{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "description": "I/O with a val in the middle",
  "path": "/in-val-out",
  "publishedAt": "2025-10-02T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:a2rdzfdxkjwerrfrpbwcipb2/site.standard.publication/3jd443afc2222",
  "textContent": "One of the most common patterns in Val Town is to take data input from some\nexternal source, do something useful with that data, and send output to another\nexternal source.\n\n\n\nI/O but with a val in the middle: I/V/O. In, val, out.\n\nNew user Slack alert\n\nThe canonical example is a user signup alert in Slack:\n\n1. Receive a webhook when a user signs up (e.g., from\n   Supabase)\n2. (Optionally) process or enrich user data in your val (e.g., with\n   Clay)\n3. Notify your team on\n   Slack\n\n\n\nRemix this val to your\nliking. Maybe you use in-house auth or another provider like Auth0. Maybe you\nwant to take the new user's email address and query for existing users from the\nsame employer. Maybe you'd prefer a Discord notification or an email.\n\nRegardless of the tools you use and the result you want, a val can flexibly\nhandle it. The in-val-out pattern goes beyond new user alerts, of course. Dozens\nof examples are listed on the\nI/V/O docs, but the best examples\nwill be the vals you create and use. Consider this a Call For Vals.\n\nIn\n\nInput could be customer support email you\nreceive, stars or new issues on your\nGitHub\nrepo, failed payments from Stripe,\nuser signups from Supabase,\ncalendar invites, Sentry errors, form submissions—you name it.\n\nVal\n\nOnce you've piped input into a val, you could analyze or classify data with\nOpenAI or Anthropic, enrich it with browser\nautomation via Browserbase or\nKernel, verify phone numbers or\nemails with Twilio, process images and video, parse PDFs, or pipe data directly\nto an output channel.\n\nOut\n\nAfter input and processing, you could notify yourself over email or\nSlack,\ncreate a Linear issue, open a GitHub PR, write to a Notion doc or\nAirtable, update a\nGoogle Sheet, persist data\nin SQLite or\nSupabase, or whatever\nelse would be useful to you and your team.\n\n--\n\nReach out to the Val Town team on Discord or\nover email if you'd like a hand setting up I/V/O, or feel\nfree to open a docs PR linking to\nyour val.",
  "title": "In, Val, Out"
}