{"slug": "talk-of-the-town-july-2026", "title": "Talk of the Town - July 2026", "summary": "Val Town's July 2026 community roundup highlights user-built vals, including Mitch Jacovetty's three-headed hydra experiment, Vincent Termini's AI-slop linter, and Paul Chin Jr.'s lava lamp fluid simulation. Paul Chin Jr. praised Val Town's plugin with ChatGPT Work, noting it offers better ergonomics and flexibility than other vibe coding platforms like Lovable and Replit.", "body_md": "*Talk of the Town* is our series highlighting neat public vals in userspace.\n\n## Vals from the community\n\n[ Mitch Jacovetty](https://mitch.website/) made\n\n[mitchs-three-headed-hydra.val.run](https://mitchs-three-headed-hydra.val.run/), a clever experiment demonstrating that LLMs can finish each other’s sandwiches.\n\n[ Vincent Termini](https://vincenttermini.com/) made\n\n[vale-linter-api](https://www.val.town/x/vultures/vale-linter-api), a website in which you copy-paste (or type) markdown to lint for AI slop.\n\n[ Paul Chin Jr.](https://paulchinjr.com/) made\n\n[laval.val.run](https://laval.val.run/)to simulate fluid in a lava lamp.\n\nAnd some kind words from Paul about using the Val Town plugin with ChatGPT Work (emphasis mine):\n\nHooking up valtown to chatgpt work has really insanely good ergonomics.I’ve been learning fluid sims. Before I was using ChatGPT to learn, and using Codex to implement, but now I can use ChatGPT Work w/ Val Town plugin and I basically get both in the same interface. I’ve sidestepped git, because valtown has a good enough code repo, and everything deploys pretty quick. I was rate limited once by valtown, and it eventually cleared up again the next day.Overall, I’m super impressed because I’ve used all the other vibe coding platforms like lovable and repplit, and valtown is more flexible and powerful.\n\n**Ikaika Hussey** made [turnedout.val.run](https://turnedout.val.run/) to gauge\nvoter turnout in Hawaii.\n\n**Drew McDonald** made\n[hardcover-mcp](https://www.val.town/x/drewmcdonald/hardcover-mcp), an MCP\nserver for the hardcover.app API. Not the only MCP server I came across this\nmonth—a good reminder that Val Town is a nice place to create one. And maybe I\nshould use Hardcover? Goodreads seems to have enshittified.\n\nAs an aside—and maybe it’s just Hardcover’s user base—*Dungeon Crawler Carl* is\non quite the tear this summer.\n\n[ Nico Baier](https://nicobaier.com/) made\n\n[townstash](https://www.val.town/x/nbbaier/townstash), a Redis-style key/value storage on top of Val Town SQLite. Nico also built\n\n[email-replay](https://www.val.town/x/nbbaier/email-replay)for developing email handler vals without having to send fresh emails again and again to test. Always neat to see Val Town devtools created in userspace! Speaking of which...\n\n[ Ish](https://bsky.app/profile/ismaels.xyz) made\n\n[valcomments.val.run](https://valcomments.val.run/), a commenting platform in userspace.\n\n[ James Somers](https://jsomers.net/) built a simple\n\n[email-to-claude](https://www.val.town/x/jsomers/email-to-claude)val to correspond with Claude via email. I often send myself email to note this or that—anything I want to remember later—so I enjoy this variety of email-as-entrypoint val.\n\n[ Jason Tan](https://shapedlines.com/) made a cron val that\n\n[emails him when new showtimes open](https://www.val.town/x/shapedlines/imax-odyssey-showtime-watcher)for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Not the only movie monitoring val I’ve come across this month—\n\n**nitemice** made\n\n[village-mow](https://www.val.town/x/nitemice/village-mow).\n\n[ Peter Liu](https://pql.val.run/) made\n\n[color-golf.val.run](https://color-golf.val.run/). Very satisfying sound effects! Although I think I’m about as bad at this as I am at real golf.\n\n**Christopher Ronning** made\n[solitaire-game.val.run](https://solitaire-game.val.run/). Classic Windows-style\nSolitaire, either Klondike or Freecell.\n\n[ Hunter Parks](https://hunterparks.com/) made\n\n[whois.val.run](https://whois.val.run/)to check domain availability via RDAP. Useful, and I like the interface.