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  "description": "Townie v5, MCP, Revamped SQLite, Teams, LSP, and more",
  "path": "/newsletter-26",
  "publishedAt": "2026-03-10T00:00:00.000Z",
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  "textContent": "This is a newsletter about the goings-on in Val Town. I'm Pete, and I joined the\nteam this year, partly to write things like this (and that, and\nthis, and that). Steve used to\nwrite these newsletters when I read them as a Val Town user, and I know it's\nnice to hear from the founder. Sorry I'm not Steve! Please do still reply with\nyour thoughts and feedback, though—what you like reading about, what you wish\nVal Town would support, what vals you've built or want to build, et cetera.\nWe'll reply!\n\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"></p>\n\nOur last newsletter, #25, was delivered in summer of 2025 when\nTownie was a val in user-space and \"vibe coding\" was only a few months old.\nSince then: the Val Town MCP server and vt CLI launched, so you can work on vals\nwherever you get your LLMs; Townie was reborn in product-space; every val gets\nits own SQLite database; our TypeScript editor is faster and better; we launched\nTeams so that you can bring Val Town to work; and much more.\n\nAlso: we're having a party this Thursday, March\n12th, at our office in downtown Brooklyn. Come say hello!\n\nThe elephant in the town: AI\n\nThere are three primary ways to ✨ do AI ✨ in Val Town:\n\n1. Townie\n2. MCP + your favorite LLM\n3. vt CLI + your favorite LLM\n\nBefore I talk about Townie, let me just say: Townie is quite good, but we\nencourage you to bring Val Town to whatever coding tool you prefer (claude code,\ncodex, cursor, et al—it's up to you). Townie and MCP are a step above the CLI\nbecause they have better access to val primitives, but regardless of your weapon\nof choice, you get Val Town's core loop: edit code → 100ms deploy → live\nURL.\n\nOk, without further adieu: Townie is Val Town's code robot, now\nback in town next to your code editor. Townie uses the Claude 4.6\nfamily and the Val Town MCP server under the hood. The MCP server can do a whole\nlot: create, edit, and run vals; read your SQLite, blob, and log data; configure\ncron, http, and email; read and write environment variables; view history and\nswitch branches; and more. Here we ask Townie to one-shot a \"Val Town Square\"\nmessaging forum.\n\n<p style=\"position: relative; aspect-ratio: 16/9; border: 1.5px solid grey; border-radius: 10px; overflow: hidden;\">\n  <iframe\n    src=\"https://player.mux.com/vXsP400fWe01fc6fJr02d02F5WktTv1c5VzUHx3D4A7TS02w?preload=metadata\"\n    title=\"Townie demo making a val town square val\"\n    style=\"position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border: 0;\"\n    allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\"\n    allowFullscreen=\"true\"\n  ></iframe>\n</p>\n\nVideo at 1x speed to offer a realistic sense of Townie. Song credit: Good Time\nOldies by Bosley.\n\nScoped SQLite\n\nAs of January, every val gets its own SQLite database.\nBefore that, you got one global database for your org or personal account (and\nyou still do), but now it's a whole lot easier to manage your data. There's also\na new SQL admin dashboard for poking around your val's data.\n\n<p style=\"position: relative; aspect-ratio: 16/9; border: 1.5px solid grey; border-radius: 10px; overflow: hidden;\">\n  <iframe\n    src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/LktJyCxUxU?si=PiBoCkfHPBqXQ5Kl\"\n    title=\"Tom demo's val-scoped sqlite\"\n    style=\"position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border: 0;\"\n    allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\"\n    allowFullscreen=\"true\"\n  ></iframe>\n</p>\n\nIf you've already been using the admin UI, you'll notice some new features this\nmonth: now you can create tables and add records with a GUI, and if you're\nwriting SQL by hand (or pasting from an LLM), your query will be saved as you\nnavigate between table, docs, and query views.\n\nPersonally, I'm very excited about this one. Previously my vals used the same\nshared database for newsletter subscriber lists, wiki submissions, and whatever\nother data I stored. Now each val's data lives sensibly in its own silo, and the\nquery interface lowers the friction to quickly explore data.\n\nAlso, coming soon: val-scoped blob storage.\n\nTypeScript language server\n\nThe TypeScript code editor in Val Town now runs Deno's official Language Server\nfor faster and more accurate type information. The\nCodeMirror language server\nand full server+client+proxy Val Town LSP\nare open source, and Wolf wrote a great blog post about it if you're\ncurious to learn how it works.