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This is a newsletter about the goings-on in Val Town. I'm Pete, and I joined the team this year, partly to write things like this (and that, and this, and that). Steve used to write these newsletters when I read them as a Val Town user, and I know it's nice to hear from the founder. Sorry I'm not Steve! Please do still reply with your thoughts and feedback, though—what you like reading about, what you wish Val Town would support, what vals you've built or want to build, et cetera. We'll reply!

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Our last newsletter, #25, was delivered in summer of 2025 when Townie was a val in user-space and "vibe coding" was only a few months old. Since then: the Val Town MCP server and vt CLI launched, so you can work on vals wherever you get your LLMs; Townie was reborn in product-space; every val gets its own SQLite database; our TypeScript editor is faster and better; we launched Teams so that you can bring Val Town to work; and much more.

Also: we're having a party this Thursday, March 12th, at our office in downtown Brooklyn. Come say hello!

There are three primary ways to ✨ do AI ✨ in Val Town:

1. Townie
2. MCP + your favorite LLM
3. vt CLI + your favorite LLM

Before I talk about Townie, let me just say: Townie is quite good, but we encourage you to bring Val Town to whatever coding tool you prefer (claude code, codex, cursor, et al—it's up to you). Townie and MCP are a step above the CLI because they have better access to val primitives, but regardless of your weapon of choice, you get Val Town's core loop: edit code → 100ms deploy → live URL.

Ok, without further adieu: Townie is Val Town's code robot, now back in town next to your code editor. Townie uses the Claude 4.6 family and the Val Town MCP server under the hood. The MCP server can do a whole lot: create, edit, and run vals; read your SQLite, blob, and log data; configure cron, http, and email; read and write environment variables; view history and switch branches; and more. Here we ask Townie to one-shot a "Val Town Square" messaging forum.

Video at 1x speed to offer a realistic sense of Townie. Song credit: Good Time Oldies by Bosley.

As of January, every val gets its own SQLite database. Before that, you got one global database for your org or personal account (and you still do), but now it's a whole lot easier to manage your data. There's also a new SQL admin dashboard for poking around your val's data.

If you've already been using the admin UI, you'll notice some new features this month: now you can create tables and add records with a GUI, and if you're writing SQL by hand (or pasting from an LLM), your query will be saved as you navigate between table, docs, and query views.

Personally, I'm very excited about this one. Previously my vals used the same shared database for newsletter subscriber lists, wiki submissions, and whatever other data I stored. Now each val's data lives sensibly in its own silo, and the query interface lowers the friction to quickly explore data.

Also, coming soon: val-scoped blob storage.

The TypeScript code editor in Val Town now runs Deno's official Language Server for faster and more accurate type information. The CodeMirror language server and full server+client+proxy Val Town LSP are open source, and Wolf wrote a great blog post about it if you're curious to learn how it works.

Teams launched last year so that you can bring Val Town to work. Teams comes with features for your organization like environment variable groups, val-scoped API tokens, val-scoped OAuth connections, blob management, custom domains, val ownership transfers, member management and invites, public profiles, version control/history/branching, and more. Companies like Kilo Code, Preston-Werner Ventures, and Turso are collaborating on customer support agents, deal pipelines, customer leads, and the like.

With the explosion of agents in 2026, we're noticing Teams customers beyond the eng team editing vals. One customer noted that Val Town is a perfect platform for engineers and business people to collaborate because the biz team can easily update prompts and see changes deployed immediately without waiting on engineers, and the eng team can customize the code to their liking.

Here's an unordered, incomplete list of other new features in Val Town:

• Pin vals to your profile page
• Change your account handle up to 5 times
• Connect to Slack or Google from a val
• .json, .css, and .txt files supported as val files
• Download vals as ZIP files
• Download val files individually
• Export environment variables as .env file
• Copy environment variables when you remix your own val
• 3x faster SQLite, average latency down from 35ms to 10ms (thanks Turso)
• New onboarding steps for org setup
• Val READMEs support Mermaid diagrams
• Docs guide for adding auth to your val
• Docs guide for building a Slack agent
• Go to definition for any symbol in your code
• DenoLS resolves and type-checks imported private vals and modules
• Search and replace in branches
• Search results link to source line
• Better code search (cmd+k)
• cmd+s saves globally (not just when the editor is focused)
• cmd+shift+f maps to project search
• Live HTTP preview pane floating in or alongside the editor
• Markdown preview pane alongside the editor (cmd+return)
• Full-page Logs view for a val
• Render multi-line logs
• Linkify stack traces in logs
• Query val logs via API /v1/logs
• API endpoints for managing environment variables
• Browser-based device auth for vt CLI
• Manage OAuth client connections in Settings
• Include merge commits, PR links, and Townie edits in val History
• View diffs between val versions from History
• View Townie chat history in Settings
• Townie model picker to choose between Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus
• Show Townie diff view before approving/denying edits
• Let Townie run vals
• Townie's "4 C's": commands for /cost, /compact, /context, /clear
• As an aside^, why do so many AI things start with C? Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, context...
• Attach images to Townie chat
• Fullscreen Townie mode (new!)

If you live in or around NYC, swing by our headquarters this week! We're having a party at the Val Town office in downtown Brooklyn on Thursday.

Speaking of community hangouts, last summer we had a Val Town Hall where we opened up the floor to community members demo'ing vals they'd made (for business or pleasure) and talked about our roadmap. This spring, we're bringing it back (date TBD).

Reply (1) if you're interested in presenting or attending, and/or (2) if you have requests or ideas about what should be on the meeting agenda.

My favorite part of the old newsletter was the community vals section, which you'll now find in Talk of the Town. In February we highlighted:

• vals in the atmosphere (read: atproto/Bluesky)
• a Valentine's val (dubbed "Valentown" in one email reply)
• a literal laundry val
• a Helium Hotspot val
• a moon phase val
• and dozens of other neat vals you all wrote

Share your vals in our Discord #showcase or on Bsky/X/HN/etc to be included in the upcoming March issue.