Val Town Newsletter 14

Steve Krouse on

In the last two weeks, we launched Pull Requests, redesigned the Val Editor, shipped Github Copilot-like AI Suggestions, relaunched our docs and blog sites on Astro, and a bunch of smaller things.

Coming up soon is more polish, collaboration features, and custom domains. Hopefully early next year, we’re also going to be benchmarking & improving the runtime performance of Val Town v3 and updating the limits accordingly.

The community has made hundreds of really cool vals recently (links below), including through collaboration in the Discord recently. Come join us! 👋

Pull Requests

You can now send Pull Requests to vals! Below we demonstrate forking a val, adding a feature, submitting a PR, then switching accounts, and merging the PR.

Editor Redesign

We redesigned the Val Editor to make it clearer how to run all the different types of vals and view their logs. We are rolling out these changes over the next two weeks.

HTTP handler value showing configuration of the sent request

AI Suggestions

It’s like Github Copilot, but for Val Town!

It’s free for everyone in beta. We’ll follow up with pricing once we work out the kinks.

OSS Docs

We launched our new docs site on Astro Starlight and open-sourced it.

docs

Pull requests welcome! Huge shoutout to Xkonti who’s been contributing a ton of high-leverage PRs to our new docs and mattx for building out this fantastic guide to working with Google Sheets in Val Town 🤩

Misc Updates

  • Relaunched our and open-sourced our blog
  • Run in Val Town button on code in our docs 🙏 Xkonti
  • Make logs vertically resizable
  • Import Environment Variables from .env files
  • API updates: val names & privacy
  • Copy Deno.env.get("name") when you make a new env variable
  • Renamed “Secrets” to “Environment Variables” 🙏 Xkonti
  • Val Templates for common patterns: like importing from npm, env variables, JSX, emailing yourself, persistence, OpenAI…
  • Make comments in the editor a lighter color
  • Linkify @username/valname references in READMEs and comments
  • Improved onboarding survey questions
  • Annual survey
  • Fix URLPattern bug
  • Linkify val error stack traces
  • Better error messages on std/email
  • Fix evaluation viewing bug
  • Fix error notification bug

Roadmap

  • Notifications from comments on vals you don’t own but commented on
  • Custom domains
  • Editor redesigns
  • std/openai (like Blob, SQLite, and Email)
  • Improved AI suggestions
  • Requests for pull requests aka “Todos” (kinda like Github Issues)
  • Community feature request board
  • Public folders (aka Projects)
  • Dashboard
  • Company/Team account
  • Benchmark v3 runtime performance and update limits
  • Improved runtime performance

Cool vals

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