\n\n<p style=\"position: relative; aspect-ratio: 16/9; border: 1.5px solid grey; border-radius: 10px; overflow: hidden;\">\n  <iframe\n    src=\"https://player.mux.com/J35nt9nxNtYDEQUNkbzjv4z005D9sgFRu6Sudd6Uak01Y?preload=metadata\"\n    title=\"TypeScript language server at work\"\n    style=\"position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border: 0;\"\n    allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\"\n    allowFullscreen=\"true\"\n  ></iframe>\n</p>\n\nVal Town Teams\n\nTeams launched last year so that you can bring Val Town to work. Teams comes\nwith features for your organization like environment variable groups, val-scoped\nAPI tokens, val-scoped OAuth connections, blob management, custom domains, val\nownership transfers, member management and invites, public profiles, version\ncontrol/history/branching, and more. Companies like Kilo Code, Preston-Werner\nVentures, and Turso are collaborating on customer support agents, deal\npipelines, customer leads, and the like.\n\nWith the explosion of agents in 2026, we're noticing Teams customers beyond the\neng team editing vals. One customer noted that Val Town is a perfect platform\nfor engineers and business people to collaborate because the biz team can easily\nupdate prompts and see changes deployed immediately without waiting on\nengineers, and the eng team can customize the code to their liking.\n\nAnd much more\n\nHere's an unordered, incomplete list of other new features in Val Town:\n\n- Pin vals to your profile page\n- Change your account handle up to 5 times\n- Connect to Slack or Google from a val\n- , , and  files supported as val files\n- Download vals as ZIP files\n- Download val files individually\n- Export environment variables as  file\n- Copy environment variables when you remix your own val\n- 3x faster SQLite, average latency down from 35ms to 10ms (thanks Turso)\n- New onboarding steps for org setup\n- Val READMEs support Mermaid diagrams\n- Docs guide for adding auth to your val\n- Docs guide for building a Slack\n  agent\n- Go to definition for any symbol in your code\n- DenoLS resolves and type-checks imported private vals and modules\n- Search and replace in branches\n- Search results link to source line\n- Better code search ()\n-  saves globally (not just when the editor is focused)\n-  maps to project search\n- Live HTTP preview pane floating in or alongside the editor\n- Markdown preview pane alongside the editor ()\n- Full-page Logs view for a val\n- Render multi-line logs\n- Linkify stack traces in logs\n- Query val logs via API \n- API endpoints for managing environment variables\n- Browser-based device auth for  CLI\n- Manage OAuth client connections in Settings\n- Include merge commits, PR links, and Townie edits in val History\n- View diffs between val versions from History\n- View Townie chat history in Settings\n- Townie model picker to choose between Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus\n- Show Townie diff view before approving/denying edits\n- Let Townie run vals\n- Townie's \"4 C's\": commands for /cost, /compact, /context, /clear\n- As an aside^, why do so many AI things start with C? Claude Code, Codex,\n  Cursor, context...\n- Attach images to Townie chat\n- Fullscreen Townie mode (new!)\n\nVal Town Party\n\nIf you live in or around NYC, swing by our headquarters this week! We're having\na party at the Val Town office in downtown Brooklyn\non Thursday.\n\n<p style=\"display: flex; justify-content: center\">\n  <img\n    style=\"max-width: 400px; width: 100%;\"\n    alt=\"doodle of Townie robot holding pizza and beer\"\n    src=\"https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/4e1b5548-e4cb-462a-e88d-1a42c6523200/public\"\n  ></img>\n</p>\n\nVal Town Hall\n\nSpeaking of community hangouts, last summer we had a\nVal Town Hall where we opened up\nthe floor to community members demo'ing vals they'd made (for business or\npleasure) and talked about our roadmap. This spring, we're bringing it back\n(date TBD).\n\n<p style=\"display: flex; justify-content: center\">\n  <img\n    style=\"max-width: 400px; width: 100%;\"\n    alt=\"man in town hall meme saying val town should bring town hall back\"\n    src=\"https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/f28e5d93-00cf-4b23-517e-e5718ba2b300/public\"\n  ></img>\n</p>\n\nReply (1) if you're interested in presenting or attending, and/or (2) if you\nhave requests or ideas about what should be on the meeting agenda.\n\nTalk of the Town\n\nMy favorite part of the old newsletter was the community vals section, which\nyou'll now find in Talk of the Town. In February\nwe highlighted:\n\n- vals in the atmosphere (read: atproto/Bluesky)\n- a Valentine's val (dubbed\n  \"Valentown\" in one email reply)\n- a literal laundry val\n- a Helium Hotspot val\n- a moon phase val\n- and dozens of other neat vals you all wrote\n\nShare your vals in our Discord #showcase or on\nBsky/X/HN/etc to be included in the upcoming March issue.",
  "title": "Newsletter 26"
}