Val Town Rewrites TypeScript Integration for Blazing-Fast Performance

2025-09-24
Val Town Rewrites TypeScript Integration for Blazing-Fast Performance

Val Town has completely rewritten its online editor's TypeScript integration, replacing the previous client-side Web Worker-based implementation with a cloud container-based Deno Language Server. This addresses issues with slow NPM package imports and TypeScript/Deno incompatibility in the old system, achieving 100ms deploy-on-save speeds. The new system leverages Cloudflare Containers to ensure user workload isolation and resource limits, and all code is open-sourced, providing developers with a smoother, more efficient TypeScript development experience.

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Development Online Editor

Vibe Coding: The Allure and Peril of AI-Assisted Programming

2025-07-31
Vibe Coding: The Allure and Peril of AI-Assisted Programming

Andrej Karpathy's "vibe coding," an AI-assisted coding approach where you largely ignore the code's intricacies, is efficient for prototypes and throwaway projects. However, for long-term projects, it can rapidly accumulate "technical debt." The article draws a parallel to giving a credit card to a child – initially exciting, but potentially disastrous later. It advocates caution for large-scale projects and stresses the continued importance of solid programming fundamentals and code comprehension.

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Development

Playing Catch-Up: Val Town's Journey Building an AI Code Assistant

2025-01-03
Playing Catch-Up: Val Town's Journey Building an AI Code Assistant

Val Town's AI code assistant, Townie, has been a journey of chasing the leaders – GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, and others. Starting with simple code completion, it evolved to generating full-stack apps using tool calling. This article recounts Townie's development, highlighting efforts in speed improvements, automatic error detection, and differentiated competition. It also looks ahead to integrating more advanced features.

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Development fast iteration