blog

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

• joy,
• immediacy, and
• code.

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. Like how Matz designed Ruby to make programmers happy.

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

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. Creators need an immediate connection to what they create. 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 immediately. Programming in Val Town should feel like 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. 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 endlessly powerful.

...

We build tools that realize those core bets.