Top all-time · #2690
Val Town Blog
Company blog · blog.val.townprogrammingai
Val Town Blog is the company blog at blog.val.town, writing about programming and ai. Since 2023, 28 different Hacker News readers have linked it 82 times, most often “The first four Val Town runtimes”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-16, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Val Town's blog posts cover JavaScript runtime APIs such as the Request/Response handler pattern and streams, plus engineering migrations and vibe coding. HN readers link them as references for these topics.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Updates and articles from the Val Town team
Most-linked posts?
- The first four Val Town runtimes5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-02-08
- Building a better online editor for TypeScript3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-09-09
- Moving from Express to Fastify2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-07-02
- How to keep package.json under control2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-09-11
- Migrating from Supabase to Render (2023)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-05-06
- Restricted Library Mode (Breaking change to Val Town)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-05-04
- Improving the Val Editor2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-12-11
- Connecting every app to every other app2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-09-02
- Migrating from Supabase2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-05-19
- Val Town's Seed Round2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-04-09
What Hacker News says?
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 Pre…
Comment linking /blog/seed/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2024)”Submitted Vibe code is legacy code as a story · 758 points
HN discussionThis post is the latest in a series about Townie, our AI assistant. Our first had a nice discussion on HN: https://blog.val.town/blog/codegen/ The other posts in the series: - https://blog.val.town/blog/townie/ - https://blog.val.town/blog/building-a-code-writing-robot/
Comment linking /blog/building-a-code-writing-robot/
on “What we learned copying all the best code assistants”Submitted Code search is hard as a story · 302 points
HN discussionBunnySDK.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/
Comment linking /blog/the-api-we-forgot-to-name/
on “Edge Scripting: Build and run applications at the edge”Submitted What we learned copying all the best code assistants as a story · 276 points
HN discussionYou need to use them for things like Cloudflare and Denos HTTP servers, which is actually a fairly common (and nice) pattern: https://blog.val.town/blog/the-api-we-forgot-to-name/
Comment linking /blog/the-api-we-forgot-to-name/
on “We deserve a better streams API for JavaScript”Submitted How we built Townie – an app that generates fullstack apps as a story · 175 points
HN discussionI 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!
Comment linking /blog/migrating-from-supabase
on “From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth”Submitted Why is spawning a new process in Node so slow? as a story · 95 points
HN discussionI 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 en…
Comment linking /vibe-code
on “Being Against LLMs Is Against the Spirit of Floss”Submitted Building a better online editor for TypeScript as a story · 61 points
HN discussionGreat question! Andrew Healey wrote a great blog post about sandboxing, particularly related to us: https://healeycodes.com/sandboxing-javascript-code And we recently launched more secure semantics: https://blog.val.town/blog/restricted-library-mode But in the general case, it's a hard, never-ending cat-and-mouse game, particularly with free and unauthenticated use. We will eventually probably need to restrict use s…
Comment linking /blog/restricted-library-mode
on “Show HN: HN Follow – Follow Your Friends on HN”Submitted Connecting every app to every other app as a story · 52 points
HN discussionSubmitted Joining the Open Source Pledge as a story · 31 points
HN discussionSubmitted A docs page is a search query to find AI agents and route them to your company as a story · 27 points
HN discussionSubmitted Show HN: Val Town Projects as a story · 25 points
HN discussionSubmitted From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSubmitted Val Town's Seed Round as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSubmitted The perks of a good OpenAPI spec as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Val Town for Glitch Users as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Moving from Express to Fastify as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Restricted Library Mode (Breaking change to Val Town) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Val Town MCP as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Building a better online editor for TypeScript as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted We Built an API for Clay as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Val Town Town - Can we build Val Town on Val Town? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted The first four Val Town runtimes as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Migrating from Supabase as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Scammers, exit nodes, and my part-time job fighting abuse as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
