Changelog – August 6, 2026

Val Town released its August 6, 2026 changelog, introducing a new docs site, Discover page, and updated Townie models, with DeepSeek V4 Flash now the default model, being ~100x cheaper and roughly as intelligent as Opus. The company also added ChatGPT/Codex plugins, AGENTS.md support, tags, monograms, environment variable API access, and new MCP tools, among other updates.

Many changes since early July /changelog-2026-07-02 : new docs site, new Discover page, new Townie models, new app layout, and more. Docfooding The Val Town docs https://docs.val.town/ are now written and hosted on Val Town https://www.val.town/x/valdottown/docs . You can read about that docfooding /docfooding effort on the blog. Discover To dislodge your codewriter's block, we have a new Discover https://val.town/discover page on val.town with templates, staff picks, and integrations. Whack-a-model DeepSeek V4 Flash is now Townie's default model. It's ~100x cheaper and roughly as intelligent as Opus. We also added Fable 5 and Opus 5 to Townie, because to each her own. The game of whack-a-model https://blog.val.town/glm5.2-and-sonnet5 persists, though, with Qwen 3.8 atop the charts today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49200652 . ChatGPT Plugin + AGENTS.md After adding our plugin to Claude's official marketplace last month, we did the same for Codex https://docs.val.town/guides/prompting/openai-codex / ChatGPT https://docs.val.town/guides/prompting/chatgpt . One more piece of news in agentland: we now support https://blog.val.town/agents-dot-md the AGENTS.md convention https://agents.md via a special .config val. Those agent instructions are injected into Townie chats and MCP sessions. Layout Jackson redesigned and implemented new val.town global navigation app chrome. There's now an org switcher, left sidebar, searchable val dashboard, and an updated footer. Tags You can now add tags to vals in val settings. Monograms Vals now have little placeholder monograms instead of defaulting to your profile picture as the val's image. Environment variables Environment variable groups are now accessible through our API — create, update, and attach environment variables for your org. Thanks to our friends at Herd https://herd.eco/home for the feature request. You can also now show and hide secrets while editing environment variables in the UI. Sprig Sans We've been sprinkling Sprig Sans https://www.fairetype.com/fonts/sprig-sans , the typeface on our new homepage, across other pages. Gosh, type foundries always have the coolest websites. std/openai We updated the std/openai https://www.val.town/x/std/openai val to use OpenAI's latest models. MCP branching tools New MCP tools: merge branch and delete branch . That's 54 tools now, so Steve made some docs https://mcp-docs.val.run/ in a val, ofc . HTTP analytics HTTP analytics in a val now have more useful x-axis time labels. Lightning round - PRs for vals now show the author's handle instead of their org's name - We fixed a bug where some Pro users were seeing the wrong Townie limits in settings - You can now link to a val's Connections page and its other pages, like env vars in its README by writing markdown, like Connect to Slack /connections - The first HTTP file in a val is now auto-pinned so that a preview will appear on the val's home page. You can change a val's pinned HTTP file in settings - When creating a val, we now present an inline warning when a val description is too long. Thanks Nico https://nicobaier.com/ for the suggestion - We fixed a tiny text overflow problem in Townie, e.g. when rendering long URLs - The MCP server can now directly upload blobs up to 1 MB, or 10 MB if the blob is hosted at a URL - We fixed the CLI command to rename an org - The Townie/MCP system prompt now documents val transfers between orgs - Code search is now available on public vals thanks, Nico https://nicobaier.com/ , for reporting We're hiring Are you an infra engineer who cares about the joy of programming?