\n\n**Eryn Montgomery** made\n[RIP·URL](https://www.val.town/x/unlikelyarchivist/ripurl), a weekly obituary\nseries for dead & dying domains. The obituaries are written by an LLM, which\nI’ll admit initially disappointed me, but/and I’ll also admit that the writing\nis better than I expected (maybe because it rips its sources?). At least it\nlists sources and doesn’t [pretend it’s human](/ethical-cold-outreach)—the val’s\ndescription is \"automated obituaries,\" so I appreciate the candor.\n\n[ Wil(helm)](https://bsky.app/profile/wilb.me) made\n\n[komponera.val.run](https://komponera.val.run/), a Bluesky post authoring tool.\n\n**Tod** made [spotify-search.val.run](https://spotify-search.val.run/) for full\ntext search across all your Spotify playlists.\n\n**Aleks Rūtiņš** made [biblio](https://www.val.town/x/aleksrutins/biblio), a val\nthat displays books from a Notion database with hold status.\n\n**Perry Raskin** created an [issue-share](https://raskin-issue-share.val.run/)\napp for sharing links to GitHub issues (with a different UI from the issue\nitself, which I suppose is the impetus).\n\n**hrbrmstr** made [unjam-chrome.val.run](https://unjam-chrome.val.run/), a “web\nfront-end for the Google Chrome Releases blog, built because the real thing\nlocks the main thread for 81 seconds rendering 433 CVE entries with 2015-era\njQuery.”\n\n**C0MA** made [bark.val.run](https://bark.val.run/), a playground for Bark, an\n“easy coding language, perfect for kids aged 7-12.”\n\n[ Alex McRoberts](https://bsky.app/profile/alex.mcroberts.me) made\n\n[snake-mcp](https://www.val.town/x/alexmcroberts/snake-mcp), a Nokia-style Snake game as an MCP App.\n\n**shlmt** made a [newsletter-tldr](https://www.val.town/x/shlmt/newsletter-tldr)\nemail handler val that aggregates newsletters and emails a summary.\n\n[ Steve](https://stevekrouse.com) made a few vals to play with token\nthroughput of the latest LLMs:\n\n[kimi-coder.val.run](https://kimi-coder.val.run/)for Kimi K3,\n\n[celeris-coder.val.run](https://celeris-coder.val.run/)to for the Celeris-1 diffusion model, and\n\n[openrouter-coder.val.run](https://openrouter-coder.val.run/)to compare lots of models.\n\nSteve also made [sharechat.val.run](https://sharechat.val.run/) for sharing\nClaude Code and Codex chats as unlisted links\n([topical](https://www.wired.com/story/private-claude-chats-exposed-in-google-and-bing-search-results/));\n[mcp-docs.val.run](https://mcp-docs.val.run/), docs for all the Val Town MCP\nserver’s tools; [oauth-demos.val.run](https://oauth-demos.val.run/) to demo\nOAuth DCR and CIMD; [foc-sf-2026.val.run](https://foc-sf-2026.val.run/), a\nminisite for a meetup in SF on Thursday, August 6; and\n[turtle.val.run](https://turtle.val.run/), a playground for Logo (the\nprogramming language).\n\n[Charlie](https://x.com/CharlieMolthrop) also made\n[a whole lot](https://charliemolthrop.com/blog/what-i-made-june-2026), as usual.\nLike: a [skill library](https://www.val.town/x/templates/skills-library) for\nyour team’s agents; [call-my-human.val.run](https://call-my-human.val.run/), an\nMCP server that lets an agent call you with questions in the middle of its work;\n[paper-shaders.val.run](https://paper-shaders.val.run/), a gallery of all the\nopen-sourced shaders from Paper; and\n[slopify](https://www.val.town/x/dcm31/slopify) to compare famous poems and\ntheir slop rewrites.\n\nAs always, share your vals in our [discord](https://discord.val.town) showcase\nchannel, over [email](mailto:hi@val.town), or on bluesky or twitter or wherever\nyou spend time on the internet.\n\n**We're hiring!**\n\nAre you an infra engineer who cares about the joy of programming?", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/talk-of-the-town-july-2026", "canonical_source": "https://blog.val.town/talk-of-the-town-july-2026", "published_at": "2026-07-30 00:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-13 15:36:04.078886+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "generative-ai", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Val Town", "Mitch Jacovetty", "Vincent Termini", "Paul Chin Jr.", "ChatGPT Work", "Lovable", "Replit", "Claude"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/talk-of-the-town-july-2026", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/talk-of-the-town-july-2026.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/talk-of-the-town-july-2026.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/talk-of-the-town-july-2026.jsonld"}}