Townie's back in town!

3 min read Original article ↗

doodle of Townie robot at an old fashioned computer

Townie's back! In its 5th version, Townie, our AI agent, lives alongside your code editor, powered by the Claude 4.5 family and our carefully crafted tools.

Townie is like Claude Code, but in the browser, optimized for Val Town's simple and instant runtime.

Here we ask Townie to scaffold this very blog post:

Like every edit in Val Town, Townie's changes are instantly deployed live on the internet at a URL (or a branch-preview-URL) in 100ms.

What can Townie do?

Townie can take almost any action that you as a user can take:

  • List, search, & create vals
  • Read, write, & run files
  • View history, create & switch branches, revert versions
  • Query your SQLite databases & Blob storage
  • Read & write environment variables
  • Read logs
  • Read & configure cron jobs

Because Townie has so much context, you can ask it to one-shot whole features or even full-stack apps. Or remix one of our templates. Townie gets the same tight feedback loop that Val Town users get:

  1. Edit code
  2. Automatically deployed live in 100ms
  3. Run the code
  4. View the output
  5. Read the logs
  6. Keep iterating until done

You can rely on version history and branching to move fast without breaking things, along with Townie's chat history to pick up where you left off.

Modes

We're using the latest models in the Claude 4.5 family — Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus — with three modes:

  1. Normal: Townie asks you to approve before writes
  2. Plan: Townie as your read-only thinking partner
  3. Allow all edits: Townie YOLOs changes to your vals

System prompt

Townie knows Val Town inside and out. Our system prompt is public (still), and it doubles as a great "101 intro to Val Town."

Keyboard shortcuts & slash commands

As a power user, you can open Townie with ⌘J and use slash commands:

  • /cost Show estimated cost and usage
  • /context Show context window usage
  • /compact Summarize older messages to save context
  • /clear Start a new chat

Townie is writing ~50% of my code

Before Townie v5, we didn't think we needed an in-browser AI agent. We wanted to thoughtfully craft a good MCP server and let you the developer stay where you are (in your favorite AI coding tool). And we did. And you can!

But MCP clients just aren't good enough yet, so that experience often falls short. Our customers asked for a good in-browser AI agent. Honestly, we as users of our product wanted this too. And it's pretty great! I use Townie v5 a lot now. Sometimes I use it for vibe coding (for prototypes or simple things), and other times I keep it on a tight leash (for stuff I care about).

It's fun and productive – give it a try!

Try Townie

Townie is available in public beta for Pro and Teams customers, so you can try it for $10/mo.

Thanks to Pete for helping me write this and crafting the lovely Townie doodle at the top.