Val Town Newsletter 19

Steve Krouse on

In the last month, we shipped a full-screen val Editor, a new 5x faster HTTP val runtime, a Dashboard for your account, a new Search experience, a redesign for our AI bot Townie and the ability to use tools, a new Trending leaderboard, User Profile filters and sorts, and a bunch of other improvements and bug fixes.

We’ve also been on a blogging spree: Moving from Express to Fastify, Here’s why we’re also using TypeBox, and Why spawning a new process in Node is so slow?.

On the livestream, I coded with Mary Rose Cook on concert ticket alerts, Sahil Lavingia on a stock buyback form, and Peter van Hardenberg on a Automerge change notifier.

↔️ Full-screen editor

At long last, you can edit your vals in full-screen. This new editor also features a classic left-sidebars with all your vals and folders. Thanks bcjordan and hunter for the feature requests 🙏

Try it out: val.town/editor

Demo of the new editor for @jxnblk

One of my favorite features is the ability to multi-select vals (shift-click) and drag them into folders to clean up your workspace.

⚡️ 5x Faster HTTP vals at scale

We built a new runtime for HTTP vals that is much faster at scale by re-using existing Deno processes. We’ve seen up to a 5x speedup for some vals. Try it out by selecting HTTP (Preview) for your val’s type. Learn more in our announcement post.

📊 Dashboard

We built a Dashboard to help you more quickly navigate your vals and see what’s happening in Val Town. Thanks nbbaier for the feature request 🙏

You can access your dashboard today at val.town/dashboard.

Demo of the new dashboard for @stevekrouse

🔎 Val Search

Search results are now powered by exact matching, exact phrase matching, and “vibes-based” vector search. We sort results in part by indicators of that val’s quality, ie how many times it’s been forked or liked. You can filter results by val type and by whether the val was created by you or not.

Try some searches: anthropic | openai | substrate | embeddings | react client side

Search results for 'vercel ai sdk'

🤖 Townie redesign & tool-use

Townie has a new look! It can also use the entire Val Town API for you. This means you can ask Townie to list, create, update, and delete not only vals but also blobs and sqlite data – it can run anything in our new API. Townie automatically performs GET requests and asks you to confirm before running any mutative action.

In the following demo video, you’ll notice a couple times Townie didn’t do exactly what I wanted, but we were able to work around it by doing it ourselves or asking it again. Townie is still a work in progress, but it’s a lot of fun to play with.

🦾 VALL-E Demo

LLM code generation is so exciting right now that we weren’t able to limit ourselves to just Townie. We built a prototype inspired by Anthropic Projects called VALL-E that’s great at writing vals for you. We built another prototype, VALL-E Draw, which embeds it in TLDraw! Both were built entirely in vals – so you can fork and tweak em!

The video below demos how to create multiple apps simultaneously with VALL-E Draw: a Hacker News clone with a real backend and a simple hello world example app with craazzzy styles. Here’s two demos of the original VALL-E.

🔥 Trending

Collect likes, forks, and references to gain fame and fortune – well at least fame – on the new and improved Val Town trending leaderboard. The new trending has a fresh look and much more useful rankings.

Check it out: val.town/trending

Trending screenshot of the top 7 vals as of July 22, 2024 at 4:08pm ET

❤️ Profile filters and sorts

Profile pages now have filters and sorts to help you find the vals you’re looking for. You can filter by val type and sort by date created, date updated, likes, and alphabetically.

Try it out on some power users’ profiles: pomdtr | iamseeley | nbbaier | substrate | yawnxyx

🎉 Other updates

  • Cancel a running val. Thanks Dan Shipper, Matt McClure, and Jan Zheng for requesting this feature 🙏
  • Added a refresh button on the http preview iframe
  • Fixed links to errors in stacktraces
  • Upgraded the README editor to CodeMirror
  • Upgraded OpenAI in the standard library to gpt-4o-mini for free users (up from gpt-3.5)
  • Support updating val types through the API
  • Cleaned up Val Town SDK
  • Rewrote our Saving data from a web page guide. Thanks mharris717 for the request
  • Automatically generate the new Val Town SDK when our API changes
  • Val Town took stewardship of val-town-playground and val-town-vscode from the amazing pomdtr

🛣️ Roadmap

💪 What we’re working on

Next month we focusing on onboarding, polish, performance, reliability, and hiring – join us!

🔜 Coming soon

Here’s some of the top features we’re planning to work in the coming months. Please make feature requests and vote on what you’d like to see next.

🌟 Community Vals

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