard](https://www.val.town/v/danieladmsf/gregariousIvoryOstrich) that displays real-time updates of quotes, savings, and a list of sellers with filtering and action buttons.\n- [Dhanush](https://www.val.town/u/dhanush_suvarna) built [Flighty](https://www.val.town/v/dhanush_suvarna/flighty), an API endpoint to get recent flight data\n- [Muhammad](https://www.val.town/u/muhammad_owais_warsi) built a [realtime image generator](https://www.val.town/v/muhammad_owais_warsi/imageGen) ([tweet](https://x.com/MO_warsi786/status/1856995667790397885))\n- [@vip](https://www.val.town/u/vip) built [RSS Feed AI Analysis](https://www.val.town/v/vip/rss_feed_ai_analysis)\n- [Jared](https://www.val.town/u/jaredsilver) created [Startup Clicker Game](https://www.val.town/v/jaredsilver/startup_clicker) which simulates running a tech startup\n- [willthereader](https://www.val.town/u/willthereader) built a [reminder app](https://val.town/v/willthereader/SafeReminder) that lets you quickly set alarms and timers, and sends web notifications\n- [Prasham](https://www.val.town/u/prashamtrivedi) built a [Prompt Token Counter](https://www.val.town/v/prashamtrivedi/tokencounter) for Anthropic and Google Gemini models\n- [Steve](https://www.val.town/u/stevekrouse) built [The Password Game](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/passwordgame), a web app that generates increasingly silly password requirements using AI with Cerebras\n- [@all](https://www.val.town/u/all) built [jamz](https://www.val.town/v/all/jamz), a music player app that lets you add songs, edit their details, and sort them by date or title\n- [@janu](https://www.val.town/u/janu) built [airSource](https://www.val.town/v/janu/airsource), which generates an SVG displaying real-time air quality data for major Australian cities\n- [@torlanco](https://www.val.town/u/torlanco) built [Shirtgen](https://torlanco-shirtgen.web.val.run/), an app that lets you generate AI-powered t-shirt designs\n- [Jared](https://www.val.town/u/jaredsilver) built a [Leadership Styles Inventory](https://www.val.town/v/jaredsilver/leadership_styles_inventory) quiz to assess your leadership tendencies\n- [@d17e](https://www.val.town/u/d17e) created a [QR code generator](https://www.val.town/v/d17e/qrCodeWebhook) that returns an SVG of a plottable QR code from a given value and configuration\n- [@spinningideas](https://www.val.town/u/spinningideas) built an [AI Interview Assistant](https://www.val.town/v/spinningideas/interview_practice) that lets you practice job interviews with an AI interviewer\n- [Grant](https://www.val.town/u/gwoods22) built a script to [toggle AWS EventBridge rules](https://www.val.town/v/gwoods22/aws_eventbridge_toggler)\n- [@gigmx](https://www.val.town/u/gigmx) built a [link-in-bio](https://www.val.town/v/gigmx/linkinbiotemplate) featuring a Cheshire Cat AI chat widget and social links\n- [Alfonso](https://www.val.town/u/alfongj) built an [Ethereum Address Generator](https://x.com/alfongj/status/1811672444124197568) to generate test Ethereum addresses and private keys client-side, [embedded in the Crossmint docs](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1852024470958989517)\n- [@all](https://www.val.town/u/all) built an [interactive code editor](https://wittyturquoisedove.web.val.run/) powered by Cerebras that generates HTML, CSS, and JavaScript based on natural language prompts.\n- [@all](https://www.val.town/u/all) built [savvyPurpleSpoonbill](https://www.val.town/v/all/savvyPurpleSpoonbill), an interactive code editor powered by Cerebras AI that generates HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code based on user prompts\n- [@willow](https://www.val.town/u/willow) built an [HTML to Markdown Converter](https://willow-htmltomarkdownconverter.web.val.run/) that supports tables and links\n- [@jidun](https://www.val.town/u/jidun) created [Ms_Spangler](https://www.val.town/v/jidun/Ms_Spangler), an AI tutor specializing in the Texas junior high curriculum that provides grade-appropriate academic support while fostering critical thinking and real-world applications\n- [@zlpkhr](https://www.val.town/u/zlpkhr) built a [neighborhood order app](https://zlpkhr-neighborhoodorderapp.web.val.run/) where users can propose group orders and others can sign up.\n- [Nick](https://www.val.town/u/nemonicui) built a [guided breathing instructions app](https://www.val.town/v/nemonicui/breathinginstructional) with techniques like 4-7-8 Breathing, Box Breathing, and Alternate Nostril Breathing to help manage stress and promote relaxation\n- [@tk120404](https://www.val.town/u/tk120404) built a [3D visualization of our solar system](https://tk120404-solarsystem.web.val.run/), complete with rotating planets, moons, meteor trails, and a starry background\n- [Steve](https://www.val.town/u/stevekrouse) built a middleware [usageAlert](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/usageAlert) that sends an email alert if your HTTP val exceeds 1k requests per minute\n- [@mashimi](https://www.val.town/u/Mashimi) built an [Insect Identifier](https://www.val.town/v/Mashimi/insectIdentifier) that recognizes insects from uploaded images using the Grok.AI API\n- [Will](https://www.val.town/u/willthereader) made an [AI-powered Safari extension](https://x.com/Willthereader/status/1859023415421845824), powered by a val for the backend\n- [Natalie](https://www.val.town/u/natsa) built a [todo list app for learning Node.js](https://www.val.town/v/natsa/genuinebrownermine) with expandable sub-topics and progress tracking\n- [@minhee](https://www.val.town/u/minhee) built a [single file implementation of ActivityPub using Fedify](https://www.val.town/v/minhee/FedifyOnValTown), allowing your fediverse account to follow and be followed back by a demo account\n- [@meta](https://www.val.town/u/metart43) built [a page displaying color schemes used by major news media outlets for US election map visualizations](https://www.val.town/v/metart43/us_election_color_scheme)\n- [Jan](https://www.val.town/u/yawnxyz) built a [Counter](https://val.town/v/yawnxyz/counter) - an all-in-one word, byte, and token counter that saves results to browser history\n- [Victor](https://www.val.town/u/vawogbemi) built a [Solana Pay QR Code Generator](https://www.val.town/v/vawogbemi/solanaPayDemo) that allows merchants to generate QR codes for accepting Solana payments\n- [Jesi](https://www.val.town/u/jesi_rgb) built a [Secret Santa group creator app](https://www.val.town/v/jesi_rgb/secretsanta) that allows participants to join and be randomly matched while excluding certain pairings ([tweet](https://x.com/jesi_rgb/status/1856654868611530782))\n- Ben Wheeler [built a social media share link generator in 5 min with Townie](https://x.com/benjiwheeler/status/1859703701046427760)\n- [Prasham](https://www.val.town/u/prashamtrivedi) built a [Markdown to Rich Text Converter](https://prashamtrivedi-mdtort.web.val.run/) to paste reports from AI into Confluence or other systems which use rich text\n- [Ash](https://www.val.town/u/ashryanio) built put his [record collection online](https://ashryanio-randodisc.web.val.run/)\n- [Will](https://www.val.town/u/willthereader) built a [Thank You Note Generator](https://val.town/v/willthereader/ThankYouNoteGenerator) that generates personalized thank you notes for any occasion\n- [Max](https://www.val.town/u/maxm) built a beautiful [Draggable Emoji Garden](https://maxm-draggableemojigarden.web.val.run/) that lets you drag and drop emojis to create a garden\n- [Gueejla](https://www.val.town/u/gueejla) built a [Square Root Calculator](https://gueejla-squareroot.web.val.run/?inputNum=16) that visualizes the square root of a number",[],[202,1029],"8d7d3e02-b3c6-4ab9-957e-31d24e09a23a","2024-11-08-building-a-code-writing-robot.md","86bbb736-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: Building a code-writing robot and keeping it happy\ndescription: Our experiences running LLMs in production\npubDate: '2024-11-08T05:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: Tom MacWright\nthumbnail: 'https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/code-writing-robot/slide-1.png'\ntags: [engineering]\n---\n\nI recently gave this talk at a lovely event put on by our friends at\n[Jamsocket](https://jamsocket.com/), where we discussed different experiences\nrunning LLMs in production. With [Townie](https://blog.val.town/blog/townie/),\nwe've been dealing with the magic and eccentricities of this new kind\nof engineering.\n\n![Title slide with illustration of robot](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/code-writing-robot/slide-1.png)\n\nFor those who couldn't make it or are interested in following along, here\nare some slides and speaker notes.\n\n
\n\n![Introduction to Val Town](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/code-writing-robot/slide-2.png)\n\nVal Town is mostly a platform for running little bits of JavaScript that we call \"vals\", and it makes programming accessible to a lot of new people because vals can be super small, simple, and they don't require any configuration. But we've been using LLMs to make it accessible to even more people who want to create things with natural language.\n\n
\n\n

\n\nHere's the feature I'm talking about today - Townie. It's the Val Town bot. If you want to be old-fashioned, you can write the code yourself with your hands and fingers, but Townie will let you write it indirectly with English. It's similar in broad strokes to [Anthropic Artifacts](https://www.anthropic.com/news/artifacts) or [Vercel v0](https://v0.dev/), but one of the biggest differences is that the artifacts have full-stack backends, can be shared and forked, and so on.\n\n
\n\n![Flowchart of Townie's LLM usage, including using Sonnet and OpenAI](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/code-writing-robot/slide-4.png)\n\nWe're running a pretty plain-vanilla LLM setup! The meat and potatoes of Val Town are the challenges of running a lot of user code, at scale, with good security guarantees, and building community and collaboration tools. We aren't training our own models or running our own GPU clusters.\n\nSo for LLMs, we're riding on the coattails of [Anthropic](https://www.anthropic.com/) and OpenAI and running none of our own LLM infrastructure.\n\n
\n\n![LLMs are chaotic](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/code-writing-robot/slide-5.png)\n\nBut despite the simplicity, LLMs are pretty chaotic, and this has taken longer to build than we expected.\n\n
\n\n![LLMs are great but have drawbacks like being expensive, unreliable, unpredictable, and slow](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/code-writing-robot/slide-6.png)\n\nLLMs are unlike everything else on the backend: they can easily blow up your server costs, they have plenty of downtime, they're really hard to tune, and they can be super, super slow. Here's a quick run-through of how we've been dealing with these issues.\n\n
\n\n![Good LLM models are expensive and eat money](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/code-writing-robot/slide-7.png)\n\nThe good models are expensive. LLMs eat money. We're practicing financial discipline in a non-zero interest-rate world. How do we do it?\n\n
\n\n![We fix this by using different LLMs](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/code-writing-robot/slide-8.png)\n\nThe easiest cost and performance alpha is just using different providers for different tasks. For example, when someone creates a val, we want to generate the TypeScript code for that val, which is pretty nitpicky work: it needs to work with [Deno](https://deno.com/)'s TypeScript environment and it should reliably know whether it's running on the frontend or the backend, and so on. For that we use Sonnet, which is pretty expensive.\n\nBut then once we have the generated code, we want to generate a name for it, given both the prompt and response to that prompt: for that we use [OpenAI GPT-4o](https://openai.com/index/hello-gpt-4o/), which is cheap, fast, and good enough.\n\n
\n\n![Use am abstraction library because you will switch models](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/code-writing-robot/slide-9.png)\n\nAnd to use different models, it's really nice to use an abstraction library like [@vercel/ai](https://sdk.vercel.ai/docs/introduction), which is what we've been using. I know that there are several hundred options, so that isn't a fully-researched approved recommendation, but it's worked fine for us.\n\n
\n\n![Large context windows get expensive and chat interfaces lead to them](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/code-writing-robot/slide-11.png)\n\nSo the other problem is that this is a chat interface, and none of the LLM providers provide persistence: you have to put the whole chat history into context for every single new message. And the responses that we get from Claude can be pretty long - these are complete programs that we're getting back, lots of tokens. So we've basically dispatched three different approaches to this problem.\n\n
\n\n![We remind users on a regular basis that long conversations are worse and more expensive](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/code-writing-robot/slide-12.png)\n\nOur first line of defense against this is just reminding users that Townie gets dumber when you give it more input. This is pretty similar to the UIs in other tools that say the same thing. Basically once you get to the tenth reply or so, Townie will start losing the thread of what you wanted in the first place.\n\n
\n\n![caching old messages saves us a lot of money](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/code-writing-robot/slide-14.png)\n\nCaching old messages somehow lets Anthropic amortize the cost of parsing messages and turning them into embeddings or whatever kind of fancy internal representation they have. It costs more money to create the cached stuff initially, but less to use it later.\n\n
\n\n![We can visualize our cache usage with Observable](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/code-writing-robot/slide-15.png)\n\nStoring all of this in the database was also a pretty big win - so I was able to just query this from our messages table right into an [Observable](https://observablehq.com/) notebook.\n\nThis works! You can see some of the effects here, where these blue lines that are spiking up are people having super long conversations with Townie, but instead of hitting the tokens statistic, they're being read from the cache.\n\n
\n\n![Looking at a specific chart of cache usage](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/code-writing-robot/slide-16.png)\n\nHere's the cache read tokens, zoom and enhance style, colored by which thread they're part of: you can see some spots where it's just the same exact thread that's benefiting from the caching.\n\n
\n\n![Truncating old messages doesn't work](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/code-writing-robot/slide-17.png)\n\nA funny thing that doesn't work is trying to truncate old messages. Like, you're sending code back and forth, right - so if the LLM writes code and fixes some bug you have two copies of the code in the context window. So we tried replacing old code replies with comments, or something like \"truncated for brevity,\" but the LLM took this very literally. We found that if _we_ truncated code in the conversation history, the LLM decides to truncate code in its responses, too.\n\n
\n\n![Using diffs is too unreliable](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/code-writing-robot/slide-18.png)\n\nAnother potential solution that we've struggled to implement successfully is _diffs_. Claude can convincingly provide a good [unified diff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff#Unified_format) some percentage of the time, but it is very sloppy most of the time. Diffs will have the wrong line numbers or missing context, and they won't work with any off-the-shelf merge implementations. We've implemented our own fuzzy merge solution, but even then, diffs haven't been reliable enough for regular usage.\n\n
\n\n![Anthropic uptime](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/code-writing-robot/slide-20.png)\n![OpenAI uptime](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/code-writing-robot/slide-21.png)\n\nUnfortunately, we've also hit reliability issues with both Anthropic and OpenAI – both center around two nines of uptime recently. They're doing magical things, it's understandable that there are some speed bumps along the way! But there's not too much we can do about this without hosting the models ourselves, so we have just decided to really double down on implementing good error handling in our application and have recently adopted [neverthrow](https://github.com/supermacro/neverthrow) to improve how we use errors in TypeScript.\n\n
\n\n![Tuning our custom prompt with Braintrust](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/code-writing-robot/slide-26.png)\n\nWe've also spent a lot of time tuning our custom prompt, which felt like shooting in the dark until we started using a system for evals. [Braintrust](https://braintrust.dev/) has been great for this.\n\n
\n\n![Progress with braintrust](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/code-writing-robot/slide-27.png)\n\nHere's our progress with Braintrust over time. We highlight different bad behaviors that we want to forbid from our outputs: things like using `require()` instead of `import`, using the `alert()` method, or omitting code from results. Some evals rely on simple string matching, while others use a secondary LLM to judge results from the \"smart\" LLM.\n\n
\n\n![Notifications on pull requests](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/code-writing-robot/slide-28.png)\n\nBraintrust gives us notifications on each Pull Request, letting us know whether a given system prompt change is a regression or improvement in quality.\n\n
\n\n![Implementing our UI with streaming](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/code-writing-robot/slide-34.png)\n\nThe final challenge of Townie is simply implementing the UI, which is anything but simple. We've found a nice middle ground between an overly traditional request/response flow and a fully real-time, streaming, WebSocket-based infrastructure. We're using tRPC’s [Batch Stream Link](https://trpc.io/docs/client/links/httpBatchStreamLink), which pairs traditional POST requests with streaming responses. It gives us the nice type-safety of tRPC and lets us structure our responses using [Async Generators](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/AsyncGenerator) on the server-side.\n\n---\n\nThat's it! Thanks for following along.",[],[202,1036],"804ef780-9cfe-4412-8ece-5cf854a3bb2a","2024-11-01-val-town-town.md","86bb6ee8-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: Val Town Town\ndescription: Can we implement Val Town on Val Town?\npubDate: '2024-11-01T04:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: Max McDonnell\ntags: [engineering]\n---\n\n[![](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/val-town-town/screenshot.png)](https://maxm-valtowntown.web.val.run)\n\n_[Val Town Town](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/valtowntown) is Val Town\nimplemented on Val Town. Fork it, extend it, build stuff on it, or read on if\nyou'd like to learn more._\n\nVal Town lets you build all sorts of tools with vals: HTTP handlers, crons,\nemail endpoints, frontend applications, the list goes on. But _can you build Val\nTown with Val Town_? With a few caveats, the answer is yes: let's dive in.\n\n### Handling a Request with import\n\nSo we want to accept user code, parse and execute it, and use it to handle a web\nrequest.\n\nThe most naïve and solution is to use JavaScript's\n[dynamic import](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/import)\nfunctionality to load their code.\n\nSupposing the user-provided HTTP handler looks like this:\n\n```ts\nexport default (req: Request) => Response.json(\"I work!\");\n```\n\nWe wrap it in our runtime by creating a\n[data URL](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Schemes/data)\nincluding the code, calling import, and running the default export\n([source](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/VTTnosecurity#L1)):\n\n```tsx val\nexport default async function (req: Request): Promise {\n const mod = await import(\n `data:text/tsx,${\n encodeURIComponent(\n `export default (req: Request) => Response.json(\"I work!\")`,\n )\n }`\n );\n return mod.default(req);\n}\n```\n\nThis [works](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/VTTnosecurity), but is very dangerous:\nthere's almost no separation between the system code and the user code. The user\ncode has access to the same memory and permissions that we do. It could read our\nsecrets in `Deno.env` or mess with objects on `globalThis`. This is barely\nbetter than the much-feared\n[eval()](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/eval)\nmethod. _(Fun side note: Val Town was originally called \"Eval Town\" but was\nshortened when we started calling the blocks of code \"vals\".)_\n\nHow can we lock things down?\n\n### Using Web Workers\n\nI recently [published a Val](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/eval) that demonstrates\nhow to execute untrusted code safely, using Deno's\n[Web Worker](https://docs.deno.com/runtime/reference/web_platform_apis/#web-workers)\nand\n[granular permissions](https://docs.deno.com/runtime/reference/web_platform_apis/#specifying-worker-permissions).\nWe can build all sorts of things with this, like secure playgrounds for writing\ncode, or scripting interfaces for existing applications.\n\nWith a little cleverness, we can use Web Workers as a sandbox for user-defined\nHTTP handlers!\n\nBy wrapping things in a Deno Web Worker, we can isolate user code from the\nparent process. This'll give us much better security guarantees than the\n`import()` method did.\n\nHere's a very minimal example:\n\n```ts\nconst workerEval = (code: string, args: any[]): any => {\n return new Promise((resolve) => {\n const worker = new Worker(\n `data:text/tsx,${\n encodeURIComponent(`\nself.onmessage = async (e) => {\n const mod = await import(\\`data:text/tsx,\\${encodeURIComponent(e.data.code)}\\`);\n self.postMessage(mod.default(...e.data.args))\n}`)\n }`,\n { type: \"module\", deno: {permissions: {net: false}},\n );\n worker.postMessage({ code, args });\n worker.onmessage = (e) => {\n resolve(e.data);\n worker.terminate();\n };\n });\n};\n```\n\nNotice that we've added the permission `{net: false}` to lock things down even\nfurther. Now the running code also doesn't get to make HTTP requests.\n\nWeb Workers make us _work_ a little harder to call that user-provided function:\nwe're passing messages here instead of calling functions directly. That's the\ncost of better security.\n\nWe're passing messages back and forth using\n[postMessage](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/postMessage),\nwhich has some limitations on the kinds of objects it can transmit – passing\nnumbers back and forth like this is fine:\n\n```ts\nawait workerEval(`export default (a, b) => a+b`, [1, 2]);\n// => 3\n```\n\nBut we can't just pass a complex object like a `Request`.\n\n```ts\nawait workerEval(`export default (req) => req`, [\n new Request(\"https:/val.town\"),\n]); // => {}\n```\n\nOnly\n[structured-cloneable](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Workers_API/Structured_clone_algorithm#supported_types)\ntypes are supported.\n\nThat's a bummer - how are we going to implement an HTTP handler if we can't send\nrequests and responses between the user code and the system?\n\n### Put a Server in the Worker\n\nIf we can't send `Request` and `Response` using `postMessage`, then let's set up\na web server in the Worker and communicate directly with that, instead of using\n`postMessage`. Here's how it works with\n[reqEvaltown](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/reqEvaltown) the library I've created\nto handle HTTP requests within a Worker.\n\n```ts\nexport async function serveRequest(\n req: Request,\n importUrl: string,\n): Promise {\n let port = await getFreePort();\n const worker = new Worker(\n `https://esm.town/v/maxm/evaltownWorker?cachebust=${crypto.randomUUID()}`,\n {\n type: \"module\",\n deno: {\n permissions: {\n net: [`0.0.0.0:${port}`, `esm.sh:443`, `esm.town:443`],\n read: false,\n write: false,\n },\n },\n },\n );\n worker.postMessage({\n port,\n importUrl,\n });\n worker.onmessage = (event) => console.log(event.data);\n setTimeout(worker.terminate, 10_000); // request timeout\n await isPortListening(port);\n const { pathname, search } = new URL(req.url);\n const url = new URL(\".\" + pathname, \"http://localhost:\" + port);\n url.search = search;\n const resp = await fetch(url, {\n method: req.method,\n headers: req.headers,\n body: req.body,\n redirect: \"manual\",\n });\n return resp;\n}\n```\n\nWithin this function, we:\n\n1. Find an available port.\n2. Spawn a Worker using our\n [script](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/evaltownWorker). We're running the\n Worker with limited permissions to allow the server to run and allow some\n https imports to work, but otherwise block network activity.\n3. Send a message to the Worker with the port and importUrl.\n4. Wait for the post to be available.\n5. Proxy our request to the Worker and return the response.\n\nPhew, certainly a little more complicated than before. Over in our\n[Worker code](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/evaltownWorker), we handle the rest of\nthe exchange.\n\n```ts\nconst start = (port: number, importUrl: string) => {\n import(importUrl)\n .then((m) => {\n mod = m;\n })\n .catch((err) => {\n modError = err;\n console.error(err);\n })\n .finally(() => {\n doneLoading = true;\n for (const { req, resolve } of pendingRequests) {\n handleRequest(req).then(resolve);\n }\n });\n Deno.serve(\n {\n port,\n onListen: () => {},\n onError: (err) => {\n console.error(err);\n return errorResponse(err);\n },\n },\n (req) => {\n if (!doneLoading) {\n return new Promise((resolve) => {\n pendingRequests.push({ req, resolve });\n });\n }\n return handleRequest(req);\n },\n );\n};\n```\n\nWe start a server, queue up requests that arrive while we're loading, and then\nserve any pending requests with the loaded module.\n\nThere we have it, now we're ready to handle requests with a user-provided\nhandler.\n\n### UI\n\nNow for the fun part: we head over to [Townie](https://www.val.town/townie) to\ncreate the UI. I asked for a simple site with minimal styling that accepted user\ncode in a text box and stored it in a SQLite database. From there I made a few\nmanual tweaks, hooked up the code in the database to the request handler\nendpoint, added some stylistic touches, and tweaked a few things with Townie's\nhelp.\n\nTry it out 👉 https://maxm-valtowntown.web.val.run\n\nThe functionality is quite limited compared to Val Town, but you can still do\nlots of things. You can\n[host TLDraw](https://maxm-valtowntown.web.val.run/handler/29), build\n[a React Playground](https://maxm-valtowntown.web.val.run/handler/31), and even\n[stream Server Sent Events](https://maxm-valtowntown.web.val.run/handler/30).\n\n
\n

