blog

Val Town is built on core bets that we think won't change in 10 years. We care about

• immediacy,
• code, and
• joy.

Coding on Val Town grants you immediacy. Here's Bret Victor in his famous “Inventing on Principle” talk (emphasis mine):

I've spent a lot of time over the years making creative tools, using creative tools, thinking about them a lot, and here's something I've come to believe: Creators need an immediate connection to what they're creating. That's my principle...And what I mean by that is when you're making something, if you make a change, or you make a decision, you need to see the effect of that immediately. There can't be a delay, and there can't be anything hidden. Creators have to be able to see what they're doing.

We often refer to immediacy as "tight feedback loops". You save your code, it automatically deploys in 100ms, and you see the live URL (or email, sqlite record, etc.) immediately. Programming in Val Town should feel like playing a musical instrument, throwing clay, or editing a spreadsheet, where you hit enter and everything recomputes instantly.

We think that the code itself still matters and that you should understand it. That is to say, Val Town is code-first. This may be somewhat contrarian these days with the industry's embrace of vibe coding and agents working for you while you cook dinner, do laundry, and sleep. Vibe coding has its place, but remember: vibe code is legacy code, which means it's great for low-stakes code and code you don't have to maintain but not good for your enduring, important code.

When we wrote about copying all the best code assistants a year ago, the top Hacker News comment by ajhit406 posed the question of who Val Town is for:

One consideration not mentioned is around developer sophistication. Steve alludes to the expansion effect of CodeGen ("there are millions and maybe billions who are jumping at the chance to code"), but doesn't consider that the vast majority of these people don't know about arrays, data structures, memory, containers, runtimes, etc, etc...To me, that's the most important consideration here. Are you targeting professional devs who are enhancing their current workflows iteratively with these improvements? Or re-thinking from the ground up, obfuscating most of what we've learned to date?

It's the right question, and the answer has two parts:

1. Our moonshot mission is end-user programming. That's for the "millions and maybe billions" who should have full power to shape their software like programmers do today. But we're not starting with that...
2. For now, we are working toward end-programmer programming. That means "targeting professional devs who are enhancing their current workflows iteratively," to use ajhit406's words exactly

Embracing code-first gives you the programmer full power—complete flexibility over what you're building. But it should not mean a high learning curve or complexity. Spreadsheets are simple enough that a beginner can create something useful (say, a budget) within an hour, yet powerful enough that experts can create endlessly sophisticated models over hundreds of hours. Like spreadsheets, coding in Val Town should be simple and joyful, yet limitless.

Joy is the most important to me. Programming is, and should be, incredibly fun. This is why we build Val Town: to spread the joy of programming.

Programming is fun in the way that board games and baseball scorekeeping are fun. We choose to learn the rules of Catan huddled around a coffee table with friends on Friday night. Baseball is full of formal language: catchers signaling to pitchers, coaches signaling to runners and batters, fans and statisticians keeping scorecards, middle schoolers obsessing over fantasy baseball. In A Small Matter of Programming, Bonnie Nardi writes about the fun in formal systems like baseball and board games:

In addition to being useful, formal systems have an appeal all their own; people naturally gravitate to them. Games are perhaps the clearest example of the way we spontaneously engage in interaction with formal systems.

Eurogames like Catan, card games like Bridge, and strategy games like chess require learning a non-trivial set of rules, and yet they are wildly popular—they are joyful.