Talk of the Town - July 2026

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.

Talk of the Town is our series highlighting neat public vals in userspace. Vals from the community Mitch Jacovetty https://mitch.website/ made 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. Vincent Termini https://vincenttermini.com/ made 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. Paul Chin Jr. https://paulchinjr.com/ made laval.val.run https://laval.val.run/ to simulate fluid in a lava lamp. And some kind words from Paul about using the Val Town plugin with ChatGPT Work emphasis mine : Hooking 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. Ikaika Hussey made turnedout.val.run https://turnedout.val.run/ to gauge voter turnout in Hawaii. Drew McDonald made hardcover-mcp https://www.val.town/x/drewmcdonald/hardcover-mcp , an MCP server for the hardcover.app API. Not the only MCP server I came across this month—a good reminder that Val Town is a nice place to create one. And maybe I should use Hardcover? Goodreads seems to have enshittified. As an aside—and maybe it’s just Hardcover’s user base— Dungeon Crawler Carl is on quite the tear this summer. Nico Baier https://nicobaier.com/ made townstash https://www.val.town/x/nbbaier/townstash , a Redis-style key/value storage on top of Val Town SQLite. Nico also built 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... Ish https://bsky.app/profile/ismaels.xyz made valcomments.val.run https://valcomments.val.run/ , a commenting platform in userspace. James Somers https://jsomers.net/ built a simple 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. Jason Tan https://shapedlines.com/ made a cron val that 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— nitemice made village-mow https://www.val.town/x/nitemice/village-mow . Peter Liu https://pql.val.run/ made 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. Christopher Ronning made solitaire-game.val.run https://solitaire-game.val.run/ . Classic Windows-style Solitaire, either Klondike or Freecell. Hunter Parks https://hunterparks.com/ made whois.val.run https://whois.val.run/ to check domain availability via RDAP. Useful, and I like the interface. Eryn Montgomery made RIP·URL https://www.val.town/x/unlikelyarchivist/ripurl , a weekly obituary series for dead & dying domains. The obituaries are written by an LLM, which I’ll admit initially disappointed me, but/and I’ll also admit that the writing is better than I expected maybe because it rips its sources? . At least it lists sources and doesn’t pretend it’s human /ethical-cold-outreach —the val’s description is "automated obituaries," so I appreciate the candor. Wil helm https://bsky.app/profile/wilb.me made komponera.val.run https://komponera.val.run/ , a Bluesky post authoring tool. Tod made spotify-search.val.run https://spotify-search.val.run/ for full text search across all your Spotify playlists. Aleks Rūtiņš made biblio https://www.val.town/x/aleksrutins/biblio , a val that displays books from a Notion database with hold status. Perry Raskin created an issue-share https://raskin-issue-share.val.run/ app for sharing links to GitHub issues with a different UI from the issue itself, which I suppose is the impetus . hrbrmstr made unjam-chrome.val.run https://unjam-chrome.val.run/ , a “web front-end for the Google Chrome Releases blog, built because the real thing locks the main thread for 81 seconds rendering 433 CVE entries with 2015-era jQuery.” C0MA made bark.val.run https://bark.val.run/ , a playground for Bark, an “easy coding language, perfect for kids aged 7-12.” Alex McRoberts https://bsky.app/profile/alex.mcroberts.me made snake-mcp https://www.val.town/x/alexmcroberts/snake-mcp , a Nokia-style Snake game as an MCP App. shlmt made a newsletter-tldr https://www.val.town/x/shlmt/newsletter-tldr email handler val that aggregates newsletters and emails a summary. Steve https://stevekrouse.com made a few vals to play with token throughput of the latest LLMs: kimi-coder.val.run https://kimi-coder.val.run/ for Kimi K3, celeris-coder.val.run https://celeris-coder.val.run/ to for the Celeris-1 diffusion model, and openrouter-coder.val.run https://openrouter-coder.val.run/ to compare lots of models. Steve also made sharechat.val.run https://sharechat.val.run/ for sharing Claude Code and Codex chats as unlisted links topical https://www.wired.com/story/private-claude-chats-exposed-in-google-and-bing-search-results/ ; mcp-docs.val.run https://mcp-docs.val.run/ , docs for all the Val Town MCP server’s tools; oauth-demos.val.run https://oauth-demos.val.run/ to demo OAuth DCR and CIMD; foc-sf-2026.val.run https://foc-sf-2026.val.run/ , a minisite for a meetup in SF on Thursday, August 6; and turtle.val.run https://turtle.val.run/ , a playground for Logo the programming language . Charlie https://x.com/CharlieMolthrop also made a whole lot https://charliemolthrop.com/blog/what-i-made-june-2026 , as usual. Like: a skill library https://www.val.town/x/templates/skills-library for your team’s agents; call-my-human.val.run https://call-my-human.val.run/ , an MCP server that lets an agent call you with questions in the middle of its work; paper-shaders.val.run https://paper-shaders.val.run/ , a gallery of all the open-sourced shaders from Paper; and slopify https://www.val.town/x/dcm31/slopify to compare famous poems and their slop rewrites. As always, share your vals in our discord https://discord.val.town showcase channel, over email mailto:hi@val.town , or on bluesky or twitter or wherever you spend time on the internet. We're hiring Are you an infra engineer who cares about the joy of programming?