\n
\n\nAnd there you have it: you can implement a subset of Val Town's functionality on\nVal Town itself!\n\nWorkers provide a viable security sandbox, but it's important to note that it is\nnot as isolated or safe as\n[the runtime strategy that we use today](https://blog.val.town/blog/first-four-val-town-runtimes/),\nwhich uses process isolation as well. Be careful when implementing this and any\nother security-sensitive code on Val Town in your accounts!\n\nThere are many more features that would be possible to implement:\n\n1. We currently spawn one Worker per request, would it be possible to share a\n Worker across many requests?\n2. We use `data:text/tsx` for import urls, could you implement your own module\n host so that you can use https imports?\n3. How could you capture request logs and request metadata for users to view?\n4. Could you provide user accounts? Environment variables? Database access?\n5. Val Town Town\n [cannot run itself](https://maxm-valtowntown.web.val.run/handler/37), can you\n fix that so we can make Val Town Town Town?!\n\nFork the code and see what you can make!\n",[],[202,1043],"c4158536-21db-4950-88e0-54e76386055b","2024-11-01-api-token-scopes.md","86bb573c-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: API Tokens Scopes\ndescription: Improving security with granular control over permissions\npubDate: '2024-11-01T04:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: Max McDonnell\ntags: [product, engineering]\n---\n\nWe've added API scopes to Val Town API tokens\nto improve security and give you more granular\ncontrol over your use of our [REST API](https://docs.val.town/openapi).\n\nWe have read/write scopes for:\n\n- `val` – [vals](https://docs.val.town/openapi#tag/vals)\n- `user` – [user account details](https://docs.val.town/openapi#tag/me)\n- `blob` – [blob storage](https://docs.val.town/openapi#tag/blobs)\n- `sqlite` – [sqlite database](https://docs.val.town/openapi#tag/sqlite)\n- `email` – [ability to send emails](https://docs.val.town/openapi#tag/emails)\n\nThe [API tokens page](https://www.val.town/settings/api)\nnow lets you view and configure the scope of each token.\n\n## Scoping vals\n\nThis change also lets you configure the scope of vals.\nWhen a val runs, we inject an API token into a `valtown` environment variable,\nwhich that val uses to access Val Town Standard Library functions, such as\nblob storage, sqlite, and email sending.\n\nWe are now allowing you to configure the scope of that injected `valtown`\nAPI token environment variable, effectively scoping the permissions of the val,\nensuring that it only has access to the\nresources that it needs.\n\n![](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/api-token-scopes/val-names-permissions.png)\n\nAdditionally, vals now receive short-lived API tokens when they are running, limiting the\npotential damage from a compromised val.\n\n## Safer Defaults\n\nStarting today, the default scope for vals will include every scope\nexcept `val:write` and `user:write` to limit potential damage from\nmisconfiguration, vulnerable libraries, or account compromises.\nWithout the ability to mutate val resources, unauthorized actors now cannot execute\nnew code or modify existing code in your account.\n\nFurther down the road, we're considering even fewer default scopes,\nand having a slick UI to let you opt-into extra scopes at runtime\nwhen your code accesses them. Think of the way iOS apps ask for\npermissions when they need them.\n\n## Github Secret Scanning\n\nWe're joining the [Github Secret Scanning program](https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/secret-scanning/introduction/about-secret-scanning), so if your API token is leaked\nin a public Github repository, we'll be notified and can revoke the token.\n\n## Migrating current users\n\nWe've updated 99% of existing API tokens to use these safer\ndefaults.\n\nWe identified which users are using the `val:write` scope, and have held off migrating their tokens, and work with them to upgrade. If you're one of these users,\nexpect an email shortly.\n\nWe're always looking for ways to make our platform more secure. If you have\nsecurity-related feedback or new feature suggestions please make yourself heard\nin our [Discussions](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions)\nor reach out to security@val.town.\n",[],[202,1050],"0b32365f-3168-4440-8a19-2b98b605557d","2024-10-31-fal.md","86bb2ca8-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: Val Town + Fal Partnership\ndescription: Bringing lightning fast AI image generation to Val Town\npubDate: '2024-10-31T04:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: Steve Krouse\ntags: [engineering]\n---\n\n\n\n[Fal](https://fal.ai/) is an API for generating AI images lightning fast.\n\nToday we're announcing a partnership with Fal to bring their API to Val Town users. You can now use Fal in your vals right away – no Fal API key necessary.\n\n## Quickstart vals\n\nThe quickest way to get started is to fork one of these starter apps:\n\n

\n \n $\"Simplest$ \n

\n Simplest possible Fal app\n

\n \n

\n\n

\n \n $\"Simplified$ \n

\n \"Faltown\" – variants, API client, blob storage\n

\n \n

\n\nClick \"Fork\" on either of these apps, and you'll instantly get that app deployed in your Val Town account. No further setup necessary. You can then ask [Townie](https://val.town/townie) to customize it to your needs. Want a DnD character generator? [No problem!](https://stevekrouse-genuinevioletswordtail.web.val.run/) Want a tool to help you design your next tattoo? [Done!](https://stevekrouse-tattoodesignapp.web.val.run/)\n\n## Instructions for Townie\n\nAnother quick way to get started is to copy & paste instructions into Townie. The following instructions will give Townie everything it needs to use [Flux Schnell](https://fal.ai/models/fal-ai/flux/schnell),\na state-of-the-art 12b parameter image model by [Black Forest Labs](https://blackforestlabs.ai/#get-flux).\nFal supports [the whole Flux suite](https://fal.ai/flux), and you can use any of them by changing the `FAL_ENDPOINT` variable.\n\n````markdown\nThe following are instructions on how to use Fal,\nan image generation API, in your Val Town app.\n\nImport the necessary modules:\n\n```ts\nimport { falProxyRequest } from \"https://esm.town/v/stevekrouse/falProxyRequest\";\nimport { createFalClient } from \"https://esm.sh/@fal-ai/client\";\n```\n\nSet up the Fal client on the client side:\n\n```ts\nconst FAL_ENDPOINT = \"fal-ai/flux/schnell\";\nconst fal = createFalClient({\n proxyUrl: \"/api/fal/proxy\",\n});\n```\n\nUse the Fal client to handle image generation requests on the client:\n\n```ts\nconst result = await fal.subscribe(\"fal-ai/flux/schnell\", {\n input: {\n prompt,\n image_size: \"landscape_4_3\",\n num_inference_steps: 4, // must be 12 or less\n num_images: 1,\n enable_safety_checker: true,\n sync_mode: true,\n },\n});\nconst image_url = result.data.images[0].url;\n```\n\nSet up the Fal proxy request on the server side:\n\n```ts\nexport default async function server(req: Request): Promise {\n const url = new URL(req.url);\n if (url.pathname === \"/\") {\n /* Return HTML */\n }\n\n if (url.pathname === \"/api/fal/proxy\") {\n return falProxyRequest(req);\n }\n}\n```\n````\n\n## Limitations\n\nThis partnership is intended for prototyping and small-scale projects, and is rate-limited as follows:\n\n- Val Town Free Users: 10 requests per hour\n- Val Town Pro Users: 50 requests per hour\n\nWhen your project needs scale, you can sign up for a [Fal API key here](https://fal.ai/).\n\n## How it works\n\nNormally to use the Fal API, you'd need to sign up for an API key on their website, but with this partnership, you can start prototyping with Fal in your vals without any setup. This is possible because we're proxying requests to the Fal API through [this HTTP val](https://www.val.town/v/fal/faltownproxy), which uses your Val Town API token to authenticate and rate-limit you. In this way you're using your Val Town API key in place of a Fal API key.\n\nThis is how our [OpenAI](https://docs.val.town/std/openai/) integration works as well, through [this proxy](https://www.val.town/v/std/openaiproxy). I recently built [a similar proxy](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/socialDataProxy) for [SocialData](https://socialdata.tools/), a Twitter data API provider, which Val Town Pro users can use to run this [twitterAlert](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/twitterAlert) notifying.\n\nWe think of these 'userspace proxies' as the beginnings of what we hope will become 'Val Town Marketplace'. If you want to bring your API to Val Town users, email me at steve@val.town.",[],[202,1057],"be50aca3-adc7-440d-88b8-5140add315c5","2024-10-11-val-town-newsletter-21.md","86bad8d4-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: Val Town Newsletter 21\ndescription: Townie upgrades & faster HTTP vals\npubDate: '2024-10-11T04:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: Steve Krouse\ntags: [newsletter]\n---\n\n[Townie](https://val.town/townie), our AI code assistant, got huge upgrades this month. We fixed a dozen bugs and shipped many of your feature requests. We also made big strides in HTTP val performance, are deprecating some old APIs, and made a number of other upgrades and fixes, detailed below.\n\nYou all created hundreds of awesome vals last month! Our favorite 50 are featured at the bottom of this newsletter.\n\n## 🤖 Townie upgrades\n\nTownie can blow-your-mind and it can make you tear your hair out. We're working hard to make it more of the former and less of the latter. Here's some of the improvements we've made:\n\n- Townie can create & edit any kind of val (not just HTTP vals)\n- You can upload images to Townie to help it understand your request\n- You can view requests and logs from within Townie\n- We made it easier to revert to past versions (more improvements incoming)\n- Townie can detect and fix syntax errors and client-side errors\n- Tom fundamentally re-architected to be less buggy\n- Jackson setup a suite of evals to improve Townie's accuracy\n- Townie diffs are copyable without the `+` and `-` characters\n- Diffs are off by default. You can request them explicitly\n- Townie doesn't overwrite your hand-written code as often\n- Townie has a [docs page](https://docs.val.town/reference/townie/) with tips & tricks\n\nPlease continue to reach out when Townie does something amazing or awful. Your feedback is invaluable. And as some of you know, I (Steve) am always happy to jump on a call or try to fix bugs for you. I'm steve@val.town.\n\n## ⚡️ Fast Vals\n\nVals continue to get faster and more scalable. Now [a 'hello world' val](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/hello_world) responds in about 50ms, which is comparable to other cloud providers. Our servers are in Ohio and we're testing here in New York, so your mileage may vary if you live further from Ohio.\n\n## Deprecating old APIs\n\nWe are deprecating a number of old APIs that are no longer in use:\n\n- Express vals – discontinued on 10/7/2024\n- Old HTTP runtime – migrating on 10/20/2024 ([how to upgrade](https://docs.val.town/troubleshooting/migrating-deprecated-http-vals/))\n- Eval API – discontinuing on 11/1/2024\n\nThese changes effect less than 1% of our users. If you're effected, you will receive an email with more information on how to upgrade.\n\nThe exciting part about deprecations is that it means we'll be able to ship faster because we won't be maintaining old code that almost nobody is using. Max rebuilding our code-running infrastructure to even faster and more scalable, and not having to support these old APIs will make his job a lot easier.\n\n## Prettier errors\n\nHTTP vals now have prettier errors. They sometimes have stack traces and link to the relevant source. (We're working improving the stack traces & links.)\n\n $\"Pretty$ \n\n## Videos\n\nVideos are a great way to learn the pro tips & tricks for Val Town.\n\nI did two livestreams with wonderful guests:\n\n- [**Creating design tools**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtqmldWYJoo) with [Alexander Vilinskyy](https://x.com/vilinskyy) – remaking his [viral SVG generator](https://x.com/vilinskyy/status/1834982920685269308) with Townie\n- [**Creating a Dog-E-Dex**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsvBroU9I68) with [Cynthia](https://x.com/yescynfria), a designer at Notion, who has a dream to meet every breed of dog\n\nAnd a handful of other videos:\n\n- **How to add Google Login to your val in 30 seconds** - [quick demo](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1844426213353455701), [longer explanation](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1842328023049117787)\n- [**Watch AI make me a SQLite Dashboard from 7 in minutes**](https://youtu.be/pJJfCMsklqg)\n- [**Watch me make & deploy a blog in 24 minutes with AI**](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1836457427677458826)\n- [**Lucia Auth is DEAD! Long live implementing sessions by hand?**](https://youtube.com/live/lmEgcuVm0jI)\n- [**Building a Bookshelf Scanner with AI**](https://youtube.com/live/xPvLUHvTgwM)\n\n## 🎉 Other updates\n\n- The Val Town team now gets woken up for downtime (PagerDuty) 🚨\n- AI bots are blocked from HTTP vals\n- Updated Deno types\n- Fixed a renaming bug – thanks Robin Sloan for the report 🙏\n- Fixed logs and errors with new HTTP runtime\n- Removed pinned vals UI cruft\n- Changed the order of logs (newest at the bottom)\n- Disabled autofill on env variables – thanks Matthew Bunday for the suggestion 🙏\n- Improved our list of adjectives for new val names\n- Made POST v1/vals/id a no-op if no changed – thanks Andres Rodriguez for [the request](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/issues/185) 🙏\n\n## 🛣️ Roadmap\n\nThe main projects over the next couple months are:\n\n- Discontinuing the old HTTP runtime and Eval API\n- Continued Townie AI improvements\n- Fine-grained API Token Scopes\n- Val Projects (to manage complex multi-val collections)\n- Townie writing READMEs\n- New val runtime architecture for faster & more scalable vals\n\nPlease [make feature requests and vote](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions?discussions) on what you'd like to see next.\n\n## 🌟 Community vals\n\n- Dan made [a bunch of vals to work with the Campsite API](https://www.val.town/u/campsite) and [a demo video](https://x.com/DanPhilibin/status/1833619842303463748)\n- Sarah made a [Slack notifier](https://x.com/SarahChieng/status/1833602967410528594) whenever topics of interest are mentioned on Twitter, Hacker News, and Reddit, powered by Browserbase\n- Jonnie made a [Slack bot](https://x.com/destroytoday/status/1834408549549494302) that reminds [designtown.nyc](https://designtown.nyc) folks of the keypad code\n- Guy [generates X slams Y memes](https://x.com/gvy_dvpont/status/1841818282719924430), autotweeted to Mastadon\n- Thej wrote [an excellent blog on AQI alerts in India](https://thejeshgn.com/2024/09/11/simple-imd-alerts/)\n- Steve upgraded his [twitter alert](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/twitterAlert) to use SocialData's API, so any Val Town Pro user can seamlessly fork it\n- Guy built a site to convert [Landscape Video -> Blurred Portrait](https://x.com/gvy_dvpont/status/1840894297698128246)\n- Steve [converts error emails from Render](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/renderEmails) into alerts on Discord and Github Issues, assigned to the right person, in the current milestone\n- The Crossmint team made a [bunch of awesome vals](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1835778062237008084)\n- Nathan made a [color app](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1836031718249083128) for his daughter\n- Steve launched [stringify.org](https://stringify.org) a mini-site that converts any text into a valid string you can paste into a JS file\n- Ash made a [chore app](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1836136881702031425) for his daughter\n- Eric's eight-year-old made a [word picture match game](https://efoley-wordpicturematch.web.val.run/) [for his two-year-old using Townie](https://x.com/ericdfoley/status/1840478366408798277)\n- Aman built a [flux playground](https://x.com/_amankishore/status/1840522105403961439) with Modal\n- Eli made [an info site for California's 2024 ballot propositions](https://madprops2024.org/)\n- Seamus made a [perlin noise animation generator](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1838666792484638992)\n- Wolf made a [chrome extension](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1838592604734202102) to run github gists in Val Town\n- Steve made a [domain name finder](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1834709297869070764)\n- Seamus made a [drum machine](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1838590564993765706)\n- Steve made a [github graph drum machine](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1839421869466018061) and Tom made it [sound nicer](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1839700676760186896)\n- Harry made a snazzy [LangChain Ambassador card](https://x.com/zhanghaili0610/status/1840602999443640343)\n- Steve made a [synth playground](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1838248962865647838) where you can create melodies with a sequencer and play them\n- Carl built a [DnD character creator](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1832391129586638943)\n- Jan made a very good prompt for [news & research with Groq](https://x.com/yawnxyz/status/1841613186531000522)\n- Sharan made a [personal writing assistant](https://x.com/sharanbabu2001/status/1832549769111015900) with Cerebras\n- Max sent some Val Town users [personalized deprecation emails](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1843310733511324131)\n- Steve created [helper functions](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/fileToDataURL) for base64 encoding images for sending to ChatGPT, Anthropic, and Gemini\n- Stefan made an [allergy food tracker](https://x.com/stefanboesen/status/1833364392232296897)\n- Moe made a [hex maze visualization](https://x.com/0xMoe_/status/1840079699344588805)\n- Ankit made a [hold the clock button game](https://x.com/ankitkr0/status/1833410323543404961)\n- Dustin made a [slack bot](https://x.com/dctalbot/status/1840478366408798277) that translates messages to pirate speak\n- Steve made a [realtime chess game](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1838654708342481267) where you play as the king and move with the arrow keys\n- Paras made a [book recommendation mind map](https://x.com/paraschopra/status/1835311841024614581)\n- Steve made a [bookshelf scanner](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1835740596884951317) with Gemini 1.5 flash\n- Ash made a [val to show how to get and render images from Val Town Blob Storage](https://www.val.town/v/ashryanio/getBlobAndRenderAsImage)\n- Steve made a demo showing how [Cerebras is an LLM fast enough for sliders](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1842308619897069918)\n- Konrad made a [retro car inventory app](https://val.town/v/konradmoneta/carInventory)\n- @macro21kgb made a [site to convert WebP images to PNG](https://www.val.town/v/macro21kgb/imageConverterSite)\n- DT made [a twist on the classic Game of Life](https://www.val.town/v/dthyresson/gameOfLifeSite)\n- Steve made a mini-site for calculating [idealized weekly growth](https://stevekrouse-growth.web.val.run/)\n- Nico made a [JSON visualizer](https://x.com/nbbaier/status/1840308862856896721)\n- Steve cloned Dan Shipper's [book photo analyzer](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1836781662161588486)",[],[202,1064],"21eba855-2a6e-4872-a226-a9975ee81f8e","2024-09-26-townie.md","86baafb2-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: Introducing Townie AI\ndescription: 'Meet Townie, our AI assistant that helps you ship apps fast'\npubDate: '2024-09-26T04:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: Steve Krouse\ntags: [product]\n---\n\nLast month, we launched a major overhaul of Townie, our AI assistant that helps you build apps. Val Town was already the best website to turn an idea into a deployed app. Townie can help you ship much faster.\n\n

\n\n\nIn the following video, I use Townie to make an RSVP page – with a backend and database – in just a few prompts and a couple minutes.\n\n

