Val Town Newsletter 21

Steve Krouse on

Townie, our AI code assistant, got huge upgrades this month. We fixed a dozen bugs and shipped many of your feature requests. We also made big strides in HTTP val performance, are deprecating some old APIs, and made a number of other upgrades and fixes, detailed below.

You all created hundreds of awesome vals last month! Our favorite 50 are featured at the bottom of this newsletter.

🤖 Townie upgrades

Townie can blow-your-mind and it can make you tear your hair out. We’re working hard to make it more of the former and less of the latter. Here’s some of the improvements we’ve made:

  • Townie can create & edit any kind of val (not just HTTP vals)
  • You can upload images to Townie to help it understand your request
  • You can view requests and logs from within Townie
  • We made it easier to revert to past versions (more improvements incoming)
  • Townie can detect and fix syntax errors and client-side errors
  • Tom fundamentally re-architected to be less buggy
  • Jackson setup a suite of evals to improve Townie’s accuracy
  • Townie diffs are copyable without the + and - characters
  • Diffs are off by default. You can request them explicitly
  • Townie doesn’t overwrite your hand-written code as often
  • Townie has a docs page with tips & tricks

Please continue to reach out when Townie does something amazing or awful. Your feedback is invaluable. And as some of you know, I (Steve) am always happy to jump on a call or try to fix bugs for you. I’m steve@val.town.

⚡️ Fast Vals

Vals continue to get faster and more scalable. Now a ‘hello world’ val responds in about 50ms, which is comparable to other cloud providers. Our servers are in Ohio and we’re testing here in New York, so your mileage may vary if you live further from Ohio.

Deprecating old APIs

We are deprecating a number of old APIs that are no longer in use:

  • Express vals – discontinued on 10/7/2024
  • Old HTTP runtime – migrating on 10/20/2024 (how to upgrade)
  • Eval API – discontinuing on 11/1/2024

These changes effect less than 1% of our users. If you’re effected, you will receive an email with more information on how to upgrade.

The exciting part about deprecations is that it means we’ll be able to ship faster because we won’t be maintaining old code that almost nobody is using. Max rebuilding our code-running infrastructure to even faster and more scalable, and not having to support these old APIs will make his job a lot easier.

Prettier errors

HTTP vals now have prettier errors. They sometimes have stack traces and link to the relevant source. (We’re working improving the stack traces & links.)

Pretty error message HTML page with stack trace

Videos

Videos are a great way to learn the pro tips & tricks for Val Town.

I did two livestreams with wonderful guests:

And a handful of other videos:

🎉 Other updates

  • The Val Town team now gets woken up for downtime (PagerDuty) 🚨
  • AI bots are blocked from HTTP vals
  • Updated Deno types
  • Fixed a renaming bug – thanks Robin Sloan for the report 🙏
  • Fixed logs and errors with new HTTP runtime
  • Removed pinned vals UI cruft
  • Changed the order of logs (newest at the bottom)
  • Disabled autofill on env variables – thanks Matthew Bunday for the suggestion 🙏
  • Improved our list of adjectives for new val names
  • Made POST v1/vals/id a no-op if no changed – thanks Andres Rodriguez for the request 🙏

🛣️ Roadmap

The main projects over the next couple months are:

  • Discontinuing the old HTTP runtime and Eval API
  • Continued Townie AI improvements
  • Fine-grained API Token Scopes
  • Val Projects (to manage complex multi-val collections)
  • Townie writing READMEs
  • New val runtime architecture for faster & more scalable vals

Please make feature requests and vote on what you’d like to see next.

🌟 Community vals

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