title: | Newsletter 25 |
---|---|
description: | Mutli-file vals, local development, new Townie, new Search, and much more |
pubDate: | 2025-06-03T00:00:00.000Z |
author: | Steve Krouse |
Val Town has gotten a lot more powerful.
Vals now support multiple files, folders, and branches. You can edit vals locally with your favorite editor via the vt
CLI. Townie, our AI coding assistant, uses Claude 4 Sonnet to agentically read and write your vals. We've been supporting companies using Val Town to automate workflows and build internal tools.
Our roadmap is packed with the powerful features you've been requesting: Team Accounts, SOC2, Logs & Traces API, OAuth, and much more.
As always, we save the best part of the newsletter for last: a collection of the best new vals from all of you in the community 🤩
We rebuilt vals from the ground-up to support multiple files and folders. Vals are now like GitHub repos – including branches and pull requests – but the code is instantly deployed, and scales as hosted web services. We rebuilt Townie, Search, and even this very blog you're reading right now as vals.
As show in this video above, vals now support:
- Multiple files & folders
- Branches, three-way merges, and pull requests
- Custom subdomains & email addresses
We rebuilt Townie from the ground-up around multi-file vals. It uses agentic tool-calling, powered by Claude 4 Sonnet, to read and write your code. It can even make test HTTP calls to see how things are working, and keep iterating from there.
Townie is available only for Val Town Pro users during a limited free preview. We are adding the ability to purchase credits.
Because Townie was built 100% open-source and in userspace, you can read the code, system prompts, and even remix & run it in your account. Pull requests welcome.
One of the biggest feature request for Val Town has always been to edit vals with your favorite editor. Now you can with the vt
CLI.
The vt watch
command brings the classic Val Town deploy-on-every-save experience to your favorite IDE. (Especially with the browser extension that automatically reloads your browser tab.) However, that doesn't mean you're deploying to production on every save. As shown in the video above, Val Town means you're always developing directly in your production environment, but you choose when to deploy directly on main
or in a branch preview that you can merge in when ready.
If you think Val Town is useful in your personal life, wait till you bring it to work! Our customers have saved hundreds of hours building custom tools like:
- GitHub x Slack Automations: Auto-assign PRs, enforce labels, streamline PR approvals, and surface GitHub issues in Slack.
- Hubspot Leads Deep Research: Generate AI deep research-powered reports on new HubSpot leads. Optionally convert them into audio feeds for on-the-go listening.
- Discord → Linear Tickets: React to messages with a designated emoji to instantly create a Linear ticket, with full context.
- Changelog Generator: Auto-generate changelogs from GitHub commits and share them in Discord for review before publishing.
We'd love to help you too! Our Val Town for Teams plan includes private VIP support on Slack Connect, hands-on help building custom workflows and onboarding your team, and higher limits across the board.
💌 Email charmaine@val.town to save your team hours every week.
We rebuilt Val Town Search for the multi-file vals. It's much faster and gives exact matches. (It runs on Val Town SQLite, and uses like
.) It searches across public val source code, usernames, and our docs.
Search was built 100% open-source & in userspace. With one-click, you can remix it to your account: it'll start reading from the public val firehose API, and index all public val code into your Val Town SQLite. If you want to make an improvement to search, or build something on top of that index, please do! The power of userspace 💪
We held our very first Val Town Hall!
We got a chance to share what we're building at Val Town, and see 9 lovely demos from the community. Everybody really pulled together to make it an action-packed hour. If you're curious to know what's going on in the town, this is a must-watch.
We scheduled the next Val Town Hall for June 25th, 12pm ET. Register here to participate or demo.
- Logs & Traces API (to power
vt tail
& Townie reading logs) - UI improvements branch & pull request flows
- UI improvements to Logs
- Deno LSP to dramatically improve the browser editing experience
- Townie credits & other improvements
- UI improvements to val version history
- Team Accounts
- "Login with Val Town" OAuth
- SOC2
- Ability to lock/protect a main branch
- Comments on vals (again, but better, ie on lines)
- Comments on pull requests
- Improve the discoverability of vals
- Binary file support in vals
- Infinite scale vals with usage-based pricing
- WebSocket vals
- UI & keyboard affordances to help you import from Val Town, npm, jsr
- Geoffrey Litt's Stevens went viral on HackerNews. It's a personal AI Assistant, you can read more about how he built it on his blog.
- Brad Noble made Val Town for Notion, a great demo accompanied by a post about using Val Town to unlock Notion’s full potential, and vice versa.
- Fiberplane made OpenTelemetryCollector, which receive traces and store it in SQLite.
- bgschiller made personalShopper, which turns any grocery list into a Kroger cart full of groceries.
- Moe made MiniAppStarter, a Hono + React + Tailwind + Farcaster Mini App Starter Project. This has taken off in the Farcaster community and we've been seeing lots of new mini apps! You can find other Farcaster starters directly on moe's profile.
- Smirfolio made petitPrince, a child-friendly article summarizer.
- tmcw made timeline, an online card game for 2+ players: draw historical‑event cards and race to slot them into the correct timeline.
- Wolf made FileDumpThing so you can easily share files and text snippets by pasting or uploading them and getting a URL in return. This is very handy for dropping gifs into val READMEs.
- Michael Schultz made eink-frame for information screens designed to be shown on an e-ink display.
- Wilhelm made ProtoRuns, which lets you track and store your physical runs on ATProto.
- Loading made url-project, a simple URL shortener application built on Val Town.
- c15r made ProtoShare, a secure backend system for iOS share sheet shortcuts.