\n\nBut the best way to see what Townie is like is to just go play with it.\n\n\n Start creating with Townie\n\n\n## Community creations\n\nYour creativity never ceases to amaze us. Here are some of the cool things built with Townie so far.\n\n#### Fal Image Generator\n\nIn under a minute and a single prompt, Batuhan built a tool to generate images with Fal AI.\n\n\n \n $\"\"$ \n \n\n\n#### Twitter Tracker\n\nCharmaine built a site that tracks mentions of her company's product on Twitter.\n\n\n \n $\"\"$ \n \n\n\n#### Blog summaries\n\nWith a handful of prompts, Peter made a neat tool to get Claude to summarize a blog post just by pasting a link.\n\n\n \n $\"\"$ \n \n\n\n#### Mood tracker\n\nMarcus was able to build a mood-tracking app in minutes.\n\n\n \n $\"\"$ \n \n\n\n#### Slack Bot\n\nJohnnie built a Slack bot for his team.\n\n\n \n $\"\"$ \n \n\n\n#### The sky's the limit\n\nTownie can make almost anything you can imagine. Here's more inspiration from the community to get you started:\n\n- [Carl Lange](https://www.val.town/u/csl_) built a [DNDoodle](https://dndoodle.redfloatplane.lol/), a scheduling app for D&D groups with improved features like setting poll end dates and identifying the DM's availability separately\n- [David Thyresson](https://www.val.town/u/dthyresson) built a [Bedtime Story Maker](https://dthyresson-bedtimestorymaker.web.val.run/) that generates personalized children's stories with illustrations using OpenAI and Fal AI\n- [@yawnxyz](https://www.val.town/u/yawnxyz) built [Newsly](https://www.val.town/v/yawnxyz/newsly), a val that stores emails in a SQLite database, allowing you to access your newsletters\n- [@jdan](https://www.val.town/u/jdan) built an [interactive Wikipedia Family Tree Crawler](https://www.val.town/v/jdan/infoboxCrawler) that visualizes parent-child relationships by crawling Wikipedia infoboxes\n- [@moe](https://www.val.town/u/moe) created an awesome [Number Chain Puzzle game](https://www.val.town/v/moe/numbergame) where players drag between adjacent squares with the same number to score points\n- [@roramigator](https://www.val.town/u/roramigator) built a [Hacker News digest](https://www.val.town/v/roramigator/hackernewsdigest) that emails you the top stories from Hacker News every 3 days\n- [Giles](https://www.val.town/u/gilesb) built [an email expenser](https://www.val.town/v/gilesb/emailExpenser) that processes email content using GPT4, extracts key information like income and expenses, and logs it to a Google Sheet\n- [@roramigator](https://www.val.town/u/roramigator) created a [idle clicker game about spreading a religion](https://val.town/v/roramigator/religionClickerGame)\n\n## Resources\n\nWe have some helpful [prompting tips in our docs](https://docs.val.town/reference/townie/).\n\nYou can also read more about [how we built Townie](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/how-we-built-townie) and [Simon Willison's blog post about Townie's prompt](https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/28/system-prompt-for-townie/).\n\nIf you get stuck, please reach out in [our Discord](https://discord.gg/dHv45uN5RY), or email me directly (steve@val.town), and include a link to your val. We're here to help!\n\n## Start building today\n\nHave an idea for a site, game, or app for yourself, friends, family or work?\n\nTownie is free and available now in public beta. We can't wait to see what you build.\n\n\n Start creating with Townie\n",[],[202,1071],"db010bd6-eae5-43f0-86fa-28de5f55a139","2024-09-07-val-town-newsletter-20.md","86ba15e8-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",812,["D",1787078486614],"---\ntitle: Val Town Newsletter 20\ndescription: \"Townie AI, Faster vals, and Lockfiles\"\npubDate: \"2024-09-07T04:00:00.000Z\"\nauthor: Steve Krouse\ntags: [newsletter]\n---\n\nThe newest version of Townie is _incredible_ at writing vals. It creates\ndeployed apps with a backend and database in seconds. Honestly, if you have five\nminutes, [you gotta try it out](https://val.town/townie)!\n\nWe shipped a number of other improvements, including a huge speedup to vals,\nlockfiles to secure your code, the ability to receive email attachments, a new\nversion history UI, and opened up support for hundreds more NPM packages.\n\nQuick hiring update: we're still looking for a couple more engineers to join our\nfounding team in Brooklyn. If you have any brilliant friends in NYC, please send\nthem our way!\n\nThere was such an overwhelming amount of amazing vals created this month that I\nhad to [build a custom tool](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PI5CIkcETc) to\nhelp me write the \"community vals\" section of this newsletter. You guys rock!\n\n## 🤖 Townie AI\n\nThis month we released our third wholesale rewrite of Townie, and it's\n_incredible_. It's now able to generate full-stack applications with a backend\nand database in seconds. It's like Claude Artifacts, with a backend.\n\n

\n\n[If](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1826728366549975506)\n[you](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1824823444485415000)\n[want](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1823825618246779241)\n[more](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1826336463543566826)\n[Townie](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1828831012966777263)\n[demos](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1825978445697819067),\n[I'm](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1828864172567712103)\n[tweeting](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1827046592806891580)\n[up](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1827036933823848553)\n[a](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/182636536262528211)\n[storm](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1826356154525778404)\n[of](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1826317269657395227)\n[them](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1831046366904353066). If you want to\nknow the backstory behind Townie, JP released\n[an excellent blog post about how we prototyped Townie](/codegen).\n\n## ⚡️ Faster Vals\n\nVals now run way faster. You'll see 2-10x speedups, depending on the context.\nWe're finally competitive with premier hosting providers. For example if you hit\nan HTTP val's endpoint in NYC, you'll often get a response in under 100ms. (Our\nservers are in Ohio. Multi-region is still a while off. Sorry Japan!)\n\nThis is thanks to our new load balancer, which:\n\n1. Routes around a slow part of our stack (more on this later)\n2. Directs traffic to where your val is already running, so you skip cold starts\n\nExpect more improvements and a fuller blog on this shortly!\n\n## 🔒 Lockfiles\n\nWe've introduced lockfiles in Val Town to enhance stability, security, and\nperformance. When you save a val, a deno.lock file is generated, ensuring the\nsame versions of dependencies are used in the future. This prevents issues\ncaused by changing libraries and malicious dependencies, and improves\nperformance by caching the dependency tree. Learn more in\n[our announcement post](/lockfiles).\n\n![Charts of requests to esm.town and worker initialization time decreasing](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/lockfiles/metrics.png)\n\n## 💸 We joined the OSS Pledge\n\nWe're excited to announce that we've joined the\n[OSS Pledge](https://osspledge.com/). We commit to donating at least $2k per\nyear per full-time developer at Val Town to open-source. You can learn more in\n[our announcement post](/oss). We donated have donated $9,600 so far in 2024:\n\n| Project | What it does | Amount |\n| ------------------------------------------------ | ---------------------------------------- | -----: |\n| [esm.sh](https://esm.sh/) | CDN for ESM modules | $1000 |\n| [Sindre Sorhus](https://github.com/sindresorhus) | Prolific open source maintainer | $1000 |\n| [tsx](https://tsx.is/) | Easy way to run TypeScript directly | $1000 |\n| [Fastify](https://fastify.dev/) | Web framework | $1000 |\n| [Zod](https://zod.dev/) | Data validation library | $1000 |\n| [Unified](https://unifiedjs.com/) | Markdown transformation module ecosystem | $1000 |\n| [Drizzle](https://orm.drizzle.team/) | Database query builder | $800 |\n| [CodeMirror](https://codemirror.net/) | Code editor framework | $800 |\n| [Mock Service Worker](https://mswjs.io/) | Testing helper modules | $500 |\n| [rclone](https://rclone.org/) | Upload and download files to S3 and more | $500 |\n| [Hono](https://hono.dev/) | Web standards-based web framework | $500 |\n| [husky](https://typicode.github.io/husky/) | Nice way to set up git hooks | $500 |\n\n## 🎉 Other updates\n\n- Email handler vals can now receive attachments – thanks\n [danielrw7](https://github.com/danielrw7) for the\n [feature request](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions/75)\n 🙏\n- [New version history UI for vals](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1831027036220989664)\n- [Support for hundreds more NPM packages](https://x.com/mxmcd/status/1828881056969150616)\n- [Ability to trigger LLM completions manually](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1821229088209862848)\n (alt-\\\\)\n- [Go to a val's full-screen editor by pressing .](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1822023518793404828)\n (like on GitHub) - thanks [David Siegel](https://val.town/u/dvdsgl) for the\n suggestion 🙏\n- [Redesigned Profile menu](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1819005362877407357)\n (in the top-right corner)\n- [Ability to set HTTP headers in `@std/email`](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions/142) -\n thanks [wilhelm](https://github.com/wilhelmklopp) for the suggestion 🙏\n- Val READMEs are now CodeMirror, with LLM completions (triggered manually,\n alt-\\\\)\n- A new val settings tab\n- Protections for certain kinds of denial of service attacks\n- \"Forked from\" information on val cards\n- Updated Deno to 1.46.3\n\n## 🛣️ Roadmap\n\nHere's some of the top features we're planning to work in the coming months.\nPlease\n[make feature requests and vote](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions?discussions)\non what you'd like to see next.\n\n- Continued Townie AI improvements\n- Rolling out `HTTP (Preview)` as the default `HTTP` val type\n- Continued performance improvements\n- [LLM-generated READMEs](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions/26)\n\n## 🌟 Community vals\n\n- Guy Dupont made an incredible\n [digital \"bumper sticker\" that shows what he's listening to right now](https://x.com/gvy_dvpont/status/1831412749647409286) +\n [an amazing video explaining it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWRPRW6pHIY)!\n- Ben Bleikamp wrote a couple of\n [crons to automate some posts on campsite.co and send posts to Slack](https://x.com/bleikamp/status/1832073946151207029)\n- [Schpet](https://www.val.town/u/schpet) built a val that sends a daily post to\n Slack listing all the Linear issues assigned to you that changed status,\n [powered by Val Town](https://www.val.town/v/schpet/linearStandup)\n- Guy Dupont\n [injected a val into his hand](https://x.com/gvy_dvpont/status/1823342935208755558)!!!\n- [csl\\_](https://www.val.town/u/csl_) built a\n [DNDoodle](https://dndoodle.redfloatplane.lol/), a scheduling app for D&D\n groups with improved features like setting poll end dates and identifying the\n DM's availability separately\n- [charmaine](https://x.com/charmaine_klee) made a val to help her at work\n (Snapchat)\n [track all mentions of SnapAR or Lens Studio on Twitter](https://x.com/charmaine_klee/status/1831525120294236222)\n- [@isidentical](https://www.val.town/u/isidentical) built a\n [Flux Image Generator](https://www.val.town/v/isidentical/fluxImageGenerator)\n that generates images from user prompts using the fal.ai API in\n [under 1 minute from scratch with Townie](https://x.com/isidentical/status/1828614519259832725)!\n- Larry Hudson made\n [a netifly plugin that allows you to redirect with authentication](https://netlify-plugin-redirect-with-auth.netlify.app/)\n so you can submit to private vals\n- [Sam Rose](https://x.com/samwhoo) built a\n [collaborative 6-word story app](https://x.com/samwhoo/status/1816582937707528586)\n- Simon Willison wrote an excellent\n [blog post](https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/28/system-prompt-for-townie/)\n on Townie's prompt\n- [David Siegel](https://www.val.town/u/dvdsgl) used Glide's bulk API\n [to sync all of Glide’s issues and PRs into an app](https://x.com/dvdsgl/status/1817397810880479315)\n- [Moe](https://www.val.town/u/moe) built an awesome\n [SpaceX Launch tracker](https://moe-spacex.web.val.run/) that displays\n upcoming and past SpaceX launches with data visualizations\n- [@wilg](https://val.town/u/wilg) made [tax.moi](https://tax.moi/) to explain\n how graduated federal income tax works\n- [Perbhat Kumar](https://www.val.town/u/PerbhatK) built\n [an app that weighs his coffee using the mac trackpad](https://x.com/PerbhatK/status/1831860667604934904)\n- [@jxnblk](https://val.town/u/jxnblk)\n [rebuilt](https://x.com/jxnblk/status/1826252329940832560)\n [jxnblk.com](https://jxnblk.com/) on val town – it's awesome!\n- [@moe](https://val.town/u/moe) created a\n [P5.js helper for Val Town](https://val.town/v/moe/p5) and used it to make\n [two](https://val.town/v/moe/exampleP5sketch) awesome\n [examples](https://val.town/v/moe/lostKeys)\n- The [Cannoli](https://cannoli.website/) docs\n [teach their users how to use Val Town](https://docs.cannoli.website/Blog/Release+Notes+8-11-2024#Val+Town)!\n- [David Thyresson](https://www.val.town/u/dthyresson) built a\n [Bedtime Story Maker](https://dthyresson-bedtimestorymaker.web.val.run/) that\n generates personalized children's stories with illustrations using OpenAI and\n Fal AI\n- [Jackson](https://www.val.town/u/jxnblk) built\n [test](https://www.val.town/v/jxnblk/test), a utility and badge to show test\n suite status in your val readme.\n- [Justin Bennett](https://www.val.town/u/just_be) is creating\n [content-addressable JavaScript](https://just-be.dev/rc/impossible-day)\n- [Peter Liu](https://www.val.town/u/peterqliu) revamped their\n [VT App v2](https://www.val.town/v/peterqliu/vt_app_v2) with JWT\n authentication, user accounts, and a way to change emails or delete accounts.\n- [Carl Lange](https://www.val.town/u/csl_) made\n [a site that can measure your tennis speed based on the sound of the ball hitting the racket](https://tennisspeed.redfloatplane.lol/)\n- [yawnxyz](https://www.val.town/u/yawnxyz) built\n [Newsly](https://www.val.town/v/yawnxyz/newsly), a val that stores emails in a\n SQLite database, allowing you to access your newsletters\n- [@jdan](https://www.val.town/u/jdan) built an\n [interactive Wikipedia Family Tree Crawler](https://www.val.town/v/jdan/infoboxCrawler)\n that visualizes parent-child relationships by crawling Wikipedia infoboxes\n- [@moe](https://www.val.town/u/moe) created an awesome\n [Number Chain Puzzle game](https://www.val.town/v/moe/numbergame) where\n players drag between adjacent squares with the same number to score points\n- [@roramigator](https://www.val.town/u/roramigator) built a\n [Hacker News digest](https://www.val.town/v/roramigator/hackernewsdigest) that\n emails you the top stories from Hacker News every 3 days\n- [Giles](https://www.val.town/u/gilesb) built an email expenser that processes\n email content using GPT-4, extracts key information like income and expenses,\n and logs it to a Google Sheet,\n [powered by Val Town](https://www.val.town/v/gilesb/emailExpenser).\n- [roramigator](https://www.val.town/u/roramigator) created a\n [idle clicker game about spreading a religion](https://val.town/v/roramigator/religionClickerGame)\n- [@stevekrouse](https://www.val.town/u/stevekrouse) built a\n [typing challenge game](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/typetest) where you\n can test your typing speed and submit your score to a leaderboard\n- [David Thyresson](https://www.val.town/u/dthyresson)\n [generating movie mashups](https://www.val.town/v/dthyresson/movieMashup) with\n posters, titles, and treatments.\n- [@ankit](https://www.val.town/u/ankitkr0) built a\n [website that tracks clicks](https://clicktracker.ankitkr0.web.val.run/) and\n adds confetti with each click, backed by a SQLite database.\n- [@all](https://www.val.town/u/all) built an\n [Icon Explorer](https://www.val.town/v/all/iconExplorer) that lets you search,\n filter, and copy React icon components from popular libraries like Feather,\n Font Awesome, and Ant Design.\n- [David Thyresson](https://www.val.town/u/dthyresson) built\n [Play Me A Song](https://www.val.town/v/dthyresson/playMeASong), a web app\n that lets you search for and open songs in Spotify.\n- [Adam Kazwell](https://www.val.town/u/kaz) built a\n [site that helps you know understand your personal healthy boundaries](https://x.com/kaz/status/1829022200147706175)\n- [@szymonator](https://val.town/u/szymonator) made a\n [an API demo to showcase how the Teamsurfboard API can be used](https://val.town/v/szymonator/surfboardDemoSchedule2)\n- [@all](https://www.val.town/u/all) built a\n [Val Town Prompt Generator](https://promptgen.all.esm.town/) that creates\n optimized prompts for Val Town\n- [@thatsmeadarsh](https://www.val.town/u/thatsmeadarsh) built a script that\n allows OpenAI assistants to\n [star a GitHub repository via natural language commands](https://www.val.town/v/thatsmeadarsh/star_a_github_repository_with_natural_language),\n powered by Composio\n- [Alex Phan](https://www.val.town/u/alexdphan) and\n [Sarah Chieng](https://www.val.town/u/sarahxc) built\n [Slack Scout](https://www.val.town/v/alexdphan/slackScout), which sends Slack\n notifications whenever your keywords are mentioned on Twitter, Hacker News, or\n Reddit, powered by Browserbase\n- [Max Krass](https://www.val.town/u/maxkrass) built a gateway to access\n Microsoft Graph data for event catalogs, powered by\n [a val](https://www.val.town/v/maxkrass/bondingkataloggateway).\n- [Brent Jackson](https://www.val.town/u/jxnblk) built a\n [service to generate OG images](https://www.val.town/v/jxnblk/blogOGImage) for\n his blog, powered by Val Town.\n- [@weaverwhale](https://www.val.town/u/weaverwhale) created\n [FindTrendsUsingGPT](https://www.val.town/v/weaverwhale/FindTrendsUsingGPT),\n which analyzes merchant transaction data and generates a markdown report with\n charts and tables identifying trends, fraud regions, refund rates, and\n merchant profit/loss analyses.\n- [@movienerd](https://www.val.town/u/movienerd) created a\n [pixel-art idle clicker game](https://www.val.town/v/movienerd/clicker) where\n you can earn money and upgrade various factories and workers, all written in\n React and powered by Val Town.\n- [Dan Thyresson](https://www.val.town/u/dthyresson) built a\n [GraphQL API to query Spotify tracks](https://www.val.town/v/dthyresson/tracksapi)\n he has listened to\n- [Jackson](https://x.com/jxnblk) built\n [a minimal web-based markdown editor with vim keybindings](https://x.com/jxnblk/status/1823725027109290039)\n- [Kaz](https://www.val.town/u/kaz) built a\n [\"Would You Rather\" game](https://www.val.town/v/kaz/reluctantcoffeegayal)\n that ranks answers with an Elo-based system and tracks progress.\n- [Sharan Babu](https://www.val.town/u/sharanbabu) built a\n [Text Summarization Comparison Tool](https://www.val.town/v/sharanbabu/textSummarizationComparisonTool)\n that uses the Cerebras LLM API to generate summaries through direct and\n extractive + cohesive methods\n- [@pinjasaur](https://www.val.town/u/pinjasaur) built a\n [proxy for Kagi's Smallweb RSS feed](https://pinjasaur-smallweb.web.val.run/)\n to limit the size and make it more RSS reader-friendly\n- [Curt](https://www.val.town/u/curtcox) built a\n [QR Code Scanner](https://x.com/curtcox/qrcodescanner) that uses your device's\n camera to decode QR codes and display their content and additional information\n- [Jackson](https://www.val.town/u/jxnblk) built\n [Indirection](https://www.val.town/v/jxnblk/indirection), a game of riddles to\n play with friends by guessing words from clues\n- [jdan](https://www.val.town/u/jdan) created\n [dialog](https://www.val.town/v/jdan/dialog), a val that renders Windows\n 98-style dialog boxes as SVGs\n- [EJ Fox](https://www.val.town/u/mrejfox) built a\n [daily contribution checkerboard](https://x.com/mrejfox/status/1830343140168839336)\n for Val Town\n- [@tempdev](https://www.val.town/u/tempdev) built a\n [RabbitStream](https://www.val.town/v/tempdev/rabbitstream) val that provides\n an easy-to-deploy TypeScript implementation for quickly accessing RabbitStream\n video sources\n- [Sharan Babu](https://www.val.town/u/sharanbabu) built a\n [search engine prototype with autocomplete functionality](https://www.val.town/v/sharanbabu/legitimateTanTiger)\n powered by the Cerebras LLM API and cached in the browser\n- [Mauricio](https://www.val.town/u/mauriciobc) built\n [a cat feeding app](https://www.val.town/v/mauriciobc/miau-food) that allows\n you to log when you fed your cats and which cats were fed\n- [@tempdev](https://www.val.town/u/tempdev) created a\n [Flix](https://www.val.town/v/tempdev/flix), a movie and TV show streaming\n platform with search, watch, and info pages\n- [@gio](https://www.val.town/u/gio) built\n [Razza](https://www.val.town/v/gio/razza), a web app that generates QR codes\n for initiating SMS conversations, categorized by topics like Film, Technology,\n and Sports\n- [@yawnxyz](https://www.val.town/u/yawnxyz) built\n [Diesel](https://www.val.town/v/yawnxyz/diesel), a lightweight data\n manipulation library for querying and transforming JSON, YAML, CSV, and TOML\n data\n- [@gio](https://www.val.town/u/gio) built\n [The Here Times](https://www.val.town/v/gio/theheretimes), a map-based news\n aggregator using the Google Maps API, Geonames, and NewsAPI\n- [@cephalization](https://www.val.town/u/cephalization) built a\n [SMS Journaler Text Relay](https://cephalization-smsjournalertextrelay.web.val.run)\n that lets you have conversational SMS exchanges with an AI assistant to\n organize your daily work activities\n- [@stevekrouse](https://www.val.town/u/stevekrouse) built\n [lucia_middleware](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/lucia_middleware), a\n middleware for handling user authentication and sessions, backed by Val Town\n SQLite\n- [@vawogbemi](https://www.val.town/u/vawogbemi) built a\n [URL shortener](https://vawogbemi-short.web.val.run/)\n- [David Thyresson](https://www.val.town/u/dthyresson) created\n [a Hono demo app with Unkey rate-limiting middleware](https://www.val.town/v/dthyresson/honoWithUnkeyRateLimiting)\n that limits requests to 2 per minute\n- [Matthew Weaver](https://www.val.town/u/mjweaver01) built\n [FindFraudTrendsUsingGPT](https://val.town/v/mjweaver01/FindFraudTrendsUsingGPT),\n which generates real-time fraud trend reports using GPT-4o, complete with data\n tables and Mermaid charts.\n- [Carl Lange](https://www.val.town/u/csl_) created his\n [redfloatplane.lol](https://redfloatplane.lol/), hosted on Val Town\n- [Alex](https://www.val.town/u/alexpetros) built a\n [val that monitors Hacker News and Lobsters for posts from certain sites](https://www.val.town/v/alexpetros/aggregatoralert)\n and sends an email notification with the matched stories\n- [Jackson](https://www.val.town/u/jxnblk) built an\n [example of using his test val to test his tuna val](https://www.val.town/v/jxnblk/tunaTestSuite),\n showcasing tuna's CSS-in-JS features.\n- [Sam Rose](https://www.val.town/u/samwho) built a\n [simple feature flag implementation](https://www.val.town/v/samwho/featureflags)\n that uses hashing and rollout percentages to determine flag behavior for\n users.\n- [Matt](https://www.val.town/u/neverstew) created a val that\n [supercharges query params](https://www.val.town/v/neverstew/superchargedQueryParams)\n to allow for operators like `>`, `<`, and `!=` in addition to `=`.\n- [Kyle](https://www.val.town/u/kylem) built a\n [Dependency License Checker](https://www.val.town/v/kylem/dependencyLicenses)\n that generates a table of licenses for all dependencies in a package.json file\n- [Kian](https://www.val.town/u/kian) built a\n [webcam-based image processing app](https://www.val.town/v/kian/webcameffects)\n that applies fun effects like Pink Zone, Goth Girl, and Weed Mode to your\n webcam feed.\n- [@yawnxyz](https://www.val.town/u/yawnxyz) created a\n [Perlin Noise Fabric Color Generator](https://www.val.town/v/yawnxyz/perlinNoiseFabricColor)\n that renders a hypnotic, organic pattern using Processing.js and the Perlin\n noise function\n- [@roramigator](https://www.val.town/u/roramigator) created a\n [Loot Generator API](https://www.val.town/v/roramigator/lootGenAPI) that\n generates random legendary loot items with adjectives, materials, and item\n types, based on a rarity algorithm.\n- [Steve Krouse](https://www.val.town/u/stevekrouse) built a\n [Virtual Confessional](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/confessionalApp)\n where users can confess sins and receive penance in the form of Catholic\n prayers from ChatGPT\n- [@yawnxyz](https://www.val.town/u/yawnxyz) reorganized\n [Val Town's SQLite adapter for Lucia](https://www.val.town/v/yawnxyz/luciaValtownSqlite),\n making it easier to work with SQLite databases for authentication.\n- [Sam Willis](https://www.val.town/u/samwillis) got\n [WASM Posgres running in Val Town](https://x.com/samwillis/status/1829142581831450859)\n- [Raul Galera](https://www.val.town/u/rgd) made\n [a surf forecast for his hometown with Townie](https://x.com/raulgalerad/status/1827049028862828825)\n- [Midas](https://x.com/TheMoonMidas) built\n [a quote image generator in just a couple requests in Townie](https://x.com/TheMoonMidas/status/1826973638697861283)\n- [Will Krouse](https://x.com/Willthereader) made\n [an infosite for Jumpchain](https://x.com/Willthereader/status/1825565234263978267)\n- [Peter Hartree](https://x.com/peterhartree) made\n [a 5 min Townie demo video of an app that summarizes blogs](https://x.com/peterhartree/status/1825254990169927976)\n- [Austin Crim](https://x.com/crim_codes) built\n [a notes app that works with iPhone shortcuts](https://x.com/crim_codes/status/1818112710149578764)\n- [Marcus Sandstrom](https://x.com/MarcusSandstrom) made\n [mood tracker app](https://x.com/MarcusSandstrom/status/1830544711850823697)\n- [Will Krouse](https://x.com/Willthereader) made\n [a Safari Extension to stream in ChatGPT to define words inline](https://x.com/Willthereader/status/1825969919147597933)\n- [Steve Krouse](https://x.com/stevekrouse) made\n [demo that shows Cerebras 8b generating HTML pages in under a second](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1831076208681111782)",[],[202,1078],"a63eeb51-f80e-45ff-9611-b6955065d591","2024-08-30-oss.md","86ba02b0-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: Joining the Open Source Pledge\ndescription: 'We donated $9,600 to open-source!'\npubDate: '2024-08-30T04:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: Tom MacWright\nthumbnail: >-\n https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/oss/opensourcepledge-logo-horiz-color-opengraph.png\ntags: [company]\n---\n\n\n\n\nVal Town couldn't exist without open source software. Like most startups, we build applications on top of open source frameworks, modules, languages, and more. It's crucial to us that these projects thrive and their maintainers have the time, energy, and justification to keep working on them. We contribute patches upstream and are gradually [releasing open source modules](https://github.com/val-town) of our own, but today we're supporting these projects more directly: with funding.\n\nWe're joining the [Open Source Pledge](https://osspledge.com/), and have donated $9,600 so far in 2024. The goal is to donate at least $2,000 per full-time employee per year, which we've already exceeded, but we plan to donate more throughout the year.\n\nSo far we've donated to:\n\n| Project | What it does |Amount |\n| ------ | ----- | -----: |\n| [esm.sh](https://esm.sh/) | CDN for ESM modules |$1000 |\n| [Sindre Sorhus](https://github.com/sindresorhus) | Prolific open source maintainer | $1000 |\n| [tsx](https://tsx.is/) | Easy way to run TypeScript directly | $1000 |\n| [Fastify](https://fastify.dev/) | Web framework | $1000 |\n| [Zod](https://zod.dev/) | Data validation library | $1000 |\n| [Unified](https://unifiedjs.com/) | Markdown transformation module ecosystem | $1000 |\n| [Drizzle](https://orm.drizzle.team/) | Database query builder | $800 |\n| [CodeMirror](https://codemirror.net/) | Code editor framework | $800 |\n| [Mock Service Worker](https://mswjs.io/) | Testing helper modules | $500 |\n| [rclone](https://rclone.org/) | Upload and download files to S3 and more | $500 |\n| [Hono](https://hono.dev/) | Web standards-based web framework | $500 |\n| [husky](https://typicode.github.io/husky/) | Nice way to set up git hooks | $500 |\n\nThanks so much to all the maintainers of these projects! We are so grateful for your work. We hope these donations go a small way towards showing our appreciation and making open-source more sustainable.\n\nDo you rely on open source software? You probably do: ask your company to [join the pledge](https://osspledge.com/join/) too!\n",[],[202,1086],"81ae05e3-af89-4b6f-bdc0-146be0d7fef8","2024-08-23-lockfiles.md","86b9e2c6-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: How we lock your dependencies\ndescription: 'Adding lockfiles to Val Town for stability, security, and performance.'\npubDate: '2024-08-23T04:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: Max McDonnell\nthumbnail: 'https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/lockfiles/metrics.png'\ntags: [engineering]\n---\n\nOver the past few months, we rolled out dependency lockfiles in Val\nTown. When you save a val, we generate a\n[deno.lock](https://docs.deno.com/runtime/manual/basics/modules/integrity_checking/)\nfile. When your val is run any time in the future, it'll use those exact same versions\nof your dependencies – effectively pinning your unpinned dependencies. When you save a new\nversion of that val, we regenerate the lockfile from scratch, re-pinning your unpinned\ndependencies to whatever their current versions are at that new time.\n\n## Imports in Val Town\n\nVal Town doesn't have a package manager like npm, and it doesn't use package.json files to declare dependencies. Imports\nare listed at the top of the val and are resolved by our runtime, Deno. We support imports from the [NPM](https://www.npmjs.com/) and [JSR](https://jsr.io/) registries using `npm:` and `jsr:` protocols, as well as imports\nfrom any URL using `https://`. You can optionally specify\na version in the import statement itself. For example:\n\n```ts\nimport lodash from \"npm:lodash\"; // unpinned, gets the latest\nimport lodash from \"npm:lodash@4.17.21\"; // pinned to 4.17.21\n\nimport { sqlite } from \"https://www.val.town/v/std/sqlite\"; // unpinned, gets the latest\nimport { sqlite } from \"https://www.val.town/v/std/sqlite?v=6\"; // pinned to version 6\n```\n\n## Everything's better with lockfiles\n\nYou'll see improvements on three fronts from lockfiles: stability,\nsecurity and performance.\n\n**Stability**: Libraries would change over time and vals would break. Now, if you\nbuild something and it's working, it should generally keep working.\n\n**Security**: If there's a\nmalicious dependency, it's easy for the vulnerability to proliferate rapidly\nwithout dependency pinning. Lockfiles will slow things down, and prevent certain\ntypes of attacks from being effective. Additionally we do integrity\nchecking on the contents of dependencies. If the contents of a module have\nchanged unexpectedly, we won't run your code.\n\n**Performance**: Lockfiles cache the whole dependency tree,\nso we make fewer requests, and we can make requests in parallel.\nModule fetches to Val Town\nfell by 80%. Worker initialization latency (P50) dropped 50%.\n\n![Charts of requests to esm.town and worker initialization time decreasing](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/lockfiles/metrics.png)\n\n## Getting clever with updates\n\nIf you're a passionate Val Town user, you may notice an issue with this new\nlockfile scheme as described so far. What happens when you are working on a\ncollection of vals that all depend on each other?\n\nMaybe you have your CSS styles in one val that's imported into an HTTP val.\nIf you update your styles, you'd expect the HTTP val to pick up the changes\nautomatically.\n\nNaively, lockfiles would break this pattern. You would update your CSS and you'd\nneed to re-save all vals that import that one to pick up the changes.\n\nWe don't want to make you do that. So when you save a val, we find all the vals\nin your account that depend on that val and mark their lockfiles for regeneration.\nThat way you can keep rapidly iterating and we'll make sure to update dependency\nrelationships in your vals.\n\nTo be clear this pattern only works for you and your\ndependencies. If you and a friend are iterating closely on a collection of vals,\nyou will need to re-save your vals that import your friend's vals to pick up\ntheir newest versions. We think this is a good compromise\nbetween security and convenience for now. Longer term, we plan to create [shared\ncollections of vals](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions/139)\nthat teams can fluidly iterate on together.\n\n## Going forward\n\nWe've seen a variety of situations where an https import has a subtle change\nand a val is halted from running because of an integrity error against what should\nbe the same exact version. If you run into this issue and are confident it's\nnot an exploit, you can fix it by re-saving your val, which will regenerate\nthe lockfile. We're working on the best way to handle these issues without\nremoving integrity checks entirely.\n\nThis is just the beginning of surfacing more granular control over dependencies\nin Val Town. If you have a specific feature you'd like to see, or want to edit\nyour dependencies in specific ways please make a request in our [product\ndiscussions](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions).\n",[],[202,1093],"5d689c74-3a10-4c57-8b7a-dcb5482bf412","2024-08-22-codegen.md","86b968fa-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: How we built Townie – an app that generates fullstack apps\ndescription: 'Like Claude Artifacts, but with a backend and database'\npubDate: '2024-08-22T04:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: JP Posma\ntags: [engineering]\n---\n\n[Townie](https://www.val.town/townie) has been completely redesigned in the past couple weeks. It's seriously good at writing fullstack apps. This is the post about how I prototyped this new version of Townie a couple weeks ago.\n\n

