blog

On Val Town, you can deploy TypeScript apps in milliseconds. And now, with the Val Town MCP server, you can do that from Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, VSCode, or wherever you do your AI coding. Try it!

If you've been following my tweets ("I've gotta rant about LLMs, MCP, and tool-calling for a second", "MCP is overhyped", etc.) you might be surprised by this announcement. But we think MCP is the right AI form factor for Val Town to meet developers where they are (for now). In Cursor or Claude Code or Zed or wherever.

We have guides for some of the popular LLMs—Claude Code, ChatGPT, Claude Web/Desktop—but it should work with any MCP client. If you'd like a hand with setup, ask in our discord server or send us an email.

MCP is not perfect (again, see tweets), and the whip lash from AI tooling is real, but MCP has a few things going for it:

1. Meet developers where they are
2. Write once, integrate everywhere (+ bet on open standards)
3. Ship faster

Instead of fast-following all the best AI coding assistants with Townie (more on that in a bit), Val Town MCP can be used with the latest and greatest LLM of your choosing. Users are happier, and it ends the whack-a-mole implementation game.

MCP allows us to ship faster: whereas traditional APIs require careful version control for backward compatibility to prevent breaking changes, an MCP spec can change continuously because LLMs read the spec and run inference at runtime.

Before MCP, the happy path of Val Town + AI ran through the vt CLI. You'd run vt watch then fire up Claude Code to have your local edits synced instantly on Val Town. Before that, it was Townie, an open source app builder like Bolt or Lovable but with Val Town's underlying infrastructure for instant deploys, apis, crons, email, sqlite, etc. So:

1. Townie
2. vt CLI
3. MCP

The common thread running through all of these implementations is that with Val Town what you and your LLM are coding is live immediately. It's the idea from Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle talk, that "Creators need an immediate connection to what they're creating...when you're making something, if you make a change, or you make a decision, you need to see the effect of that immediately." When you—or your LLM—makes an edit, your code is deployed on Val Town immediately. That means your website/api/script/whatever is alive as you (and your LLM) create it.

Val Town's most loyal users (Townies? No, right, that's taken) have been beta testing MCP, and now it's ready for prime time. Bring it to your favorite LLM and let us know what you think.