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Talk of the Town is a monthly series where we highlight neat vals in userspace and conversation among the Val Town community.

Here, we mean call as in "call your mother" more so than "call the API." Or really, both. Justin Uberti updated his hello-realtime val to demo OpenAI's new gpt-realtime-1.5 model. The val is live at hello-realtime.val.run and 425-800-0042, so you can literally call the val.

Inspired by Justin's demo, we bought a phone number: 304-VAL-TOWN. The area code is West Virginia, where Jackson on our team is from, and I guess also represents HTTP 304 Not Modified (there weren't any better status codes available). We'd love to own 1-800-VAL-TOWN, but we still aren't sure what we want to do with a phone number. Should it be a traditional customer support line? Or Townie? A way to actually "call" your vals? (Like a phone trigger, the way we have HTTP, cron, and email triggers now.) Steve wants an AI receptionist that sends customer calls right through to him unless he's already in a meeting. If you have ideas, no matter how outlandish, reply!

Paul Kinlan created a personal assistant email-agent val using Val Town email and SQLite, Deno sandboxes, and the Claude Agent SDK. The agent can remember things, do research and answer questions, schedule tasks and reminders, run code, et cetera. The agent works for Paul, but it could also work for you—open up memory-do.val.run to test it out.

Speaking of agents, we built duck, a simple Slack agent in Val Town using the Vercel AI SDK. Duck is meant to be a starting point for you to remix and customize with your own tools and instructions. It's part of the broader Bring Your Own Agent (BYOA) pattern we've written about. For example, you could hook up a Slack agent to the Val Town MCP server (basically Townie in Slack) to create, edit, and run vals from Slack, read your SQLite data, and quite a lot more.

If you preferred the old days when there was a new frontend framework every week instead of a new AI agent every day, this is for you. Steve is working on vtrr, a Val Town React Router framework with SSR and client-side hydration and navigation. See the hello-world example demonstrating its core features. The problem to solve here is that Val Town works quite well for 100% SSR'd apps (e.g. using Hono), but when you need any client-side JavaScript the sensible choice has been to go 100% client-side (e.g. with React). We've been missing a nice middle ground. If you have expertise in frontend frameworks, reply with suggestions on how to improve vtrr.

Setting up API keys is often the major bottleneck that slows down the Time To Aha metric when you try a new devtool. Steve wrote a hopeful blog post about the x402 protocol obsoleting API keys and a companion x402-playground val. If it pans out, it could be like Apple Pay for APIs, moving you through the subway turnstile without ever stopping at the ticket machine.

For our party at the Val Town office a couple weeks ago, we dusted off our door buzzer val to let partygoers buzz themselves upstairs. Thanks to everyone who came out, it was a great turnout! And if you missed it, keep an eye out for our next event this spring, likely a Val Town Hall to demo vals like the ones in this very blog post. Reply if you have a val you'd like to demo, and we'll get your name on the list.

As covered last month, some developers in the atproto space (colloquially, "the Atmosphere") have taken an interest in Val Town. Tom from our team wrote about the AT Protocol, made an atproto-login val, and will be at ATmosphereConf in Vancouver this weekend. Say hello if you'll be there!

As always, there are many more vals worth highlighting, more than we have above and below. Do send us yours to be included in next months Talk. To round us out:

• Paul Kinlan wrote a colourful-scrollbar val using the new(ish) CSS @property rule (Baseline as of 2024) and scroll-driven animations, which you can play with at colourful-scrollbar.val.run
• Paul also made an esper val (demo) that uses WebSpeechRecognition and Gemini models to enhance images, as an homage to Blade Runner's Esper machine
• Drew McDonald made a dc-water-filter val that emails you if there's a DC water emergency in your configured home radius
• Peter Liu wrote an importLatest utility val that grabs the latest version of an imported dependency val, bypassing the cache. This is a nice DX improvement when you're actively updating both a val and its dependencies. Thanks to Peter for opening a pull request to add this to the upstream std/utils library!
• Peter also made PineconeIndex, an interface for Pinecone vector databases using OpenAI embeddings to vectorize and search
• Raymond Cameron wrote about Using Val Town to Get Me to the Movies.
• Steve made a TypeScript microgpt in Val Town, based on Andrej Karpathy's python microGPT
• Pete made a copy-sqlite-table val to copy your account-scoped sqlite databases to a specific val (because now every val gets its own database). Then Nico remixed it to make an even better migrate-sqlite val that fully migrates tables, views, indexes, and triggers from account- to val-scoped databases
• CapMan made an ikon-snow-alert val to monitor fresh powder
• Curt Cox built a cors-audit val that checks the CORS policy of various APIs, live on cors-audit.val.run
• Paul Chin Jr. created guess-that-hype, a "millennial-core quiz about recycled tech hype" - I scored a 3/8, very Gen Z of me
• Paul also made devfest26-raffle, a colorful raffle website for the NorfolkJS meetup