\n The redesigned Townie, currently in beta at \n val.town/townie.\n

\n\n\n## Codegen\n\nRecent advances in code generation (\"codegen\"), particularly in Claude 3.5 Sonnet, has enabled a completely new style of building software through conversation with an LLM.\n\nSome of the most successful products are:\n\n- [Claude Artifacts](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-5-sonnet): build interactive websites and other code through conversation. Websites can be viewed directly.\n- [Cursor](https://www.cursor.com/): a fork of VSCode built for AI. It can generate changes across an codebase.\n- [Vercel v0](https://v0.dev/): build website UIs from prompts.\n- [Websim](https://websim.ai/): similar to Claude Artifacts, but built around \"fake websites\". So going to catgifs.com will generate a website with cat gifs on the fly.\n- [VSCode Copilot](https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/copilot/overview): intelligent autocompletions of code within larger projects, for lots of programming languages.\n\n\n

\n $\"Claude$ \n

Claude Artifacts: making a game.

\n $\"Websim:$ \n

Websim: catgifs.com.

\n\n\nThe beauty of products like Vercel v0, Claude Artifacts, and Websim is that you immediately get a working program back even if you don't know anything about programming! For example, in Websim you don't even see the code, you just see the generated website.\n\nSo far these LLM-generated programs have been limited to the frontend, or copy-pasted into other places. Tools like VSCode Copilot and Cursor let you build larger software with a frontend and a backend, but now you need a place to deploy it, which is a significant barrier to non-programmers, and slows the iteration cycle.\n\nWe see many Val Town users generate their code in an LLM and then copy it into Val Town, since our \"vals\" (tiny full-stack webapps) get instantly deployed. We figured we're in a good position to tighten the feedback loop of codegen to full-stack deployment, and to finally approach [end-user programming](/end-programmer-programming):\n\n> The dream is that the full power of computers be **accessible to all**, that our\n> digital worlds will be as **moldable as clay**.\n\nThis vision is taking shape with frontend-only apps, but if we're really talking about \"the full power of computers\", then this should include entire applications, with persistence, authentication, external API calls — really everything that professional programmers build.\n\nI spent most of July 2024 prototyping codegen ideas in Val Town, with great results. In this blog post I'll show you what I built and what I learned. And since I built it all within Val Town itself, it's all open source, and you can fork it!\n\n

\n My prototype codegen with an instantly deployed backend and database.\n

\n\n\n# Generate a full-stack app with backend and database\n\nFirst I built a basic version of code generation. We can do this in only 80 lines (and only a few dependencies). You can fork it to play with it.\n\n\n\nI used [Vercel's AI SDK](https://sdk.vercel.ai/) to easily switch between models. To teach the LLM how to write code on Val Town, I went for a maximalist approach: I downloaded as many public vals as I could fit in a context window and put them in [`valleGetValsContextWindow`](https://www.val.town/v/janpaul123/valleGetValsContextWindow). I also found adding [our docs](https://docs.val.town) to the context window helpful (as raw markdown pages).\n\nI tell it to start outputting a Typescript fence immediately (```ts), so it starts writing code right away. I then strip out the code fence later.\n\nThis is enough to generate a basic Hacker News clone with a backend and database, which is instantly deployed on its own subdomain:\n\n

\n \n \n \n

\n Hacker News clone with backend and database, generated with gpt-4o\n (generation is sped up).\n

\n\n\n# Advanced prototype\n\nOver the course of several weeks, I ended up adding lots of features to this prototype:\n\n- Side panel with code and preview\n- CodeMirror for syntax highlighting\n- Follow-up prompts to iterate\n- Generate a new val for every iteration, so you can easily go back\n- Generate multiple vals (by opening multiple tabs when submitting the form)\n- Loading an existing val\n- Editing code manually\n- Switching between models (Claude, OpenAI) and context window size\n\n

\n\n\nI called this prototype VALL-E, and you can [fork it yourself](https://www.val.town/v/janpaul123/valle). Let's look at the details of what we ran into.\n\n### Database persistence\n\nEach Val Town user has a [SQLite](https://docs.val.town/std/sqlite/) database powered by [Turso](https://turso.tech/). We ran into a problems teaching the LLM to adhere to the idiosyncrasies of Val Town SQLite. So I punted on SQLite and just got the LLM to save everything in Val Town Blob Storage, which is basically S3 lite, so it had no trouble understanding it.\n\nLater Steve was able to fix the issues with SQLite by instructing the LLM to use his [LLM-safe shim](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/sqlite). Instead of trying to fix this through prompting, it works better to write a wrapper around the API that transforms the data into something that LLMs expects. Adapt your code to the LLM, not the LLM to your code.\n\n### Make real\n\nYou might have seen the [\"Make Real\"](https://github.com/tldraw/make-real) demos of [tldraw](https://tldraw.dev/), where you can draw shapes on a canvas, and turn it into HTML. I made a prototype \"Make Real with Backend\". For this, I put tldraw in a [val](https://www.val.town/v/janpaul123/valledraw) (which you can fork), and put my VALL-E prototype in an iframe:\n\n

\"Make Real with Backend\"

\n\n\nIt currently only works with text prompts, but it should be easy to pass the SVGs of arbitrary drawings to the LLM, as with the original Make Draw demos.\n\nI modified the VALL-E prototype to pass the name of generated val up to tldraw, using the [`postMessage` API](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/postMessage). That way you can use a previously generated val as the basis for a new one, such as when I write \"add more sample stories\" in the video above.\n\n### Model choice\n\nClaude Sonnet 3.5 is clearly the best model for writing code right now. However we found that it can be very deterministic, so it can help to crank up its `temperature`.\n\nWe also played with `gpt-4o` vs `gpt-4o-mini`. The `mini` version is much cheaper but much worse, though it's pretty good at making websites, especially when given some examples. However, we don't want to optimize too much for cheap models, because the premier models of today will be the cheap models of tomorrow.\n\n### Putting it all together\n\nOnce I had built all this, I gave a lightning talk at an event hosted by South Park Commons. It's 5 minutes of building lots of little apps.\n\n\n\n# Reducing costs\n\nI started with a maximalist approach of filling the context window with as many example vals and docs as possible. Claude 3.5 Sonnet has a 200k token context window and I put hundreds of vals in there. However, a single query with a full context window costs at least $0.60 (just for the input tokens), which is a lot.\n\nA full context window is also slower, and I hit rate limits much more quickly. I managed to get custom rate limits from Anthropic, but it's not ideal. Let's look at how I optimized our costs and speed.\n\n### Evals\n\nBefore cutting down our context window, I wanted to measure how good our models are, so I could see how much performance would be affected by a smaller context window.\n\nIn the world of LLMs these measurements are called \"evaluations\" or \"evals\" (presumably because people forgot that the word \"benchmark\" already existed). For us the general idea is this: generate a bunch of websites, then make sure they work. For this I built [\"E-VALL-UATOR\"](https://www.val.town/v/janpaul123/eVALLuator):\n\n

\n\nThis runs some basic prompts like \"Create a simple todo list app\" or \"Create a quiz game with a scoring system\", and then checks if it runs without errors, in which case we award 3 points. If there are errors, we'll retry but subtract a point. The maximum score for 10 prompts is thus 30 points.\n\nHow do we evaluate if the generated code runs without errors? Let's look at the different types of mistakes we can capture:\n\n1. Syntax errors.\n2. Typescript errors.\n3. Backend errors on `GET /`.\n4. Frontend errors on `GET /`.\n5. Frontend errors when interacting (clicking on stuff).\n6. Backend errors when interacting (persistence issues, issues on other pages).\n7. Visual issues (site doesn't look good).\n8. Site doesn't do what we expect.\n\nFor this prototype I implemented 1,3,4. I made a [val](https://www.val.town/v/janpaul123/httpValErrorCatcher) (actually VALL-E made it for me) that wraps any arbitrary HTTP val, and injects a `\n\n### Nice new REST API documentation\n\n![Val Town REST API Documentation](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/openapi/docs.png)\n\nFirst thing, we get **way better REST API documentation**. It has example\nrequests, with everything from cURL to Python clients. It describes the precise\nshapes of the objects you'll get back. You can even test APIs right in\nthe API docs. Hats off to [Scalar](https://scalar.com), whose\n[open source package](https://github.com/scalar/scalar) is powering this.\n\nThe docs are based on our OpenAPI spec, which is emitted from Fastify and\npulled from our server's routes. From there on, setting up nice documentation\nis basically as simple as this:\n\n```html\n\n\n```\n\n### A TypeScript SDK\n\nMeet our [new TypeScript SDK](https://github.com/val-town/sdk),\n`@valtown/sdk`, which we autogenerate from our OpenAPI spec using\n[Stainless](https://www.stainlessapi.com/):\n\n```ts title=\"example.ts\"\n// Import the SDK\nimport ValTown from \"npm:@valtown/sdk\";\n// Initialize it\nconst valTown = new ValTown();\n// Use it\nconsole.log(await valTown.me.profile.retrieve());\n```\n\nThe SDK covers all of our major API methods, and has robust TypeScript\ntypes for everything. Methods in our API that are paginated, like listing\ncomments, vals, or search results, are implemented as async iterators\nin the SDK so you don't even have to implement any pagination logic.\n\nFor Node.js, you can install it as an NPM package:\n\n```bash\nnpm install @valtown/sdk\n```\n\nThe SDK works in Deno, of course, but also in Node.js, Bun, and other major\nruntimes. We're generating it with tools from our friends at [Stainless](https://www.stainlessapi.com/), and their system keeps it updated\nso that every time we update the REST API, we can quickly roll a new release\nof the SDK.\n\n### Our AI, Townie, can now call our REST API\n\n\n\n[Townie](https://www.val.town/townie) is Val Town's bot - it started as an\nexperiment to see if we could coax an LLM into writing code that fit\nVal Town's runtime better. It has a long way to go before it reaches\nsentience, fortunately/unfortunately, but it can already write some pretty\ndecent code.\n\nBut it couldn't really interact with Val Town until now. Townie just got\nthe ability to call our API directly, which means that it can do things like\ncreating vals, searching for existing code, updating readmes – anything\nthat the API can do, Townie can do too.\nTo be safe, Townie will run `GET` requests against the API freely, but asks\nfor permission before running `POST`, `PUT`, or `DELETE` requests.\n\nTownie knows the whole layout of the API because OpenAPI 3.1 is\n[compatible with JSON Schema][oa31], and\nthe [OpenAI Function calling][calling]\nsystem is based on JSON Schema-defined parameters. So we can smoothly\ntranslate from our OpenAPI specification for our REST API, into a definition\nof functions that OpenAI can call – along with LLM-friendly descriptions\nfor every function, parameter, and return value – and voila, the robot\ncan use the machine.\nAvoiding OpenAPI-OpenAI mixup typos was one of the more\nmentally challenging parts of implementing this.\n\nUnfortunately ChatGPT does hallucinate incorrect parameters\noccasionally, despite having a very precise definition of what is correct.\nIt does this so often that we added a prompt reminding it that it likes\nto make a particular mistake, but it shouldn't make that mistake:\n\n> When calling the valsCreate function, make sure to follow the schema,\n> which requires that 'code' and 'name' properties be nested in a 'body' object.\n\nThis new era of software is funny and awe-inspiring!\n\n[last_post]: https://blog.val.town/blog/fastify/\n[openapi]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAPI_Specification\n[oa31]: https://www.openapis.org/blog/2021/02/18/openapi-specification-3-1-released\n[calling]: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/function-calling",[],[202,1114],"4c59ac36-f347-437c-a456-bf4d1801742f","2024-07-23-val-town-newsletter-19.md","86b8dc3c-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: Val Town Newsletter 19\ndescription: >-\n Full-screen Editor, 5x faster HTTP vals, new Dashboard, improved Search,\n Townie redesign, Trending redesign, Profile filters, and more!\npubDate: '2024-07-23T04:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: Steve Krouse\ntags: [newsletter]\n---\n\nIn the last month, we shipped a full-screen val Editor, a new 5x faster HTTP val runtime, a Dashboard for your account, a new Search experience, a redesign for our AI bot Townie and the ability to use tools, a new Trending leaderboard, User Profile filters and sorts, and a bunch of other improvements and bug fixes.\n\nWe've also been on a blogging spree: [Moving from Express to Fastify](/fastify/), [Here's why we're also using TypeBox](/typebox), and [Why spawning a new process in Node is so slow?](/node-spawn-performance).\n\nOn the livestream, I coded with [Mary Rose Cook on concert ticket alerts](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ2uqaqD10E), [Sahil Lavingia on a stock buyback form](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-TXoB0BmSA), and [Peter van Hardenberg on a Automerge change notifier](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIVgi4mRXxk).\n\n## ↔️ Full-screen editor\n\nAt long last, you can edit your vals in full-screen. This new editor also features a classic left-sidebars with all your vals and folders. Thanks [bcjordan](https://www.val.town/u/bcjordan) and [hunter](https://www.val.town/u/hunter) for the [feature](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions/58) [requests](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions/137) 🙏\n\nTry it out: [val.town/editor](https://val.town/editor)\n\n $\"Demo$ \n\nOne of my favorite features is the ability to multi-select vals (shift-click) and drag them into folders to clean up your workspace.\n\n## ⚡️ 5x Faster HTTP vals at scale\n\nWe built a new runtime for HTTP vals that is much faster at scale by re-using existing Deno processes. We've seen up to a 5x speedup for some vals. Try it out by selecting `HTTP (Preview)` for your val's type. Learn more in [our announcement post](/http-preview/).\n\n

