Steve Krouse

📝 I'm officially a hoarder now. Netlify throws away my analytics data every 30 days, but I finally setup a little automation with @val.town to persist it. blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/preserv...

warmed by people finding me at events to talk about how they loved glitch and expressing that nothing has fully replaced it - but at least for the “having a good time getting an app built and online (and remixable) without needing an aws account“ part, though, @val.town is still so great

I find Bluesky threads are hard to read in the mobile app. Here’s a tool to help read like thread like it’s a blog post btr.val.run/thread?q=htt...

we migrated the @val.town docs to val town, which was full of AX/DX/UX tradeoffs (to borrow @jim-nielsen.com's framing) anthropomorphized potato pothole doodle by @jxnblk.bsky.social

been spending a lot of time identifying & fixing security issues at @val.town: here's how it's going blog.val.town/security

@stevekrouse.com the chatgpt valtown plugin is my favorite way to vibe code right now. Check out my fluid sim experiment and retro guest book thingee. www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7Pt...

for the company blog on @val.town: vals now get access to scoped blob storage so they can store binary data and avoid conflicting with each other blog.val.town/scoped-blob-...

Lately, in town: - redesigned core val UI - deploying your combobulated (claude) code - new Pro pricing (only for new users) - ...and more blog.val.town/changelog-05262026

vibe coding without understanding what's going on feels like I'm a child whose parent took over my school project I don't feel good when I'm done, and I sure won't be able to answer any questions in show 'n' tell tomorrow

Intense vertigo thinking about @nanr.bsky.social's numbers. Based on current pledges/valuations, AI philanthropic giving would saturate an additional 300+ Arc Institutes, i.e. an extra 80K employees. Or 5,000 Institutes for Progress demanding 200K employees! nanransohoff.substack.com/p/the-third-...

This is the video I wish I could've watched when I was 14 and wanted to know how to make web apps. I made Val Town for anyone who wants to learn how to code. We cover the basics of: JavaScript web servers, HTTP HTML, forms GET and POST requests SQLite Hono routing www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Mrs...

experimenting with a video walkthrough of the (new) val town changelog, out yesterday www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtqa...

The talk of the val town! Delightful video by Mr @petemillspaugh.com youtube.com/watch?v=mKXoAVVrlXc

it's hard to put into words how good it feels to be quoted by one of my role models

the reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated i spent 10 hours writing this blog post by hand. i would be delighted if you read it stevekrouse.com/precision

excited to finally publish val town investor updates! if you care about val town (or me), would love your thoughts on our direction :) blog.val.town/2026-feb

the doodling culture has to be one of the biggest draws to working at @val.town (hiring a product engineer if anyone is looking! val.town/careers)

@val.town public investor update is out blog.val.town/2026-feb

What if you never had to get an API key ever again? You can spend 5 min (vibe) coding an app, but 30 min getting the API keys We need OpenRouter for all APIs. But as a protocol Meet x402, my first real use for crypto www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqr4...

I am creating a post about using voice as my primary input with LLMs and I remembered Blade Runner's Esper machine. I thought it'd be fun to replicant 👉 WebSpeechRecognition 👉 Gemini Flash Lite for Voice to UI 👉 Gemini Nano Banana to "Enhance" 👉 Built with voice Clone 👉 val.town/x/paulkinlan...

demo: ejecting to @val.town

i love building random one-off software, for example, to help me compare webcams great use of vibe-coding (when you can throw away the code)

I built a built a better version of lovable! It'll help you build a billion-dollar business in just a few decades! billionaire.val.run

this was fast! @val.town is cool

started playing with mcp servers today and built a little one with just one tool to look up country by ccTLD val town for the server and @cloudflare.social's ai playground for testing is a nice feedback loop

would it surprise you to learn that the first thing i tried to make when learning javascript in 2017 was a word game? alexsfirstwordgamewasbad.val.run

holy crap! dan abramov knows about val town!

i came up with a new way to build software! you write the code yourself with your fingers it's claude code, in your own brain it's as local-first as it gets, and sustainable: just slop bowls & 1 gallon of water lmk if you'd like a help installing in your brain! it's called "learning to code"

First everyone on @bsky.app gets a small database. Now every Val on @val.town gets a small database. Who’s next?!

new thing at @val.town - every val gets a database! plus a database browser / ui. blog.val.town/scoped-datab... maybe the coolest part: if you fork someone's val, you get a copy of the database schema.

we rebuilt @val.town's ai agent from scratch for the 5th time, and it's pretty great! would love any feedback :) blog.val.town/townie-v5

a favorite part of my new job is getting to* doodle for blog posts, like this octocat (drawn with my mouse in @excalidraw.com lol) *not just getting to, but encouraged to

I wrote some advice for college kids in 2026, what I learned since college, what I wish someone told me, etc stevekrouse.com/advice

pretty wild that you can send "timings" from the backend to browsers and they'll visualize them for you

To start 2026 I officially joined @stevekrouse.com, @macwright.com, and co. at @val.town as a programmer-writer, part-time while I continue writing my book :) Val Town's founding poem is still my favorite way to describe what it is: > If GitHub Gists could run > And AWS Lambda were fun

My latest obsession has been optimising webhook events from Ghost to Netlify. I needed a way to filter out large payloads sent to Netlify. Using @val.town as a webhook middleware, I can strip payloads and skip triggering builds for certain posts. jonathanyeong.com/writing/usin...

It was fun to build flickity.val.run I turn each article linked from hackernews into a short video by summarizing the post, taking a screenshot and then combining them into a script for veo3.1 Video gen could be better, but surprisingly good.

love seeing val.town work through this in public. one of the hardest things we dealt with at glitch was never being able to narrow down to specific use cases - we wanted to be everything to everyone and that's part of how we ended up being nothing to anyone (rip)

what we've been up to recently at val town: blog.val.town/pickling

ah the bicycle, the computer for the body

Honeycomb really knows how to sticker!!! Thanks so much @charity.wtf ❤️

📢 Introducing The Val Town MCP Server Bring Val Town to your favorite LLM – Cursor, ChatGPT, Zed, wherever! AI coding, instant deployments, built-in SQLite For example, here we use Claude Code to make a blog in a couple prompts Learn more & get started 👉 blog.val.town/mcp

i wrote everything that i've been kind of nervous to write about @val.town: here's how things have been going the last three years, and read to the end for how we're hiring for two people macwright.com/2025/11/11/v...

made enough progress on coney letters to push to prod loopyletters.val.run/coney like my other "find a big word" games, the words are random uniformly pulled from the wordnik list, which includes a lot of junk. i'm sorry. better on mobile than desktop.

recommitted to @opensourcepledge.com at @val.town for 2025! very pumped to support projects like zod, fastify, codemirror, unified, and esm.sh with real 💸 as well as positive vibes. blog.val.town/oss-pledge

Very excited about this Remix 3 Fetch Router demo by @jim-nielsen.com www.val.town/x/jimniels/f... Remix 3 is still super early (and changing fast) but it's exciting how powerful this full-stack routing thing will be - seems like a perfect fit for val town h/t @tylur.dev for finding this!