Val Town Blog
blog.val.town · Company blog · on HN since 2023
The Val Town team writes about building their TypeScript code hosting platform, covering runtimes, editor design, migrations and engineering decisions.
What HN saysCommenters praise its honest writing on long-term engineering decisions, especially the Supabase migration post, and also bring up its job posting.
26HN people shared it
4linked it in comments
69stories submitted
1.9Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2023people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1The first four Val Town runtimes5 people · 13 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 2Migrating from Supabase4 people · 9 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 3Building a better online editor for TypeScript3 people · 67 points · first shared 2025 · 12 comments on HN
- 4Vibe code is legacy code2 people · 758 points · first shared 2025 · 454 comments on HN
- 5Val Town's Seed Round2 people · 7 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 6Moving from Express to Fastify2 people · 6 points · first shared 2024 · 2 comments on HN
- 7How to keep package.json under control2 people · 5 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 8Restricted Library Mode (Breaking change to Val Town)2 people · 5 points · first shared 2023 · 1 comments on HN
- 9Zod is amazing. Here's why we're also using TypeBox2 people · 3 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 10Ethical Cold Outreach2 people · 2 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 11Redesigning the Val Town Editor2 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 12The API we forgot to name2 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 13Code search is hard1 people · 302 points · first shared 2024 · 159 comments on HN
- 14What we learned copying all the best code assistants1 people · 276 points · first shared 2025 · 82 comments on HN
- 15How we built Townie – an app that generates fullstack apps1 people · 175 points · first shared 2024 · 33 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
apitman · 2024-11-07
BunnySDK.net.http.serve(async (request: Request): Response | Promise<Response> => { return new Response("Hello World"); }); I love that pretty much all the JS runtimes have settled on `(Request): Response`[0], but I really wish they would standardize starting the server as well. Would make writing cross-runtime services easier.
[0]: https://blog.val.town/blog/the-api-we-forgot-to-name/
stevekrouse · 2024-05-01
Val Town | Founding Engineers | ONSITE (Brooklyn) | Full-time | $150k & 0.5-2% equity
We believe everybody should be able to code. Our product is as if Github Gists could run or AWS Lambda were fun. On Val Town, you can write, collaborate, and deploy code. Users make websites, HTTP endoints, crons, and email handlers. Our userbase is small but passionate, and growing quickly.
We just raised $5.5m from Accel, Tom Preston-Werner, Guillermo Rauch, and a bunch of other amazing angels. The dream is to hire 2-3 incredibly talented senior folks here in Brooklyn over the next 6 months. We have hard and interesting engineering, design and infra challenges to solve. We are a small team (currently 4) that take pride in our craft, think deeply, and ship often.
Website: https://val.town
Funding announcement: https://blog.val.town/blog/seed/
Job postings: https://val.town/careers
joarxpablo · 2026-08-15
I agree that this is a crisis for FLOSS, and for the copyleft technique in particular. But in my mind projects always have some level of human contribution, and those contributions will still be copyrightable. A company copying a FLOSS project would thus have to meticulously use only parts written 100% by LLMs. Vibe coding is a spectrum (https://blog.val.town/vibe-code) and as long as you are not on the extreme end of this spectrum (and I do not believe that is a sustainable way to develop large software projects) there will always be some human input that has to be worked around; and copying is then tantamount to rewriting or refactoring the program from scratch.
wxw · 2026-05-06
I enjoyed the Supabase migration article from a while ago (https://blog.val.town/blog/migrating-from-supabase) as well. There's a shortage of good, honest writing on long-term engineering decisions, please keep up the blog!