\n\n## 📊 Dashboard\n\nWe built a Dashboard to help you more quickly navigate your vals and see what's happening in Val Town. Thanks [nbbaier](https://www.val.town/u/nbbaier) for the [feature request](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions/8) 🙏\n\nYou can access your dashboard today at [val.town/dashboard](https://val.town/dashboard).\n\n $\"Demo$ \n\n## 🔎 Val Search\n\nSearch results are now powered by exact matching, exact phrase matching, and \"vibes-based\" vector search. We sort results in part by indicators of that val's quality, ie how many times it's been forked or liked. You can filter results by val type and by whether the val was created by you or not.\n\nTry some searches: [anthropic](https://val.town/search?q=anthropic) | [openai](https://val.town/search?q=openai) | [substrate](https://val.town/search?q=substrate) | [embeddings](https://val.town/search?q=embeddings) | [react client side](https://val.town/search?q=react%20client%20side)\n\n $\"Search$ \n\n## 🤖 Townie redesign & tool-use\n\nTownie has a new look! It can also use the entire Val Town API for you. This means you can ask Townie to list, create, update, and delete not only vals but also blobs and sqlite data – it can run anything in our [new API](https://docs.val.town/openapi). Townie automatically performs GET requests and asks you to confirm before running any mutative action.\n\nIn the following demo video, you'll notice a couple times Townie didn't do exactly what I wanted, but we were able to work around it by doing it ourselves or asking it again. Townie is still a work in progress, but it's a lot of fun to play with.\n\n

\n\n## 🦾 VALL-E Demo\n\nLLM code generation is so exciting right now that we weren't able to limit ourselves to just Townie. We built a prototype inspired by Anthropic Projects called [VALL-E](https://val.town/v/janpaul123/VALLE) that's great at writing vals for you. We built another prototype, [VALL-E Draw](https://www.val.town/v/janpaul123/VALLEdraw), which embeds it in TLDraw! Both were built entirely in vals – so you can fork and tweak em!\n\nThe video below demos how to create multiple apps simultaneously with VALL-E Draw: a Hacker News clone with a real backend and a simple hello world example app with craazzzy styles. Here's [two](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1813699804729663495) [demos](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1812980867381489962) of the original VALL-E.\n\n

\n\n## 🔥 Trending\n\nCollect likes, forks, and references to gain fame and fortune – well at least fame – on the new and improved Val Town trending leaderboard. The new trending has a fresh look and much more useful rankings.\n\nCheck it out: [val.town/trending](https://val.town/trending)\n\n $\"Trending$ \n\n## ❤️ Profile filters and sorts\n\nProfile pages now have filters and sorts to help you find the vals you're looking for. You can filter by val type and sort by date created, date updated, likes, and alphabetically.\n\nTry it out on some power users' profiles: [pomdtr](https://val.town/u/pomdtr) | [iamseeley](https://val.town/u/iamseeley) | [nbbaier](https://www.val.town/u/nbbaier) | [substrate](https://val.town/u/substrate) | [yawnxyx](https://www.val.town/u/yawnxyz)\n\n