- Cam Pak made voicemessages, a web app for recording, transcribing, and sharing voice notes with expiration controls.
- Salon made mandate, a val that helps you set up AI agents through a registry and workflow definitions.
- Wolf made Electric, a lightweight static site hosting system built on Hono RPC and Val Town blob store, with a simple CLI.
- supagroova made LiveStormMCP, a val that is hosting a Livestorm MCP server.
- Malcolm Ocean made FlexCal, a flexible Google Calendar alternative interface that syncs 2 way with Google Calendar via OAuth.
- Max made esm, a fast content-type friendly proxy for esm.town.
- Alex Wein made gordwame, a word game.
- nucky made book-lookup-notion, which uses the Google Book API to look up bibliographic metadata elements. The val thumnail is a great gif.
- chadparker made endpoints for interacting with Notion DB.
- artivilla made fren, an app for browsing, searching, and copying AI prompts, similar to ray.so/prompts/browser.
- probablycorey (who started Atom and Electron at GitHub!) made mini-remix, which lets you write server side and client side react code in the same file and render it to a val.
- ije made mono-jsx, mono-jsx just works on Val Town!
- boucher made vt-discord, which stores your chats and shared links on a private server, and lets Claude AI search and analyze them.
- dcm31 made logoWorkshopOpenMoji, an SDK to generate logos directly in code.
- Wolf made NPLLM, a clone of the npm website with search functionality, package detail pages, and the ability to download npm packages as tar files.
- dcm31 made demoCamera, a floating webcam component that you can easily add to any val.
- prashamtrivedi made promptfixer, a prompt fixing service with form and email processing.
- elouan made oceaniverse, a pondiverse store.
- bradley made litebrite, a little web‑app version of the classic Lite‑Brite toy.
- Steve Krouse made live-reload, middleware for live-reloading HTTP vals during development. (We use it to edit this blog!)
- gwoods22 made cp24-digest, a val that manages CP24 email alerts by recieving them, storing them in a blob, and displaying them here.
- Nico Baier made thirdTimer, a web app implementing the "Third Time" productivity method. neverstew remixed it with visual displays.
- pomdtr made tinyfeed, which generate a static HTML page from a collection of feeds.
- thirdsouth made Mercury, which connects Mercury's Bank API to Slack so you can check account balance, view recent transactions, get notifications etc directly in Slack.
- cmknz made maine-bills-tax, which summarizes all of the current pending bills that could impact taxes in the State of Maine.
- kamalnrf made MailGoat, which automatically organizes your emails with custom labels.
- Wolf made instagramScraping, which extracts image and caption data from Instagram posts.
- colingourlay made supernote-crosswords, which uploads daily crosswords to your Supernote.
- humbl made figma-variables-manager, a Figma plugin that syncs variables from external sources like Notion and Coda.
- dcm31 made build.moi, a social showcase for your Val Town vals, like TikTok but Val Town! (YouTube demo)
- yakuzadave made notionWidgets, a way to be able to host your own Notion Widgets using Val Town.
- jpchip made GlobalEntryAppointmentChecker, which emails you when global entry appointments are available.
- nucky made notion-2-bluesky, which lets you auto-schedule Bluesky posts from a Notion DB.
- Llad made Gardenon, to help map your garden and track information about each plant.
- Steve Krouse made profile-pics, a Val Town Profile Pic Proxy.
- stu43005 made hololiveAnniversaryIcs, for tracking anniversary dates for Hololive (a virtual YouTuber agency).
- jamiedubs made twitterCompetitorMonitoring to track tweets mentioning competitor URLs and visualizes the data in charts.
- We at Val Town made door for Val Town office guests to open the door through their phone, like this!
- Joey Hiller made ValTown-Package-Tracker to track a package of sensors he was sending from Oakland to us in Downtown Brooklyn!
- dinavinter made slack, a Slack bot that uses OpenAI to generate responses.
- prashamtrivedi made hn-remote-ts-genai-jobs, to track Hacker News' Who's Hiring filter for remote TypeScript + GenAI-related jobs.
- dcm31 made rotrank, an ELO ranking system for popular Italian Brainrot characters.
- tmcw made bluesky-thinkup-tribute, so you can know when people you follow update their descriptions on Bluesky.
- Alex Brinsmead made autonomous-val, a demo on how to build autonomous agents on Val Town that can be triggered by API calls, cron jobs, etc.
- pomdtr made extract-feeds to extract RSS feeds from an HTML page.
- curtcox made wwtdotcom, a proxy for wwt.com that rewrites all links to stay within the proxy and injects a help widget on every page.
- ashryanio made halpk, which fetches the RSS feed from Astoria Tech's Subcurrent blog and displays a random blog post each time the page is loaded. He also made subcurrentShuffle with Townie in 15 minutes at that same meetup!
- Cam Pak made groq-api, a simple API using the AI SDK and Groq.
- mgmarlow made aposd-red-flags, a simple flashcard app to help learn about common software design red flags from the book A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout.
- JJG made blockbench-plugin, which fetches JavaScript or TypeScript files from GitHub repositories or Gists and serves them with the proper content type headers.
- Steve Krouse made luciaMagicLinkStarter to roll-your-own auth & magic link login using Lucia.
- Max made sqlitelogs, a logging system that stores logs in SQLite with a web interface and search functionality.
- orjpap made a blog analytics system using Val Town's SQLite to track visitors and page views.
- Payton made Privy Pay, a tap to pay experience with Farcaster mini apps using NFC technology.
- yawnxyz made andp, a demo of embedding Observable in Val Town.
- neverstew made voweltown, an interactive website to explore vowels across different languages.