\n\n### 🎉 Other updates\n\n- [Cancel a running val](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions/117). Thanks Dan Shipper, Matt McClure, and Jan Zheng for requesting this feature 🙏\n- Added a refresh button on the http preview iframe\n- Fixed links to errors in stacktraces\n- Upgraded the README editor to CodeMirror\n- Upgraded OpenAI in the standard library to `gpt-4o-mini` for free users (up from `gpt-3.5`)\n- Support updating val types through the API\n- Cleaned up Val Town SDK\n- Rewrote our [Saving data from a web page](https://docs.val.town/guides/saving-data-from-a-web-page/) guide. Thanks [mharris717](https://www.val.town/u/mharris717) [for the request](https://x.com/GFunk911/status/1808239507444990185)\n- Automatically generate the new Val Town SDK when our API changes\n- Val Town took stewardship of [val-town-playground](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-playground)\n and [val-town-vscode](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-vscode) from the amazing [pomdtr](https://val.town/u/pomdtr)\n\n## 🛣️ Roadmap\n\n### 💪 What we're working on\n\nNext month we focusing on onboarding, polish, performance, reliability, and hiring – [join us!](https://val.town/careers)\n\n- Rolling out `HTTP (Preview)` as the new default `HTTP` val type\n- [Val runtime performance](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions/113)\n- [LLM-generated vals](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions/47), ie Townie and VALL-E improvements\n\n### 🔜 Coming soon\n\nHere's some of the top features we're planning to work in the coming months. Please [make feature requests and vote](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions?discussions) on what you'd like to see next.\n\n- [Receive attachments from email handlers](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions/75)\n- [Usage tracking and pricing](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions/19)\n- [LLM-generated READMEs](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions/26)\n\n## 🌟 Community Vals\n\n- The [Substrate](https://substrate.run) is on 🔥 with a dozen vals that show how much faster they run multi-step LLM flows: [sub.audio](https://sub.audio/), [Illustrated Primer](https://www.val.town/v/substrate/illustratedPrimer), [Hacker News RAG](https://www.val.town/v/substrate/hackerNewsRAG), [Similar Sites](https://www.val.town/v/substrate/similarSites), [Spanish Lesson](https://www.val.town/v/substrate/spanishLesson), [WebSim](https://www.val.town/v/substrate/websim)\n- [Kayla](https://www.val.town/u/kayla_lin) built a [yenny.app](https://www.yenny.app/), a yen conversion app, [powered by Val Town](https://x.com/kayladotdev/status/1808293579468550211)\n- [Nico](https://www.val.town/u/nicosuave) gave [ChatGPT the ability to install python packages](https://x.com/nicoritschel/status/1814716092801294786), powered by a val\n- [Sam Rose](https://www.val.town/v/samwho) built [Ping](https://samwho.dev/ping/) so you can send him anonymous messages, [powered by a val](https://x.com/samwhoo/status/1811304859334750493)\n- [Achille](https://www.val.town/u/pomdtr) found a [way to embed a full stack vite + honojs app in a single JSR import, ie excalidraw](https://x.com/pomdtrr/status/1805928035670994998)!\n- [Jan](https://val.town/u/yawnxyz) built [a Japanese Translator in Google Sheets](https://x.com/yawnxyz/status/1807120870248505434), [a clone of a viral drag effect](https://x.com/yawnxyz/status/1813713602819580376), and a function to [get citations](https://www.val.town/v/yawnxyz/citation)\n- [pvh](https://www.val.town/u/pvh) built a [cron that notifies of changes to Automerge documents](https://www.val.town/v/pvh/watcher)\n- [Mux](https://www.val.town/u/mux) built an [API to dub videos using Sieve](https://www.val.town/v/mux/seiveDubbing)\n- [Lu \"todepond\" Wilson](https://www.val.town/u/todepond) built a [magic iframe](https://x.com/TodePond/status/1814947568389931057) powered by Val Town\n- I built a bunch of fun utilities: [\"the create react app\"](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/reactClientDemo) of Val Town and [a video explaining React, SSR, and Val Town](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyhsMd0CBnk), [website load performance tester](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/perf), [DNS lookup site](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/dns), [lookup your internet twin](https://stevekrouse-twin.web.val.run/) with ExaAI, [played around with Browserbase](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1807812485711622617), [explained when esm.town transpiles](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/esmTownTranspileDemo)\n- [Jackson](https://www.val.town/u/jackson) built a [VIM-mode markdown editor](https://www.val.town/v/jxnblk/vimarkdown)\n- [Max](https://www.val.town/u/maxm) built a [Infinite Graph of SVGs](https://maxm-infinitesvggraph.web.val.run/)\n- [Pete Millspaugh](https://www.val.town/u/petermillspaugh) wrote and sent the [June 2024 Edition](https://www.val.town/v/petermillspaugh/june2024) of his wonderful newsletter\n- [dglazkov](https://www.val.town/u/dglazkov) built a [better Discord helper function](https://www.val.town/v/dglazkov/discordBot), a [sample implementation of the Breadboard Servive Endpoint](https://www.val.town/v/dglazkov/googlenews), a [BaaS](https://www.val.town/v/dglazkov/bbaas) (Breadboard As a Service), and a [CORS-safe proxy for qdrant](https://www.val.town/v/dglazkov/qdrant)\n- [mharris717](https://mharris717.github.io/val-tools-doc/) wrote a [guide to use vals in tools for LLM calls](https://mharris717.github.io/val-tools-doc/)\n- Peter Zakin built [a similar websites explorer](https://x.com/pzakin/status/1814404672301814133)\n- [Will](https://www.val.town/u/willthereader) built a [jumpchain.net](https://jumpchain.net/) ([source](https://www.val.town/v/willthereader/Jumpchain_Website)), an info site and resource guide for the Jumpchain community\n- [Sam](https://www.val.town/u/samwillis) ran [Postgres Lite](https://www.val.town/v/samwillis/pglite_http_preview_runtime) in a val, which [runs much faster on our new HTTP runtime](https://x.com/samwillis/status/1814016232133173383)\n- [Triozer](https://www.val.town/u/triozer) built a [API to query if someone is live on YouTube or Twitch](https://www.val.town/v/triozer/livestatus)\n- [Kyle](https://www.val.town/u/kylem) built a [git release notes generator](https://www.val.town/v/kylem/gitReleaseNotes)\n- [Brian](https://www.val.town/u/brianleroux) built a [cap friendly scraper](https://x.com/brianleroux/status/1808228023029977482)\n- [Steve](https://www.val.town/u/saolsen) put the [Ace editor in a val](https://www.val.town/v/saolsen/ace)\n- [Matthias](https://www.val.town/u/matthiasraimann) built a [SAGA scraper and notifier](https://www.val.town/v/matthiasraimann/SagaImmoScraper)\n- [Park](https://www.val.town/u/park) built a [clean simple BTC price site](https://www.val.town/v/park/btc)\n- [bohaska](https://www.val.town/u/bohaska) built a [cron that automatically answers issues from NationStates](https://www.val.town/v/bohaska/nationstatesSentimentAI) using sentiment analysis\n- [vipshek](https://www.val.town/u/vipshek) built a [cron that detects new website contents](https://val.town/v/vipshek/detectNewWebsiteContents)\n- [jonbo](https://www.val.town/u/jonbo) built an [API that generates a fake server-side delay](https://www.val.town/v/jonbo/dynamicSleep)\n- [Seeley](https://www.val.town/u/iamseeley) built a [enterprise-grade FizzBuzz](https://www.val.town/v/iamseeley/fizzFuss)\n- [edgeeffect](https://www.val.town/u/edgeeffect) built a [smart garbage day notifier](https://www.val.town/v/edgeeffect/whatDoYouThinkOfItSoFar)\n- [Will](https://www.val.town/u/willthereader) built a [work time calculator](https://www.val.town/v/willthereader/Work_Time_Calculator_2)",[],[202,1121],"1653ad82-7498-4366-83c5-9f29968ea70d","2024-07-19-node-spawn-performance.md","86b87e9a-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: Why is spawning a new process in Node so slow?\ndescription: At Val Town we spawn a lot of processes. We're working on making it faster\npubDate: '2024-07-19T04:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: Max McDonnell\ntags: [engineering]\n---\n\nAt Val Town we run your code in Deno processes. We recently noticed, that under\nload, a single Val Town's Node server cannot exceed 40 spawns/s. It spends 30%\nof its time with the main thread blocked on calls to `spawn`. Why is it so slow?\nCan we make it any faster?\n\nTo simulate this pattern we'll write an HTTP server that spawns a new process\nfor each request. Like this:\n\n```js\nimport { spawn } from \"node:child_process\";\nimport http from \"node:http\";\nhttp\n .createServer((req, res) => spawn(\"echo\", [\"hi\"]).stdout.pipe(res))\n .listen(8001);\n```\n\nWe'll write similar implementations in Go\n([here](https://github.com/maxmcd/process-per-request/blob/fb2f5f9518d62f058f7e587580c302b56f7a5781/go/main.go))\nand Rust\n([here](https://github.com/maxmcd/process-per-request/blob/0a6442f656fe7bc8f6c61ef2c5fdef65c6afa0f1/rust/src/main.rs))\nand run this example with Node, Deno and Bun.\n\nI am running all of these on a Hetzner CCX33 with 8 vCPUs and 32 GB of ram. I am\nbenchmarking with [bombardier](https://github.com/codesenberg/bombardier)\nrunning on the same machine. The command I'll run to benchmark each server is\n`bombardier -c 30 -n 10000 http://localhost:8001`. 10,000 total requests over 30\nconnections. I prewarm each server before running the benchmark. I'm using Go\nv1.22.2, Rust v1.77.2, Node v22.3.0, Bun 1.1.20, and Deno 1.44.2.\n\nHere are the results:\n\n| Language/Runtime | Req/s | Command |\n| ---------------- | ----- | ---------------------------------- |\n| Node | 651 | `node baseline.js` |\n| Deno | 2,290 | `deno run --allow-all baseline.js` |\n| Bun | 2,208 | `bun run baseline.js` |\n| Go | 5,227 | `go run go/main.go` |\n| Rust (tokio) | 5,466 | `cd rust && cargo run --release` |\n\nOk, so Node is slow. Deno and Bun have figured out how to make this faster, and\nthe compiled, thread-pool languages are much faster again.\n\nNode's `spawn` performance does seem to be notably bad. [This\nthread](https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/14917) was an interesting read,\nand while in my testing things have improved since the time of that post, Node\nstill spends an awful lot of time blocking the main thread for each Spawn call.\n\nSwitching to Bun or Deno would improve this a lot. That is great to know, but\nlet's try and improve things with Node.\n\n## Node `cluster` Module\n\nThe simplest thing we can do spawn more processes and run an http server\nper-process using Node's `cluster` module. Like so:\n\n```js\nimport { spawn } from \"node:child_process\";\nimport http from \"node:http\";\nimport cluster from \"node:cluster\";\nimport { availableParallelism } from \"node:os\";\n\nif (cluster.isPrimary) {\n for (let i = 0; i < availableParallelism(); i++) cluster.fork();\n} else {\n http\n .createServer((req, res) => spawn(\"echo\", [\"hi\"]).stdout.pipe(res))\n .listen(8001);\n}\n```\n\nNode shares the network socket between processes here, so all of our processes\ncan listen on `:8001` and they'll be routed requests round-robin.\n\nThe main issue with this approach for me is that each HTTP server is isolated in\nits own process. This can complicate things if you manage any kind of in-memory\ncaching or global state that needs to be shared between these processes. I'd\nideally find a way to keep the single thread execution model of javascript and\nstill make spawns fast.\n\nHere are the results:\n\n| Language/Runtime | Req/s | Command |\n| ---------------- | ----- | --------------------------------------------- |\n| Node | 1,766 | `node cluster.js` |\n| Deno | 2,133 | `deno run --allow-all cluster.js` |\n| Bun | n/a | \"node\\:cluster is not yet implemented in Bun\" |\n\nSuper weird. Deno is slower, Bun doesn't work just yet, and Node has improved\na lot, but I would have expected it to be even faster.\n\nNice to know there is some speedup here. We'll move on from it for now.\n\n## Move The Spawn Calls To Worker Threads\n\nIf the `spawn` calls are blocking the main thread, let's move them to worker\nthreads.\n\nHere's our `worker-threads/worker.js` code. We listen for messages with a\ncommand and an id. We run it and post the result back. We're using `execFile`\nhere for convenience, but it is just an abstraction on top of `spawn`.\n\n```js\nimport { execFile } from \"node:child_process\";\nimport { parentPort } from \"node:worker_threads\";\n\nparentPort.on(\"message\", (message) => {\n const [id, cmd, ...args] = message;\n\n execFile(cmd, args, (_error, stdout, _stderr) => {\n parentPort.postMessage([id, stdout]);\n });\n});\n```\n\nAnd here's our `worker-threads/index.js`. We create 8 worker threads. When we\nwant to handle a request we send a message to a thread to make the spawn call\nand send back the output. Once we get the response back, we respond to the http\nrequest.\n\n```js\nimport assert from \"node:assert\";\nimport http from \"node:http\";\nimport { EventEmitter } from \"node:events\";\nimport { Worker } from \"node:worker_threads\";\n\nconst newWorker = () => {\n const worker = new Worker(\"./worker-threads/worker.js\");\n const ee = new EventEmitter();\n // Emit messages from the worker to the EventEmitter by id.\n worker.on(\"message\", ([id, msg]) => ee.emit(id, msg));\n return { worker, ee };\n};\n\n// Spawn 8 worker threads.\nconst workers = Array.from({ length: 8 }, newWorker);\nconst randomWorker = () => workers[Math.floor(Math.random() * workers.length)];\n\nconst spawnInWorker = async () => {\n const worker = randomWorker();\n const id = Math.random();\n // Send and wait for our response.\n worker.worker.postMessage([id, \"echo\", \"hi\"]);\n return new Promise((resolve) => {\n worker.ee.once(id, (msg) => {\n resolve(msg);\n });\n });\n};\n\nhttp\n .createServer(async (_, res) => {\n let resp = await spawnInWorker();\n assert.equal(resp, \"hi\\n\"); // no cheating!\n res.end(resp);\n })\n .listen(8001);\n```\n\nResults!\n\n| Language/Runtime | Req/s | Command |\n| ---------------- | ----- | ---------------------------------------------- |\n| Node | 426 | `node worker-threads/index.js` |\n| Deno | 3,601 | `deno run --allow-all worker-threads/index.js` |\n| Bun | 2,898 | `bun run worker-threads/index.js` |\n\nNode is slower! Ok, so presumably we are not bypassing Node's bottleneck by\nusing threads. So we're doing the same work with the added overhead of\ncoordinating with the worker threads. Bummer.\n\nDeno loves this, and Bun likes it a little more. Generally, it's nice to see\nthat Bun and Deno don't see much of an improvement here. They're already doing a\ngood job of keeping the sycall overhead off of the execution thread.\n\nOnward.\n\n## Move Spawn Calls to Child Processes\n\nIf threads are not going to work, let's use child processes to do the work.\nWe're spawning processes to spawn processes, but we'll spawn a small number of\nworker processes from the main thread and distribute work between them. This way\nwe only pay the spawn cost on startup in the main thread.\n\nThis is quite easy. We simply swap out the worker threads for processes spawned\nby `child_process.fork` and change how we send and receive messages.\n\n```diff\n$ git diff --unified=1 --no-index ./worker-threads/ ./child-process/\ndiff --git a/./worker-threads/index.js b/./child-process/index.js\nindex 52a93fe..0ed206e 100644\n--- a/./worker-threads/index.js\n+++ b/./child-process/index.js\n@@ -3,6 +3,6 @@ import http from \"node:http\";\n import { EventEmitter } from \"node:events\";\n-import { Worker } from \"node:worker_threads\";\n+import { fork } from \"node:child_process\";\n\n const newWorker = () => {\n- const worker = new Worker(\"./worker-threads/worker.js\");\n+ const worker = fork(\"./child-process/worker.js\");\n const ee = new EventEmitter();\n@@ -21,3 +21,3 @@ const spawnInWorker = async () => {\n // Send and wait for our response.\n- worker.worker.postMessage([id, \"echo\", \"hi\"]);\n+ worker.worker.send([id, \"echo\", \"hi\"]);\n return new Promise((resolve) => {\ndiff --git a/./worker-threads/worker.js b/./child-process/worker.js\nindex 5f025ca..9b3fcf5 100644\n--- a/./worker-threads/worker.js\n+++ b/./child-process/worker.js\n@@ -1,5 +1,4 @@\n import { execFile } from \"node:child_process\";\n-import { parentPort } from \"node:worker_threads\";\n\n-parentPort.on(\"message\", (message) => {\n+process.on(\"message\", (message) => {\n const [id, cmd, ...args] = message;\n@@ -7,3 +6,3 @@ parentPort.on(\"message\", (message) => {\n execFile(cmd, args, (_error, stdout, _stderr) => {\n- parentPort.postMessage([id, stdout]);\n+ process.send([id, stdout]);\n });\n```\n\nNice. And the results:\n\n| Language/Runtime | Req/s | Command |\n| ---------------- | ----- | --------------------------------------------- |\n| Node | 2,209 | `node child-process/index.js` |\n| Deno | 3,800 | `deno run --allow-all child-process/index.js` |\n| Bun | 3,871 | `bun run worker-threads/index.js` |\n\nGood speedups all around. I am very curious what the bottleneck is that is\npreventing Deno and Bun from getting to Rust/Go speeds. Please let me know if\nyou have suggestions for how to dig into that!\n\nOne fun thing here is that we can mix Node and Bun. Bun implements the Node IPC\nprotocol, so we can configure Node to spawn Bun child processes. Let's try that.\n\nUpdate the `fork` arguments to use the `bun` binary instead of Node.\n\n```js\nconst worker = fork(\"./child-process/worker.js\", {\n execPath: \"/home/maxm/.bun/bin/bun\",\n});\n```\n\n| Language/Runtime | Req/s | Command |\n| ---------------- | ----- | ----------------------------- |\n| Node + Bun | 3,853 | `node child-process/index.js` |\n\nHah, cool. I get to use Node on the main thread and leverage Bun's performance.\n\n## Stdio\n\nLogs. The previous implementations assume there will be minimal log output, but\nwhat if there's a lot? We could send the logs using `process.send`, but that\nwill be quite expensive if our output bytes are serialized to JSON.\n\nI spent a lot of time in this rabbit hole. Here's a rough summary of the things\nI tried:\n\n1. Passing file descriptors between processes. Like passing the stdout/err back\n up to the parent process. I tried this a few different ways but couldn't get\n it working so that we'd always capture all the bytes written.\n2. Just using `process.send`. This works, but is only performant if you use\n `serialization: \"advanced\"` so that you can send bytes without serialization.\n This doesn't work in Deno and Bun.\n3. I created a pair of [Abstract\n Sockets](https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/unix.7.html#:~:text=be%20inspected.%0A%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20abstract-,an%20abstract%20socket,-address%20is%20distinguished) for each spawn\n call and sent the logs over the socket. This spends too much time setting up\n the sockets to be worth it.\n\nAlso Abstract Sockets are crazy. I'm familiar with [Unix Domain\nSockets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_domain_socket) where you have a file\ncalled (eg) `something.sock` and you can listen on it and connect to it just\nlike a network address. Turns out, that if you use a Unix socket and the\nfilename starts with a null byte, like `\\0foo` the socket will not exist on the\nfilesystem and it'll be automatically removed when no longer used. Weird! Cool!\n\nAfter all this testing I have two approaches that work pretty well.\n\n1. Set up a pool of processes with `.fork()` and also set up a separate abstract\n socket for each one to send logs.\n2. Simply use `process.send` but use `serialization: \"advanced\"`.\n\nLet's see how those work out.\n\nWe'll need something that outputs a lot of logs. So I grabbed the `main.c` file\nfrom Sqlite's source. This is a 163Kb file. We'll run the command `cat main.c`\nto print it out.\n\nHere's our `baseline.js` again with that update:\n\n```ts\nimport { spawn } from \"node:child_process\";\nimport http from \"node:http\";\nhttp\n .createServer((_, res) => spawn(\"cat\", [\"main.c\"]).stdout.pipe(res))\n .listen(8001);\n```\n\nI've updated the Go and Rust code as well. Let's see how they do:\n\n| Language/Runtime | Req/s | Command |\n| ---------------- | ----- | ---------------------------------- |\n| Node | 374 | `node baseline.js` |\n| Deno | 667 | `deno run --allow-all baseline.js` |\n| Bun | 1,374 | `bun run baseline.js` |\n| Go | 2,757 | `go run go/main.go` |\n| Rust (tokio) | 3,535 | `cd rust && cargo run --release` |\n\nFascinating. It's cool to see Bun and Rust pull ahead here compared to the\nprevious benchmarks. Node is still slow very slow and Deno is surprisingly\nunhappy with this workload.\n\nNext let's try my abstract socket communication channel implementation. It's\ngetting quite complex so I won't post it here, but you can [take a look\nhere](https://github.com/maxmcd/process-per-request/tree/7528cd8045c998c8b5451961e0818473b4a81860/child-process-comm-channel).\n\n| Language/Runtime | Req/s | Command |\n| ---------------- | ----- | ---------------------------------------------------------- |\n| Node | 1,336 | `node child-process-comm-channel/index.js` |\n| Node + Bun | 2,635 | `node child-process-comm-channel/index.js` |\n| Deno | 862 | `deno run --allow-all child-process-comm-channel/index.js` |\n| Bun | 1,833 | `bun child-process-comm-channel/index.js` |\n\nHaha. I had seen some random benchmark results where Node+Bun was faster than\nbun alone, but it never netted out in the final runs.\n\nThe Deno results are quite perplexing. In implementing this example I had a\n\"bug\" where I was buffering the response as a string. Here's the diff of me fixing it:\n\n```diff\n@@ -88,9 +88,8 @@ const spawnInWorker = async (res) => {\n worker.child.send([id, \"spawn\", [\"cat\", [\"main.c\"]]]);\n- let resp = \"\";\n worker.ee.on(id, (msg, data) => {\n if (msg == MessageType.STDOUT) {\n- resp += data.toString();\n+ res.write(data);\n }\n if (msg == MessageType.STDOUT_CLOSE) {\n- res.end(resp);\n+ res.end();\n worker.requests -= 1;\n```\n\nThis 'fix' makes Deno a lot slower, but Node and Bun a lot faster! I wonder if\nthat's because one has a faster `toString()` implementation or higher overhead for\n`res.write`?\n\n| Language/Runtime | Req/s | Command |\n| -------------------- | ----- | ---------------------------------------------------------- |\n| Deno + string buffer | 1,453 | `deno run --allow-all child-process-comm-channel/index.js` |\n\nWeird!\n\nFinally, here is the `process.send` implementation. It is fast and also\nincredibly simple to implement. I am a little unexcited about this solution\nbecause it is slower than I'd like, doesn't support Deno and Bun, and there's\nvery little space to improve things. However, this implementation is deeply\npractical and easy to understand, which is beautiful. Here's the source of\n`worker.js`, the rest [is here](https://github.com/maxmcd/process-per-request/tree/7528cd8045c998c8b5451961e0818473b4a81860/child-process-send-logs).\n\n```ts\nimport { spawn } from \"node:child_process\";\nimport process from \"node:process\";\n\nprocess.on(\"message\", (message) => {\n const [id, cmd, ...args] = message;\n const cp = spawn(cmd, args);\n cp.stdout.on(\"data\", (data) => process.send([id, \"stdout\", data]));\n cp.stderr.on(\"data\", (data) => process.send([id, \"stderr\", data]));\n cp.on(\"close\", (code, signal) => process.send([id, \"exit\", code, signal]));\n});\n```\n\n| Language/Runtime | Req/s | Command |\n| ---------------- | ----- | --------------------------------------- |\n| Node | 1,179 | `node child-process-send-logs/index.js` |\n\nVery nice, probably the practical choice if you are only targeting Node.\n\n## Load Balancing\n\nA quick note on load balancing between processes. Both Go and Rust [have\ncomplicated schedulers](https://rakyll.org/scheduler/) that [distribute work\nefficiently](https://tokio.rs/blog/2019-10-scheduler). So far, when picking a\nworker I've been grabbing a random one:\n\n```ts\nconst workers = await Promise.all(Array.from({ length: 8 }, newWorker));\nconst randomWorker = () => workers[Math.floor(Math.random() * workers.length)];\n```\n\nHowever, we can also implement round-robin, and least-connections style load\nbalancing. [See a wonderful writeup on those\nhere](https://samwho.dev/load-balancing/).\n\n```ts\nconst pickWorkerInOrder = () => workers[(count += 1) % workers.length];\nconst pickWorkerWithLeastRequests = () =>\n workers.reduce((selectedWorker, worker) =>\n worker.requests < selectedWorker.requests ? worker : selectedWorker\n );\n```\n\nSadly I didn't see consistent performance improvements with these approaches.\nThey all perform about the same. Maybe more typical workloads where the spawn\ncalls are not entirely uniform would benefit more from these changes.\n\n## Library?\n\nIt seems possible, given all of these findings, to implement a `child_process`\nlibrary that implements the same API surface as `node:child_process` but farms\nthe spawn calls out to a process pool. Maybe I will write that, or maybe you\nwill. Please [let me know](https://x.com/mxmcd) if there's interest.\n\n## Final Thoughts\n\nWe're sadly at the limits of my knowledge/experimentation, but I wonder what\ncould unlock more performance.\n\nIt was really fun to see improved performance and what didn't, and the random\nmoments where Deno/Bun/Node were affected differently.\n\nUsing Node and Bun together is a fun pattern and it's nice to see it lead to\nsuch a speedup. Please support Node's IPC, Deno!\n\nLet me know if there's anything else I should experiment with here! See you next\ntime :)\n",[],[202,1128],"7f5bec1d-f67a-454e-aa81-6935faac830d","2024-07-17-http-preview.md","86b85c12-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: New HTTP Val Runtime in Preview\ndescription: We built a new runtime for HTTP vals that is up to 5x faster at scale\npubDate: '2024-07-17T04:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: Max McDonnell\ntags: [engineering, product]\n---\n\nWe built a new runtime for HTTP vals that is much faster at scale. We've seen up to a 5x speedup for some vals. This is a preview feature, so expect rough edges. We'd love your feedback on it.\n\n## Usage\n\nWe created a new val type, `HTTP (Preview)`, to let you opt-into the new runtime. Here's how:\n\n1. Create a normal `HTTP` val\n2. Click on the val's type `HTTP` and select `HTTP (Preview)` in the dropdown menu.\n\nThat's it! Run your val 5 times in quick succession to see the difference.\n\n{/* Here's a simple script you can run to test it out yourself: TODO */}\n\n{/* Or if you'd prefer, here's a utility website to do the same thing: TODO */}\n\n## Architecture\n\nUp until now, every time you run a val it starts a new Deno process and installs all your dependencies from scratch. This takes 100 milliseconds or more, depending on how many dependencies you have.\n\nWith the new `HTTP (Preview)` val, we keep your Deno process around and forward multiple requests to it. This means that the first request will still have the 100ms+ cold start time, but every request after that will be _much_ faster. For example, the simplest possible val that just returns \"hello world!\" will take 100ms to boot up the first time, but then only 10ms for subsequent requests. To be clear, that's not including network latency to the val (which from NYC is 90ms), just the time it takes for the val to respond.\n\nA user from NYC hitting a \"hello world!\" val can expect to see a 180ms response time for the first request and 90ms for every request after that using `HTTP (Preview)`. Whereas with the normal `HTTP` val type, they would see 190ms for every request. The difference is even more pronounced for vals with more dependencies and large dependencies like WASM modules. We migrated the Date Me Directory and saw total request time go from 800ms to 200ms!\n\nWe want to be conservative with this rollout, so we're only keeping `HTTP (Preview)` vals alive for 10 seconds after the end of the last request they receive. As we get more comfortable keeping vals alive for longer, we'll increase this timeout window, particularly for Pro users. We're considering ways to keep vals alive indefinitely, but that will require some changes to our pricing to make it sustainable.\n\n## Limitations\n\nThere are currently two limitations to `HTTP (Preview)` compared to the normal `HTTP` type:\n\n1. `console.log` and other logging output aren't captured\n2. You can’t cancel a val that is currently running\n\nWe expect to have fixes for these limitations in the next couple weeks. In the meantime, we recommend using the normal HTTP val type in development and then switching to HTTP (Preview) for production.\n\n## Breaking changes\n\nThere is one breaking change with this new feature: it only re-runs your val handler, not any of the other code in your val. This means that if you have any code outside of your handler that you want to run on every request, you'll need to move it into your handler.\n\nFor example, this val will return a new random number for every request in our existing system, but after you switch to the next version, it'll return the same number - because the call to `Math.random()` is only run when the val is started up, not when a new request is handled.\n\n```ts\nconst number = Math.random();\n\nexport default function(req: Request) {\n return Response.json(number);\n}\n```\n\nThe upgrade path is to move anything you want to happen on every request into the request handler:\n\n```ts\nexport default function(req: Request) {\n const number = Math.random();\n return Response.json(number);\n}\n```\n\nNow each call to this val will return a new random number. This is how most serverless platforms work, and we think it's a good model to follow. You'll only need to migrate your code if you upgrade to the new runtime.\n\n## Rollout\n\nThis new runtime has the potential to be much faster and more scalable than our current approach, so we want it to be the default soon. But it's a big change, so we're being careful. Today we're rolling it out as an opt-in val type, `HTTP (Preview)`.\n\nAfter we've ironed out the kinks and achieved feature parity between the two runtimes, we'll make this the default type for new HTTP vals,\ndrop the (Preview), and encourage everyone to upgrade to the new system for that big performance boost! Depending on how it works out, we might be also be able to auto-upgrade some vals to the new system.\n\n## Feedback\n\nWe'd love to hear your feedback on this new feature. You can send a message in our `#general` or `#bugs` channels in [our Discord](https://discord.gg/dHv45uN5RY) or email us at [feedback@val.town](mailto:feedback@val.town).\n",[],[202,1135],"8480ee95-3450-4cc7-be01-22eb9e93c897","2024-07-15-typebox.md","86b81a72-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: Zod is amazing. Here’s why we're also using TypeBox\ndescription: Why we’re using TypeBox instead of Zod for our server validation layer\npubDate: '2024-07-15T04:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: Tom MacWright\nthumbnail: 'https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/typebox/card.png'\ntags: [engineering]\n---\n\nI've written a bit about how much I like [Zod](https://zod.dev/). I've also [contributed a bunch of improvements to Zod](https://github.com/colinhacks/zod/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Atmcw+is%3Aclosed), especially around performance.\n\nZod has revolutionized how developers think about data validation because, I'd say, it has a wonderful API. Creating a shape for some data in Zod is really developer-friendly:\n\n```ts\nimport { z } from \"zod\";\n\nconst User = z.object({\n username: z.string(),\n});\n\nUser.parse({ username: \"Ludwig\" });\n\n// extract the inferred type\ntype User = z.infer;\n// { username: string }\n```\n\nHowever, for [Val Town’s recent transition from express to Fastify](https://blog.val.town/blog/fastify/), we've been using [TypeBox](https://github.com/sinclairzx81/typebox) in place of Zod for validation. Fastify can support either Zod or TypeBox [via a Type Provider system](https://fastify.dev/docs/latest/Reference/Type-Providers/), but TypeBox was the clear option for us.\n\nWhy? Mostly because TypeBox plays well with JSON Schema, and we need JSON Schema\ndefinitions for our [OpenAPI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAPI_Specification)\nspecification. Plus, it's pretty fast.\n\n### TypeBox ↔ JSON Schema ↔ OpenAPI\n\nAs we've been migrating to [Fastify](https://fastify.io/) for our API server, one of our major goals has been to strictly define all of the inputs and outputs, and to be able to express them all in an [OpenAPI specification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAPI_Specification) that will have a lot of trickle-down benefits.\n\nOpenAPI 3.1.0 [is 100% compatible with JSON Schema](https://www.openapis.org/blog/2021/02/18/openapi-specification-3-1-released) – the types of query parameters, request bodies, response bodies, and more are all defined with [JSON Schema](https://json-schema.org/) objects.\n\nHere's an example of one of our simplest routes - the [esm.town](https://docs.val.town/api/esm-town/) endpoint that exposes Val contents as TypeScript or JavaScript modules so that they can be run in Deno or browsers:\n\n```ts\nfastify.route({\n method: \"GET\",\n url: \"/v/:handle/:name\",\n schema: {\n description: \"Get source code for a val\",\n // TypeBox provides this Type variable\n // which we use to build the schema\n querystring: Type.Object({\n v: Type.Optional(Type.Integer({ minimum: 0 })),\n }),\n params: Type.Object({\n handle: Type.String(),\n name: Type.String(),\n }),\n },\n // …\n});\n```\n\nLet's look at the `querystring` type (and [here's a Val that shows doing just this](https://www.val.town/v/tmcw/typeboxExample)):\n\n```ts\nconst querystring = Type.Object({\n v: Type.Optional(Type.Integer({ minimum: 0 })),\n});\n\nconsole.log(JSON.stringify(querystring));\n// {\"type\":\"object\",\"properties\":{\"v\":{\"minimum\":0,\"type\":\"integer\"}}}\n```\n\nTypeBox objects are JSON Schema objects with extra in-memory magic!\n\nA fun way to think about TypeBox is that it does for JSON Schema what [drizzle does for SQL](https://orm.drizzle.team/) - it's a nice, TypeScript-friendly builder syntax for an existing spec that tries to expose all of the spec's power. That's not _all_ TypeBox is -\nit has an extremely fast built-in [type checker](https://github.com/sinclairzx81/typebox?tab=readme-ov-file#typecheck),\nit can [create example values based on schemas](https://github.com/sinclairzx81/typebox?tab=readme-ov-file#values), and a lot more.\n\nThere _are_ ways to use Zod to produce JSON Schema. For example, there's [zod-to-json-schema](https://github.com/StefanTerdell/zod-to-json-schema):\n\n```ts\nimport { z } from \"zod\";\nimport { zodToJsonSchema } from \"zod-to-json-schema\";\n\nconst mySchema = z\n .object({\n myString: z.string().min(5),\n myUnion: z.union([z.number(), z.boolean()]),\n })\n .describe(\"My neat object schema\");\n\nconst jsonSchema = zodToJsonSchema(mySchema, \"mySchema\");\n```\n\nThat said, TypeBox’s supported validators mirror what you can do in JSON Schema precisely, whereas Zod's often stretch into things that JSON Schema can't do, for two reasons:\n\n- Zod is most often used without reference to JSON Schema, so there's no sense in it trying to be a _subset_ of JSON Schema.\n- Zod follows the _parse, don't validate philosophy_.\n\n### Parse, don't validate\n\nAlexis King [coined this snappy slogan and popularized it in this great blog post, \"Parse, don't validate\"](https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2019/11/05/parse-don-t-validate/). Here's a vastly oversimplified example of how these two approaches might look in TypeScript:\n\n```ts\n// A validation-based approach\nif (isValid(object)) {\n // This is valid\n console.log(object);\n}\n\n// A parsing-based approach\nconst { error, value } = parse(object);\nif (!error) {\n // This is valid\n console.log(value);\n}\n```\n\nValidating is the default approach of a module like [ajv](https://ajv.js.org/guide/typescript.html#utility-types-for-schemas) and the behavior of how TypeBox’s [Check](https://github.com/sinclairzx81/typebox?tab=readme-ov-file#check) method works: they do some form of [type narrowing](https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/2/narrowing.html) to let the type system know that the given data is valid, but they do not copy or mutate the data.\n\nZod, on the other hand, parses, and it creates a [deep clone](https://zod.dev/?id=parse) of its input data:\n\n```ts\nconst stringSchema = z.string();\n\nstringSchema.safeParse(\"billie\"); // => { success: true; data: 'billie' }\n```\n\nThis, in most cases, is _awesome_. The flexibility of Zod lets you do a lot of useful work in the 'parsing' step. You can [transform inputs](https://zod.dev/?id=transform) and [strip extra keys on objects](https://zod.dev/?id=strip). Zod can guarantee that that your data is 'clean' - it has the expected keys, but doesn't have any extra keys. Most of the time, this is a thing about Zod that I greatly appreciate.\n\nHowever, for validating the types of our Fastify schema, this approach has two downsides:\n\n- All of the methods in Zod that rely on the \"parse, don't validate\" architecture won't be convertible to JSON Schema. JSON Schema doesn't let you transform data, or pick object properties: it's a system for validation.\n- Parsing and deep-copying inputs is one of the main reasons why Zod's performance [lags other type validators](https://moltar.github.io/typescript-runtime-type-benchmarks/). It is harder to optimize its approach than it is to optimize an approach that doesn't require copying data.\n\n### Performance\n\nNow that I've mentioned performance, I should reiterate something I've written before a bunch of times: performance wasn't the main reason for using TypeBox instead of Zod for this problem. Performance also wasn't the main reason for [switching to Fastify from express](https://blog.val.town/blog/fastify/).\n\nAnd this applies even though fastify is [benchmarked faster](https://fastify.dev/benchmarks/) than express and TypeBox is benchmarked faster than Zod.\n\nI am a strong believer in Carlos Bueno’s [mature optimization handbook](https://carlos.bueno.org/optimization/), which dictates that:\n\n> The trickiest part of speeding up a program is not doing it, but deciding whether it’s worth doing at all.\n\nAnd, later:\n\n> Before you can optimize anything you need a way to measure what you are optimizing. Otherwise you are just shooting in the dark. Before you can measure you need a clear, explicit statement of the problem you are trying to solve. Otherwise, in a very real sense, you don’t know what you are doing.\n\nSo, I keep in mind that everything in the application that is not the bottleneck, is not the bottleneck. I know in my mind that there's a performance difference between different kinds of loops in JavaScript, but in almost every case that doesn't matter.\nThe overhead of a `.forEach` call versus a `for` loop is going to be\ninsignificant versus a single database call or network request.\n\nAnd in the vast majority of applications, validation and parsing is\nnot the bottleneck. That's the case in Val Town. Our bottlenecks are things like network topology, cold-start times for processes, database access, and disk access. We have metrics in [Honeycomb](https://www.honeycomb.io/) that break down the time cost of running vals, and Fastify overhead isn't a major contributor.\n\nTake it from [the author of Arktype](https://www.reddit.com/r/typescript/comments/17cmt0q/comment/k5rcmvi/), one of the extremely fast Zod alternatives:\n\n> I'll tell you a secret- validator performance is mostly negligible in ~95% of situations and Zod's is totally reasonable.\n\nNow, I do write this as someone who spent a bunch of time writing those [performance-oriented Zod pull requests](https://github.com/colinhacks/zod/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Atmcw+is%3Aclosed), which contributed to a pretty decent [performance improvement on some benchmarks](https://observablehq.com/@tmcw/zod-perf-by-versions). Why?\n\nBecause at the time, I was working on [Placemark](https://play.placemark.io/), a geospatial data-editing tool, and that tool was using Zod to validate geospatial data. Geospatial data is large, often in the hundreds of megabytes to gigabytes and more. And it contains a lot of nested JSON structures, like huge arrays of longitude, latitude positions that describe the precise curves of a line.\n\nSo on that project I genuinely used the [Chrome Profiling tools](https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/performance) and got a result in which Zod was a big part of the total time spent, so it became a high priority to optimize it.\n\n### See also\n\nThere is a [lot of competition](https://npmtrends.com/@badrap/valita-vs-@sinclair/typebox-vs-arktype-vs-valibot-vs-zod) happening in the TypeScript validation space right now, which is super exciting for me, free-riding on all this innovation. So forgive me for not comprehensively covering all of the projects.\n\n[Valibot](https://github.com/fabian-hiller/valibot) is cool because it be a much smaller addition to your JavaScript bundle than Zod.\n\n[Arktype](https://github.com/arktypeio/arktype) is extremely cool because it essentially does for the TypeScript type system what TypeBox does for JSON Schema: the Arktype idea is that you don't need to learn a new type syntax - you can just write TypeScript-style type syntax and it'll get compiled to type checkers that can run at runtime. TypeBox has something similar in its [codegen module](https://github.com/sinclairzx81/typebox-codegen).\n\nNot to mention, [Colin](https://x.com/colinhacks) just got funding to build [the next version of Zod, v4](https://zod.dev/blog/clerk-fellowship), which will undoubtedly be a major step up for performance and power.\nThe future is bright!\n",[],[202,1142],"e7f206ea-17a7-4e00-9fd9-4f4d948d0d22","2024-07-02-fastify.md","86b7c158-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: 'Moving from express to fastify, pt 1'\ndescription: How switching to Fastify let us embrace runtime and compile-time types\npubDate: '2024-07-02T04:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: Tom MacWright\ntags: [engineering]\n---\n\nThe JavaScript ecosystem has changed a lot in the last 15 years.\nWe've gone from CommonJS to ESM, from browserify to webpack to vite,\nfrom mocha to vitest, from the request module to using web-standard\nfetch everywhere. The constant reinvention can\nbe exciting or annoying from one day to the next.\n\n### The success of Express\n\nAmid all this churn, [express][express] has persevered.\nExpress is a web framework for Node.js, introduced\nby [TJ Holowaychuk][tj] in 2009. Like many early JavaScript\nmodules and some of TJ's projects, it took inspiration\nfrom the land of Ruby - in particular, [Sinatra][sinatra], which\nwas established in 2007.\n\n```js title=\"express-example.js\"\n// This is a tiny example of using\n// express. Notice how there's almost no boilerplate\n// involved in creating a tiny web server.\nconst app = require('express')();\napp.get('/', (req, res) => {\n res.send('Hello World!');\n});\napp.listen(3000);\n```\n\nExpress is a beautifully light abstraction: a\n'hello world' example is barely over 10 lines. Compared to the boilerplate\nrequired to do the same in Ruby on Rails or a Java server at the time, it\nwas a breath of fresh air.\n\n $\"Weekly$ \n\nExpress became the default for new JavaScript projects and has stayed\nthere. In a typical week, express is downloaded from NPM 30 million\ntimes. It's a roaring success in every way.\n\n### A need for types\n\nExpress is an _expressive_ framework: like a classic Ruby or\nJavaScript framework, it lets you color outside the lines using\nloosely defined objects and types. Query string parameters in express\nbecome [freeform objects](https://expressjs.com/en/4x/api.html#req.query).\nThe same goes for the bodies of requests, and the kinds of responses\nyou can send: it's all a bit ad-hoc by default.\n\nBut the vibes have shifted: we write [TypeScript][ts] now,\nand everyone's excited about validation modules like [Zod](https://zod.dev/)\nand [TypeBox](https://github.com/sinclairzx81/typebox). Interfaces\nare less ad-hoc and more declared, tested, and strictly typed.\n\nModern tooling is written to take full advantage of types\nand schemas. With [tRPC](https://trpc.io/), we're writing backend\nendpoints and calling them from auto-generated, auto-typed functions\non the frontend. Other backends are embracing [OpenAPI][openapi]\n(née Swagger) to generate clients, test suites, and more.\nEnd-to-end type-safety is in vogue, and it is good.\n\n### The promise of OpenAPI\n\nIn our case, we want our types as an [OpenAPI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAPI_Specification)\nspecification.\nOpenAPI is a JSON/YAML document that lets you describe your entire\nREST API strictly: what URLs are supported, how parameters, headers,\nand request bodies should be formatted, what kind of responses\nwill be produced. It lets you enrich this strict machine-readable\ninformation with human-readable descriptions and helpful examples.\nIt's a pretty exciting time for the OpenAPI spec.\n\n```mermaid\nflowchart TD\n FR[Fastify routes] --> FS[@fastify/swagger]\n FS --> OA[openapi.json]\n OA --> C[OpenAPI consumers]\n OA --> SSDK[TypeScript SDK]\n OA --> DOCS[API Docs]\n OA --> OAPI[OpenAPI Function calling]\n OA --> V[Linter]\n V -->|lint feedback| FR\n```\n\nA number of companies and open source projects, including\n[Stainless](https://www.stainlessapi.com/), [Speakeasy](https://www.speakeasyapi.dev/),\nand [OpenAPI TypeScript](https://openapi-ts.pages.dev/), are\nwriting tools that can generate functional, clean SDKs straight\nfrom OpenAPI specifications.\n\nYou can also generate great documentation from OpenAPI specifications.\nWe're already [generating api.val.town/documentation][openapi_docs]\nusing a library from [Scalar](https://scalar.com/).\n\nAnd in the near future, we should be able to use our OpenAPI specification\nto give our [AI assistant](https://x.com/tmcw/status/1803132938269175956)\nthe ability to interact with our API via [function calling](https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/function-calling):\nconveniently, OpenAPI and the OpenAI function calling\nsystem are both based on [JSON Schema](https://json-schema.org/),\nso translating between the two is possible.\n\n### Issues with express\n\nVal Town started off with Express. It has served us pretty well.\nBut the papercuts started to accumulate.\n\nWhen we started creating [a public API with an OpenAPI spec][rfc],\nwe immediately started to get a bad feeling about using express\nas we were doing before. The OpenAPI specification was making\nstrong promises about the kinds of requests we accepted and responses\nwe'd return. But the specification was just a dead document,\na YAML file - it wasn't part our codebase, or our test suite. So it\nwasn't enforced or validated, and sure enough, it was slightly incorrect\nfrom day one.\n\nThe other pain point was async. We write the Val Town backend\nas TypeScript but try to transpile it to modern code, so\nwe keep our [async functions][async_mdn] and ESM syntax when we\nrun our code. Express far predates the existence of the\nasync & await keywords in JavaScript, and it [does not mix well with them][express_async].\n\n### Finding an alternative\n\nBecause express is incredibly popular, there are ways to implement\nOpenAPI with it, and support async handlers - plugins like\n[express-openapi](https://github.com/kogosoftwarellc/open-api)\nand [express-async-errors](https://github.com/davidbanham/express-async-errors). But these are a bit bolted-on:\nthey make it technically possible to achieve the goal, but\nnothing about them is idiomatic.\n\nAnother option would be waiting for the next version of express, v5,\nwhich includes support for async functions. That release is\ntaking [a little while to complete][express_5], so we didn't want\nto bet on it landing soon.\n\nIt is great, though, that express\nis still actively maintained, and I don't envy the task of rolling\na major update to such a heavily-adopted project. There are certainly\ncodebases with tens of thousands of lines of code that rely on\nexpress and can't easily jump to an alternative.\n\nBut Val Town's backend is not an enormous legacy project.\nSwitching web frameworks wasn't going to require\na [deadly from-scratch rewrite][never_rewrite]. We were ready to\nbid adieu to express.\n\nTechnology choice is complicated. I don't want to make a decision\nbased on some simplistic criteria like GitHub Stars, but it's equally\nfraught to rely on vibes and instinct. So I investigated whether\nprojects had good documentation and maintainership, if they had\na decent history of stability, and perhaps most importantly, whether\nthey were trying to solve the problems that we needed to solve.\n\n### Fastify\n\n![Fastify](https://assets.blog.val.town/legacy/fastify/fastify-logo.png)\n\nWe landed on [fastify][fastify] as the technology to build the\nfuture of Val Town's public API. Some of the strongest points for\nfastify were:\n\n- A comprehensive [ecosystem](https://fastify.dev/ecosystem/),\n which includes a lot of high-quality, first-party plugins. We're\n building a system in production, which means things like rate\n limiting are going to be necessary, and it's amazing that\n fastify's [rate limiter](https://github.com/fastify/fastify-rate-limit)\n is well-architected.\n- Great, thorough [documentation](https://fastify.dev/docs/latest/Reference/Routes/),\n and an active community that has been really helpful for support.\n- Solid support for [plugins and encapsulation](https://fastify.dev/docs/latest/Reference/Encapsulation/) that let us structure the application into sub-applications.\n- Support for [validation and serialization](https://fastify.dev/docs/latest/Reference/Validation-and-Serialization/) with multiple validators and validation for all inputs and ouputs.\n- [Good support for async/await](https://fastify.dev/docs/latest/Reference/Routes/#async-await), like you might expect from a modern framework.\n- Off-the-shelf integrations for [opentelemetry](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@opentelemetry/instrumentation-fastify) and [Sentry](https://docs.sentry.io/platforms/javascript/guides/fastify/) mean\n that we could have tracing and telemetry from day one.\n- We were already using the [light-my-request](https://github.com/fastify/light-my-request) module to test\n our express server. light-my-request is written and maintained\n by the fastify folks, and it is built into fastify.\n- Finally, [@fastify/express](https://github.com/fastify/fastify-express)\n let us incrementally migrate from express to fastify.\n\nOf course, fastify is also very fast, but web framework overhead\nwasn't a problem with express and most likely won't be a problem with\nany framework we choose: most of our performance envelope has to\ndo with operating [the Val Town runtime][runtimes] and interacting\nwith the database.\n\nWe considered a few other options, like [Hono](https://hono.dev/) and [Elysia](https://elysiajs.com/).\nBoth are lovely projects - we use and recommend Hono a ton\nin Vals. Elysia has convenient typesafety and a lot of features,\nbut its support for Node.js is very experimental. And Hono has\na [first-party OpenAPI plugin](https://github.com/honojs/middleware/tree/main/packages/zod-openapi), but some of the ecosystem around fastify - for tracing,\nincremental migration from express, and plugins - was more built-out.\n\nFor simpler projects and especially for situations where we want\nmulti-platform compatibility so that code can run on Node.js, Deno,\nor Cloudflare Workers, [we reach for Hono](https://www.val.town/examples/packages/hono).\n\n### Incrementally porting our application, route by route\n\nBy using [@fastify/express](https://github.com/fastify/fastify-express)\nwe were able to do this migration entirely incrementally: the first\nfastify PR just added the fastify dependency and wrapped our express\nserver with fastify. Then each successive PR moved a few routes\nfrom express to fastify, until the application has been\ncompletely ported.\n\n $\"Open$ \n\nAs of today, we've ported all but two routes in our backend server.\nIt's been an incredibly incremental effort, thanks to @fastify/express -\nsuch that we never had to stop work on feature development or freeze\npart of the codebase while switching frameworks.\n\nAnd the best is yet to come – next we'll be talking about our\n[new TypeScript SDK][sdk], which is generated directly from the OpenAPI\ndocuments that fastify produces, as well as [improved documentation](https://api.val.town/documentation)\nand more robust API endpoints. Stay tuned!\n\n[openapi]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAPI_Specification\n[async_mdn]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Statements/async_function\n[express_async]: https://zellwk.com/blog/async-await-express/\n[tj]: https://github.com/tj\n[express]: https://expressjs.com/\n[sinatra]: https://sinatrarb.com/\n[ts]: http://typescript.com/\n[rfc]: https://blog.val.town/blog/expanding-the-vals-api-rfc/\n[express_5]: https://github.com/expressjs/discussions/issues/233\n[never_rewrite]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/\n[fastify]: https://fastify.dev/\n[runtimes]: https://blog.val.town/blog/first-four-val-town-runtimes/\n[sdk]: https://github.com/val-town/sdk\n[openapi_docs]: https://api.val.town/documentation\n",[],[202,1149],"dfe81352-2c7f-4666-b662-3016729aa9fc","2024-06-25-val-town-newsletter-18.md","86b71d84-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: Val Town Newsletter 18\ndescription: 'HTTP Streaming, Semantic Search, Townie AI Chat, and a TypeScript SDK'\npubDate: '2024-06-25T04:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: Steve Krouse\ntags: [newsletter]\n---\n\nIn the last month, we shipped HTTP streaming, semantic search, and Townie, an AI chatbot that knows how to write vals. We also released a TypeScript SDK on top of our new OpenAPI spec for the Val Town API, redesigned profile pages, public likes, and nameable API tokens.\n\nWe're currently working on making it easier to navigate and organize vals, improvements to search, the ability to stop a running val, and performance improvements.\n\nYou all have been making some amazing vals! We've seeing AI apps, streaming demos, personal websites, emojis, authentication middleware, and a hundred others listed at the bottom of this newsletter.\n\nIf you enjoy reading these newsletters, join our team at Val Town to help write them! We're hiring someone to do [content-focused devrel](https://val-town.notion.site/DevRel-at-Val-Town-117abe97069449e58df53d7a794ebfac?pvs=4) to inspire and support the next 100k programmers to build on Val Town.\n\n### 🌊 HTTP Streaming\n\nYou can stream from vals!!! Our new open-source [deno-http-worker](https://github.com/val-town/deno-http-worker) also enables us to increase request size limits from 2mb to 100mb and make response sizes unlimited. Read more in the [HTTP Streaming announcement](/http-streaming/).\n\n

\n\n## 🔎 Val Semantic Search\n\nAre there any vals related to...? We have a new search mode that uses embeddings to give you a val with the same \"vibes\" as your search query. It's currently its own mode labelled \"semantic search\" – [try it out yourself](https://www.val.town/search?searchType=semantic)! We're working on combining it with the exact search to give you a wholistic search experience. Learn more in the [Semantic Search announcement](/val-vibes/).\n\n $\"Semantic$ \n\n## 🤖 Townie\n\nWe built a Townie, a chatbot that knows common Val Town patterns. It's surprisingly good at generating working code. You can see below me asking it for help on a fairly complex task [from Pat LaVarre](https://x.com/pelavarre/status/1804191746760544676). It doesn't give me what I ask for – it gives me something better – and it immediately ran, zero-shot (on its first try). It works even better if you give it feedback in a couple iterations. [Try it out!](https://www.val.town/townie)\n\n $\"Townie$ \n\n## ✨ Upgraded OpenAPI & TypeScript SDK\n\nAfter a herculean effort to port our Express server to Fastify, we were able to generate a good [OpenAPI schema](https://api.val.town/openapi.json), [interactive API docs](https://api.val.town/documentation), and a [TypeScript SDK](https://github.com/val-town/sdk). [Try it out yourself!](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/demoSDK) Shout-out to our friends at [Stainless](https://www.stainlessapi.com/) for help generating the SDK.\n\n $\"Demo$ \n\n## ❤️ Profile redesign, public likes\n\nYour profile page is now prettier and a bit more functional. You can view your vals in a list or a grid, as well as the vals you liked. We're reimagining users' profile as a jumping off point to explore. Coming soon: sorting and filtering for vals in your profile.\n\n $\"Screenshot$ \n\n## 𝍌 Custom formatter settings\n\nYou can use tabs instead of spaces and banish trailing semicolons. Customize dprint to your heart's content in your [editor settings](https://www.val.town/settings/editor). Shout out to [David Sherret](https://x.com/DavidSherret) for creating the wonderful [dprint](https://dprint.dev/). Thanks Adrian Sieber for the original feature request and Nikita for [the final kick](https://x.com/nikitavoloboev/status/1801038544623882590) to get it done.\n\n

\n\n## 📺 Livestreams\n\nLivestreams are a great way to learn Val Town by watching others. And if you watch live, you can ask questions and we'll answer! Or heckle – that's fun too.\n\nSince the last newsletter, I spoke with:\n\n- [Simon Willison](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pmC3P1fUFo) - prototyped a [search-based RAG](https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jun/21/search-based-rag/) (Retrieval Augmented Generation) with the new Claude 3.5 Sonnet\n- [Linus Lee](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nYPeK9_X6o) - made a [websim clone](https://www.val.town/v/thesephist/webgen) to hallucinate websites\n- [Geoffrey Litt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9h5wxUuuTI) - created [a twitter email digest](https://x.com/geoffreylitt/status/1800952306998845660) where you control the algorithm\n- [Max Bittker](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QGjdDGEkyI) - built a backend to power a community showcase\n\nTune into the next episode [this Thursday, June 27th at 10am ET with Mary Rose Cook](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ2uqaqD10E)!\n\nOur friend Beniamin also is making wonderful Val Town livestreams! I loved this one where he [used GPT4 summarization to combine many newsletters into one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9tU5p3uSKQ).\n\n### 🎉 Other updates\n\n- Fixed an extremely annoying bug where the cursor would reset to the beginning of the first line after formatting. Now it stays where you left it.\n- Added the ability to create a val via the API with a specific type (except cron)\n- Improved log streaming & a button to refresh logs\n- Ability to name Val Town API tokens\n- Added three \"getting started\" examples for new users\n- Reorganized val logs for better readability\n- The URL box in the Val Preview iframe is now fairlyully selectable\n- Long val READMEs get truncated with a “view more” button\n- [val.town/newest](https://www.val.town/newest) now has list-view options\n- There's now a \"copy code\" button in markdown js, ts, jsx, tsx snippets\n- Moved the search icon to a better spot in mobile header\n- Improved observability and usage tracking\n- Upgraded database to high-available cluster\n- Made VIM logo background transparent\n- Refactored the code that runs vals, fixing inconsistencies\n\n## 🛣️ Roadmap\n\n### 💪 What we're working on\n\n- Side panel view for vals and folders\n- [Full-screen val editor](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions/14)\n- Filters & sorts in user profiles\n- Val detail page improvements\n- [Usage tracking](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions/19)\n- [Stop a running val](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions/117)\n- [Val runtime performance](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions/113)\n- [Search improvements](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions/69) (combining exact & semantic)\n\n### 🔜 Coming soon\n\nHere's some of the top features we're planning to work in the coming months. Please [make feature requests and vote](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions?discussions) on what you'd like to see next.\n\n- [Receive attachments from email handlers](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions/75)\n- [Dashboard](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions/8)\n- Usage-based pricing plan\n- [LLM-generated vals](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions/47)\n\n## 🌟 Community Vals\n\n- [Achille](https://val.town/u/pomdtr) stunned us all again with an authentication middleware val so powerful, it just may be the [\"last login\" you'll ever need](https://www.val.town/v/pomdtr/lastlogin). It also comes with a [hono adapter](https://www.val.town/v/pomdtr/lastloginHono).\n- [Max](https://val.town/u/maxm) made a series of demos to show us all how to stream: [hello world for streaming HTTP responses](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/streamingResponseExample) that sends a new message every second, [simple server-sent events demo](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/SSEDemo), a [clone of robpike.io](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/robPikeIO), [streaming OpenAI threads](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/openAIStreaming), a [mini ChatGPT clone](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/valTownChatGPT), a [GIF that streams frames](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/streamingGif), [multiplayer circles](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/multiplayerCircles), [an endless maze](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/endlessMazeStream), [NYC's traffic cameras as streaming ASCII images](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/asciiNycCameras)\n- [Thomas](https://www.val.town/u/iamseeley) made and remade his personal website 8 times (!!!) to show different frontend patterns on Val Town and their [relative performance](https://www.val.town/v/iamseeley/webPerformance): [Client-side React](https://www.val.town/v/iamseeley/reactServer), [Client-side React via CDN](https://www.val.town/v/iamseeley/clientMultirouteReact), [Svelte](https://www.val.town/v/iamseeley/multirouteSvelte), [Preact](https://www.val.town/v/iamseeley/multiroutePreact), [Vue](https://www.val.town/v/iamseeley/multirouteVue), [Hono](https://www.val.town/v/iamseeley/multirouteHono), [React](https://www.val.town/v/iamseeley/multirouteReact), and [HTML as String](https://www.val.town/v/iamseeley/multirouteHTML)\n- [Steve](https://val.town/u/stevekrouse) rebuilt the [Date Me Directory](https://dateme.directory) (currently in Hono HTML) as [client-side React (with React Router)](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/dateme_react_client), as well as a version that also has [server-side rendering](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/dateme_react_hydrated). We'll figure out the frontend patterns if we have to build and rebuild all our vals a million times to do it!\n- [Alvi](https://val.town/u/alvi) is [collecting his Steam playtime history](https://www.val.town/v/alvi/SteamPlaytimeHistory_playHistoryToSqlite) to a SQLite database, so he can analyze his gaming habits\n- [Jordan](https://www.val.town/u/jdan) made a val to [explode and explore emoji](https://www.val.town/v/jdan/emojiExploder) and [piped all emoji into a Notion database](https://x.com/jdan/status/1802386599235518473) [with backlinks](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/1800876339928687047)\n- [@charlypoly](https://val.town/u/charlypoly) made a bunch of vals with Browserbase: [val that watches a blog for changes](https://www.val.town/v/charlypoly/valBlogWatcherCron), a [val that checks if a website has changed](https://www.val.town/v/charlypoly/websiteHasChanged), a [Puppeteer example](https://www.val.town/v/charlypoly/browserbasePuppeteerExample), and [browserbase utils](https://www.val.town/v/charlypoly/browserbaseUtils)\n- [Steve](https://val.town/u/stevekrouse) made an [uptime status page](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/status) built on top of data collected by an [uptime monitor cron](https://www.val.town/v/healeycodes/isMyWebsiteDown)\n- [Thomas](https://val.town/u/iamseeley) made [a series of vals around JSON Resume](https://iamseeley-resumehandler.web.val.run/)\n- [Thomas](https://val.town/u/iamseeley) is [sending SMS](https://www.val.town/v/iamseeley/sendSMS) via email!\n- [Victor](https://val.town/u/vawogbemi) made a [Date Me Directory clone](https://www.val.town/v/vawogbemi/dateme) but for a man in finance (6'5, blue eyes)\n- [@midnightlightning](https://val.town/u/midnightlightning) made [an endpoint to calculate additional metadata for a Uniswap liquidity position](https://www.val.town/v/midnightlightning/uniswapV3Position)\n- [Jon](https://val.town/u/jonbo) made [a bot that ensures a Supabase websocket listener is alive](https://www.val.town/v/jonbo/MADBOTS)\n- [Achille](https://val.town/u/pomdtr) somehow figured out how to [run Astro in Val Town](https://www.val.town/v/pomdtr/astro)! Here are the [Val Town Docs hosted in Val Town](https://pomdtr-docs.web.val.run/) 🤯\n- [@arrudaricardo](https://val.town/u/arrudaricardo) [changes his GitHub status](https://www.val.town/v/arrudaricardo/random_change_github_status) to a random emoji every day\n- [Jan](https://val.town/u/yawnxyz) made an awesome [new blob admin](https://www.val.town/v/yawnxyz/blobbyFace)\n- [@jcoleman](https://val.town/u/jcoleman) [saves email signups](https://www.val.town/v/jcoleman/saveEmailSignupsDeerSpringBakery) for Deer Spring Bakery\n- [Achille](https://val.town/u/pomdtr) brought a [taste of Observable Framework to Val Town](https://www.val.town/v/pomdtr/freeformServer)\n- [Max](https://val.town/u/maxm) cobbled together [some Deno fresh charts](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/freshChartsExample) as HTML or images\n- [Domingo](https://val.town/u/domingo1987) created a [Python problem exchange backend](https://www.val.town/v/domingo1987/problemPython) for a custom GPT\n- [Jordan](https://www.val.town/u/jordan) made some [vals relating to the National Weather Service](https://www.val.town/u/nws), including [a Bluesky feed generator](https://www.val.town/v/nws/feeds)\n- [@kingish](https://val.town/u/kingishb) gets a [weekly email digest of good times to go on a bike ride](https://www.val.town/v/kingishb/blackLobster)\n- [Achille](https://val.town/u/pomdtr) created [middleware that adds handy debug links](https://www.val.town/v/pomdtr/devtools) to get to a val's code and log\n- [Steve](https://val.town/u/stevekrouse) made [a little clone](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/favFarm) of Wes Bos's wonderful [fav.farm](https://fav.farm/) for when you need a quick little favicon out of an emoji\n- [Achille](https://val.town/u/pomdtr) found a clever workaround to [set temporary environment variables](https://www.val.town/v/pomdtr/setEnv)\n- [Jan](https://val.town/u/yawnxyz) built an [vector search](https://www.val.town/v/yawnxyz/buildclubProjectSearch) on top of Lunr and Airtable\n- [@camajudson](https://val.town/u/camajudson) built a [Discord bot for the Cama community](https://www.val.town/v/camajudson/handleDiscordInteraction)\n- [Steve](https://val.town/u/stevekrouse) made a [simple OpenAI streaming demo](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/openaiStreamingDemo) and [one that streams back _rendered_ HTML](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/openaistreaminghtml). Why make HTML when ChatGPT will write it for you?\n- [Jan](https://val.town/u/yawnxyz) made a [blurb generator](https://www.val.town/v/yawnxyz/blurbs) that inputs a link and outputs a blurb and a bunch of tags\n- [@tfayyaz](https://val.town/u/tfayyaz) demoed [search messages](https://www.val.town/v/tfayyaz/searchmessages) with HTMX\n- [Chet](https://val.town/u/chet) made an [HTML formatter](https://www.val.town/v/chet/HtmlFormatter)\n- [Steve](https://val.town/u/stevekrouse) demoed how to get [geolocation data in a website](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/geolocation_api_demo)\n- [@nmsilva](https://val.town/u/nmsilva) made a [Supabase cache](https://www.val.town/v/nmsilva/supabaseCache)\n- [@nerdymomocat](https://val.town/u/nerdymomocat) syncs to [Habitify from Todoist with AI](https://www.val.town/v/nerdymomocat/add_to_habitify_from_todoist_w_ai)\n- [Max](https://val.town/u/maxm) showed us how to [import a wasm binary manually](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/imageMagickWasmExample)\n- [@l3gacyb3ta](https://val.town/u/l3gacyb3ta) wrote [a script to calculate the heat at a point](https://www.val.town/v/l3gacyb3ta/heat_at_point) on a map\n- [Daniel](https://val.town/u/danielkerrigan) fetched [the most popular Obsidian plugins](https://www.val.town/v/danielkerrigan/obsidianPlugins) from Github\n- [Thomas](https://val.town/u/iamseeley) made a [text to image playground](https://iamseeley-texttoimageplayground.web.val.run/) for Fal.ai\n- [@banebot](https://val.town/u/banebot) made a [greeting card generator](https://www.val.town/v/banebot/GreetingCard)\n- [Jan](https://val.town/u/yawnxyz) made a [val that gets content from a URL](https://www.val.town/v/yawnxyz/getContentFromUrl) for summerizers. It combines https://r.jina.ai/URL and markdown.download's Youtube transcription getter to do its best to retrieve content from URLs.\n- [Achille](https://val.town/u/pomdtr) got [WANIX](https://www.val.town/v/pomdtr/wanix) (a web-native unix) running in a val\n- [Thomas](https://val.town/u/iamseeley) made a [val that backs up his vals to Github](https://www.val.town/v/iamseeley/valBackup)\n- [Nico](https://val.town/u/nicoalbanese) demoed [Vercel's AI SDK Streaming](https://www.val.town/v/nicoalbanese/tomatoMinnow)\n- [Alex](https://val.town/u/rattrayalex) made a site to paste & clean [Slack messages](https://www.val.town/v/rattrayalex/slack_cleaner)\n- [Jason](https://val.town/u/jasonhibbs) made a [price tracker](https://www.val.town/v/jasonhibbs/priceTracker) for the Emma Luxe Cooling Mattress\n- [Sean](https://val.town/u/seanehalpin) is [tracking their figma plugin statistics](https://www.val.town/v/seanehalpin/placemarkGlobeMonitor)\n- [Achille](https://val.town/u/pomdtr) made a [val that serves a Github repo](https://www.val.town/v/pomdtr/serveGithubRepo)\n- [@hunty](https://val.town/u/hunty) made a [Spotify endpoints for play state](https://www.val.town/v/hunty/spotify)\n- [@bdon](https://val.town/u/bdon) made a [USD to TWD converter](https://www.val.town/v/bdon/usd_twd_converter)\n- [Matthias](https://val.town/u/matthiasraimann) made a [web component example](https://www.val.town/v/matthiasraimann/WebComponentExample)\n- [Steve](https://val.town/u/stevekrouse) made [a site to lookup DNS records](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/dns)\n- [Jan](https://val.town/u/yawnxyz) made the beginnings of a [UI for a Simon Willison's RAG search](https://www.val.town/v/yawnxyz/ragwithclaude_ui)\n- [Steve](https://val.town/u/stevekrouse) made a [streaming demo with Anthropic Claude](https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse/anthropicStreamDemo)\n- [@ashryan](https://val.town/u/ashryanio) made a [QR code generator](https://www.val.town/v/ashryanio/generateQrCode)\n- [@zerovox](https://val.town/u/zerovox) made [an RSS feed from his items from Readwise reader](https://www.val.town/v/zerovox/readwiseReaderReadItemsRss) to be ingested to Workflowy\n- [Jan](https://val.town/u/yawnxyz) demoed [DuckDB](https://www.val.town/v/yawnxyz/duckdbExample)\n- [Thomas](https://val.town/u/iamseeley) made an [HuggingFace API Gateway](https://www.val.town/v/iamseeley/hfApiGateway)\n- [@ashryan](https://val.town/u/ashryanio) made a [random secret generator](https://www.val.town/v/ashryanio/generateRandomSecret)\n- [@gwoods22](https://val.town/u/gwoods22) made a [cron to get updates on the Macdonald Block Reconstruction Project](https://www.val.town/v/gwoods22/macdonald_block_updates)\n- [@saolsen](https://val.town/u/saolsen) made a [Codemirror TypeScript Emacs demo](https://www.val.town/v/saolsen/codemirrorTsBrowserEmacs) on top ofs [Max's Codemirror TypeScript demo](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/codemirrorTsBrowser)\n- [Brian](https://val.town/u/brianleroux) is [scraping CapFriendly](https://www.val.town/v/brianleroux/scrapecapfriendly)\n- [Jan](https://val.town/u/yawnxyz) is archiving [Sidebar.io](https://www.val.town/v/yawnxyz/SidebarToArchive) to Google Sheets\n- [Thomas](https://val.town/u/iamseeley) made a [3D emoji generator](https://www.val.town/v/iamseeley/threedEmoji)\n- [@triptych](https://val.town/u/triptych) made a [hit counter](https://www.val.town/v/triptych/hitCounter) you can attach to any website via fetch\n",[],[202,1156],"c950fb45-b2a5-4736-99e9-5cdd262b0f17","2024-06-18-val-vibes.md","86b6d23e-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: 'Val Vibes: Semantic search in Val Town'\ndescription: >-\n How to build semantic search with embeddings for Val Town within Val Town\n itself\npubDate: '2024-06-18T04:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: JP Posma\ntags: [engineering]\n---\n\nIf you've been following along, you know that [code search is hard](/search-notes/). Matching a search query to a particular val, allowing for misspellings, adding ranking signals to prioritize the best content, is a complicated and error-prone quest.\n\nBut what if it wasn't? Instead of parsing code to extract terms and creating inverted indexes for trigrams, what if we used _vibes_ to search?\n\n### Similar vibes\n\n“Search” is about finding documents based on a query, using some sort of sorting mechanism that ranks the most relevant documents. You might rank a document higher if it contains the search term more often, or prioritize documents with an exact match over those that only roughly match the search term.\n\nWe'll look at a completely different sorting mechanism called “semantic search”, which uses one of those crazy features to come out of the world of machine learning: embeddings. It works like this: you put in a string into an API, and you get an array of numbers, called an “embedding”, with the property that things that have the same “vibe” will get similar numbers.\n\nFor example, “animal that barks” should have similar vibes to “dog”. And “dog bites man” should have different vibes than “man bites dog”. And “discord bot” should have _very_ different vibes still.\n\n

\n\nSo we need to generate an embedding when a document is created or updated. Then, when someone searches for something, we create an embedding for their search query. Then we find the document embeddings that are closest to the query embedding.\n\nThat's the idea, though in practice embeddings can be quite unpredictable and surprising. Our examples above already break down… “animal that barks” vibes more with “woof woof woof” than with “dog”. And “dog bites man” and “man bites dog” have even more similar vibes than that, presumably because there's lots of biting going on in both cases.\n\n

\n\nFor our purposes though, embedding similarity is high between “discord bot” and “github api”, or “chat server integration”. This helps in finding code that is not exactly the same, but still relevant to the search query.\n\n

\"\" — \n Similar vibes, plotted by [this val](https://www.val.town/v/janpaul123/semanticSearchBlogPostPlot).\n

\n\n### Prototyping in Val Town\n\nI started prototyping this on my computer, but then realized: this is Val Town, the ultimate prototyping tool for things like this. I ended up making three different semantic search vals, using different storage engines: [Postgres](https://www.postgresql.org/) (using [Neon](https://neon.tech/)), [SQLite](https://sqlite.org/) (using [Turso](https://turso.tech/)), and in-memory (using [blob storage](https://docs.val.town/std/blob/)). Let's look at Postgres first, and at the end I'll also show how to do this in-memory.\n\nThere are two phases to semantic search:\n\n1. **Indexing**: generating embeddings for all public vals.\n2. **Querying**: generating an embedding for the search query, and comparing to the indexed embeddings.\n\nFor indexing, we first create a Postgres table on Neon (using the [pgvector](https://github.com/pgvector/pgvector) extension):\n\n```sql\nCREATE TABLE vals_embeddings (id TEXT PRIMARY KEY, embedding VECTOR(1536));\n```\n\nThen we create a [cron val](https://docs.val.town/quickstarts/first-cron/) (or as I like to call them: inter-val…), which we set to run every hour.\n\nFirst we query all vals, for which Achille Lacoin had already made an excellent val:\n\n

\"\" — \n Querying public vals, by Achille Lacoin.\n

\n\nWe filter out vals for which we have existing embeddings, put the rest in batches of 100 vals.\n\n

\n\nThen we fetch embeddings from OpenAI for each batch of 100 in parallel, and save them to Postgres.\n\n

\n\nThis works! Here are the logs from a recent incremental run:\n\n

\n\nQuerying is simpler still. We turn the query string into an embedding, and sort by similarity:\n\n

\n\nFor a nicer UI, I forked an HTTP val (also by Achille Lacoin) and hooked it up to my search function:\n\n

\n\nThis works pretty well! Check out all my semantic search prototypes [here](https://www.val.town/v/janpaul123/valtownsemanticsearch).\n\n### Product\n\nOnce the Postgres prototype worked well, I integrated it into Val Town itself. The implementation is roughly the same: I added a pgvector `embedding` column to our Postgres table that stores vals, and generate an embedding whenever a val is created or updated.\n\nYou can use it by going to the [search page](https://www.val.town/search) and selecting “semantic search”.\n\n

\n\nWe're still iterating on this feature. Here are some ideas we have to improve it, but if you have your own, please let us know on [Discord](https://discord.gg/dHv45uN5RY) or [Github](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions)!\n\n- Combine exact and semantic search. Label them differently by highlighting exact matches for exact search, and maybe label semantic results different.\n- For searches that return a lot of exact results, improve ranking by using the semantic distance as a ranking feature, in lieu of not having [tf-idf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf) stats with our current search setup.\n- For both exact and semantic results, add popularity stats (references, forks, likes) as ranking signals. Show all of these in the search results for easier debugging of ranking (currently only likes are shown).\n- Do fuzzy search (e.g. [levenshtein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance) or similar) in JavaScript, using the top N results from semantic search, to account for misspellings or similar spellings.\n- Split exact search on spaces, giving ranking preference to exact phrases and number of parts matching.\n\n### Bonus: In-memory\n\nAs promised, here is the implementation using in-memory comparisons and blob storage.\n\nThis doesn't require any sort of database, just a place to store bytes. I used Val Town's standard library, which contains [blob storage functions](https://docs.val.town/std/blob/). You can use it to store binary data, or JSON (which gets serialized/deserialized). So we can simply store a blob for every batch of 100 vals, and keep a separate JSON storage to keep track of which embedding is stored where:\n\n

\n\nThen to query, we load all the blobs in memory, and compare them all against the embedding from the query string. This is of course not as efficient as using an index optimized for this sort of sorting, but not too bad for our (still) small number of vals.\n\n

\n\nThanks for reading!\n\n

",[],[202,1163],"c402cecf-29d6-40ac-a20c-de5df065c042","2024-06-13-http-streaming.md","86b68edc-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: HTTP Streaming in Val Town\ndescription: >-\n Val Town supports HTTP streaming for streaming LLMs, large requests and\n responses, and server-sent events\npubDate: '2024-06-13T04:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: Max McDonnell\ntags: [product, engineering]\n---\n\nVal Town now supports HTTP streaming, [our most-requested feature](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions/14).\n\n $\"The$ \n\nYou may recognize me as the guy who originally requested that feature. Now I work here and I shipped it!\n\nStreaming opens up many new use-cases: streaming LLM responses, large requests and responses, and server-sent events.\n\n## Streaming LLM Responses\n\nLLMs are a classic use-case for streaming: they send responses word-by-word as they're generated. Here is a minimal example of a streaming OpenAI response: OpenAPI’s SDK lets us request a streaming response by specifying `stream: true`. They return an [AsyncIterator](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/AsyncIterator) and we turn that into a [ReadableStream](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/ReadableStream/ReadableStream) for our response.\n\n```ts\nimport { OpenAI } from \"https://esm.town/v/std/openai\";\n\nexport default async function (req: Request): Promise {\n const openai = new OpenAI();\n const stream = await openai.chat.completions.create({\n stream: true,\n messages: [\n {\n role: \"user\",\n content: \"Write a poem in the style of beowulf about the DMV\",\n },\n ],\n model: \"gpt-3.5-turbo\",\n max_tokens: 2048,\n });\n return new Response(\n new ReadableStream({\n async start(controller) {\n for await (const chunk of stream) {\n controller.enqueue(\n new TextEncoder().encode(chunk.choices[0]?.delta?.content)\n );\n }\n controller.close();\n },\n }),\n { headers: { \"Content-Type\": \"text/event-stream\" } }\n );\n}\n```\n\nIt's a little bit of a dance to connect the two tools together, but the result is fun:\n\n

\n\n[Fork on Val Town](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/openAIStreamingExample) | [View live output](https://maxm-openaistreamingexample.web.val.run)\n\n### The request limit is now 100mb\n\nWe've increased the limit on request body size from 2mb to\nto 100mb. Here's [an example val](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/reportBodySize) that returns the size of the request body without holding all of it in memory:\n\n```ts\nexport default async function (req: Request): Promise {\n if (req.method !== \"POST\") {\n return new Response(\"Method not allowed\", { status: 405 });\n }\n const reader = req.body.getReader();\n let totalBytes = 0;\n console.log(performance.now());\n while (true) {\n const { done, value } = await reader.read();\n if (done) break;\n console.log(value.byteLength, performance.now());\n totalBytes += value.byteLength;\n }\n return new Response(`${totalBytes}`);\n}\n```\n\nIf we upload a large file to that endpoint it will respond as we'd expect:\n\n```bash\n$ curl --data @image.png https://maxm-reportbodysize.web.val.run\n66799801\n```\n\n## Unlimited response sizes\n\nWe used to buffer and store responses, which imposed a 10mb limit on how much send from an HTTP val. Now we don't, and you can send very big responses:\n\nIn the example below we proxy the latest [130mb\nsupernovae image](https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasawebbtelescope/53782948438/in/album-72177720313923911/) from the Webb Telescope. The client can begin downloading the image before the server has finished downloading it.\n\n```ts\nexport default async function (req: Request) {\n return fetch(\n \"https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53782948438_9b85e57a6c_o_d.png\"\n );\n}\n```\n\n
\n\n $\"James$ \n\n[Fork on Val Town](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/jamesWebbImageProxy) | [View live output](https://maxm-jameswebbimageproxy.web.val.run)\n\n## Server-Sent Events\n\n[Server-Sent Events](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Server-sent_events/Using_server-sent_events) are kind of like a one-way WebSocket. The ChatGPT example above actually used server-sent events. They're useful when you want to work with a stream of discrete events, rather than a continuous stream of data. Here's an example of constructing a server-sent event stream manually to make a clone of [robpike.io](https://robpike.io/).\n\n```ts\nconst msg = new TextEncoder().encode(\"💩\");\nconst initialDelay = 20;\nexport default async function (req: Request): Promise {\n let timerId: number | undefined;\n const body = new ReadableStream({\n start(controller) {\n let currentDelay = initialDelay;\n function writeToStream() {\n currentDelay *= 1.03;\n controller.enqueue(msg);\n timerId = setTimeout(writeToStream, currentDelay);\n }\n writeToStream();\n },\n cancel() {\n if (typeof timerId === \"number\") {\n clearInterval(timerId);\n }\n },\n });\n return new Response(body, {\n headers: {\n \"Content-Type\": \"text/event-stream\",\n },\n });\n}\n```\n\n
\n\n

\n\n[Fork on Val Town](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/robPikeIO) | [View live output](https://maxm-robpikeio.web.val.run)\n\nFor a more complex application using server-sent events, check out my [little ChatGPT clone](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/valTownChatGPT).\n\n### Under the hood\n\nWe had to entirely reorient the way we run user code to support streaming.\n\nPreviously, both requests and responses were read into buffers before being sent to and from the val. This had both speed and scalability issues, as we wouldn't want to buffer a very large response in memory. Now, we only communicate with user code over HTTP.\n\nWith HTTP vals, we proxy the incoming request straight to the worker. This way we don't mess too much with the request structure and you'll see a request lifecycle that is very similar to running your own HTTP server.\n\nIf you're running a script, email, or cron val we send an HTTP request with the relevant information and wait for a response. Now that we're talking HTTP, this paves the way for future support for [websockets](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions/144).\n\nWe built most of this functionality in a library called deno-http-worker, [which we've open sourced on GitHub](https://github.com/val-town/deno-http-worker).\n\nAnd let this be a lesson to you: be careful what features you wish for – you just may end up joining the company and building them.\n\n### Go forth and stream\n\nWe're excited to see what you build! Here're a few more examples to inspire your next val:\n\n- [maxm/multiplayerCircles](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/multiplayerCircles) - a\n collaborative canvas of movable circles that polls the database on the backend\n and streams changes to the frontend.\n- [thesephist/webgen](https://www.val.town/v/thesephist/webgen) - ask chatGPT to generate a website and watch it render bit by bit in front of your eyes. (watch this built live [on Steve's live stream](https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1yNGaZYkdVXJj))\n- [maxm/asciiNycCameras](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/asciiNycCameras) - streaming ASCII videos of NYC traffic cameras.",[],[202,1170],"37d35453-023d-4046-8836-dafd0bdd292f","2024-05-29-val-town-newsletter-17.md","86b5f2e2-7bcf-11f1-b068-1607ee4eb77e",["D",1784053703462],"---\ntitle: Val Town Newsletter 17\ndescription: 'Improved performance, redesigned val page, live coding, and much more!'\npubDate: '2024-05-29T04:00:00.000Z'\nauthor: Steve Krouse\ntags: [newsletter]\n---\n\n\n\nOver the last month, we drastically improved val runtime performance, redesigned the val page, and worked on dozens of other improvements and bug fixes. Jackson and JP joined the team! Steve started a weekly live coding series.\n\nNow we're working on HTTP streaming and improving user onboarding. Over the coming weeks and months, we'll work on better search, improved val organization, a new pricing plan, more performance improvements, and more.\n\nThere were so many amazing community vals this month! Here are a few highlights: [Static Chess](https://www.val.town/v/maxm/staticChess), [Robin Sloan's book preorder email handler](https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/at-home-in-high-dimensional-space/#valtown), and [Cameron's homeless resources Custom GPT](https://www.val.town/v/cameronpak/homeless). See below for _sixty_ (!!) more awesome vals from the last month.\n\n### 🤗 Welcome Jackson & JP!\n\nWe're so excited to welcome Jackson and JP to the team!\n\n[Jackson](https://jxnblk.com/) was most recently an indie game designer, and before that a Staff Engineer at Gatsby. He's known for [styled-system](https://styled-system.com/), [theme-ui](https://theme-ui.com/), and [MDX Deck](https://mdxjs.com/). He's joining full-time as our founding design engineer.\n\n[JP](https://janpaulposma.nl/) was most recently uncovering ancient Roman secrets at [Vesuvius Challenge](https://scrollprize.org/), and before that founded [Zaplib](https://zaplib.com/) with Steve. He is joining part-time for the summer.\n\n### ⚡️ Vals are 2x faster!\n\nMax shipped [a huge performance improvement](https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions/113#discussioncomment-9203997) to the val runtime by cutting out a network hop on imports. Vals are at least 60% faster, and vals with many imports are many times faster. For example, the [Date Me Directory](https://dateme.directory) (one of the most complex vals) runs 6x faster now – half a second vs 3 seconds!\n\n### 🎨 Val Page Redesign\n\nTom [redesigned the val page](/redesigning-val-pages/), and then Jackson redesigned it again!\n\n

\n $\"Val$ \n

Before

\n $\"Val$ \n

After

\n\n### 📺 Livestreams\n\nSteve started a weekly live coding series. Tune into the next episodes:\n\n- [Max Bittker – May 30, 12pm ET](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QGjdDGEkyI)\n- [Linus Lee – June 6, 12pm ET](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nYPeK9_X6o)\n\n

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