Steve Krouse
@stevekrouse
founder @ValDotTown, spreading the joy of programming
Amazon's Kiro looks awesome and seems to get a lot right (spec driven development), BUT still seems to be missing one big piece that I haven't seen any coding agent address yet: Helping you with the dynamic interplay between top-down and bottom-up design. Going up and down the…
Tried to fix a bug this morning in a vibe coded project with more vibe coding Claude 4 Sonnet spun out writing a bunch more code The problem was that we were trying to html-escape content that we thought was text but was actually html. The solution was to stop escaping it. The…
old val town editor: 😐 new val town editor: 🤯 thanks to @_404Wolf and @CloudflareDev containers!!!
We just opened up applications for the fall cohort of PMF Method. The level of talent in our alumni group is insanely high. What’s been really interesting to see is that many were pre-idea and not even sure they wanted to be founders when they applied. This intensive experience…
the crazy peeps at @ValDotTown built a val that analyses our GitHub issues 🤯 val.town/x/charmaine/an…
I'm constantly falling into this pattern: 1. Start with Request / Response function 2. Upgrade to Hono for routing 3. Hono JSX for server-side routing 4. Ugh, need frontend stuff, rearchitect to client-side React app The JS world really needs a minimalistic fullstack framework.…
if lovable is canva, val town would like to be figma
Before Canva, there were only 5M 'designers' that used Photoshop. Canva made everyone capable of designing, 44x'd the market to 220M designers. Lovable is doing the same for code and 'producing' 1 billion builders by building the product that builds all other products.
So exciting! The world needs more thoughtful technical folks like Pete to become writers 🤩
I'm writing a book!
PostHog uses @ValDotTown to pipe Octolens insights into PostHog - tracking brand perception and product sentiment!! This powers custom charts and reports to monitor product launches 🐙🦔 Honored to be used by the products we love (thanks for the shoutout ❤️)
How @posthog tracks brand sentiment in real time When most growth comes from word of mouth and referrals, perception is performance. PostHog uses @Octolens to: ✅ Monitor sentiment across Reddit, X, HN ✅ Break feedback down by product ✅ Track the impact of IRL campaigns (like…
i am fanatical that everyone needs a clipboard manager it takes 30 min to install & get familiar with and then your life is better forever do yourself a favor and download maccy!
my favorite new app in recent months: maccy.app by @p0deje once you have clipboard history, you'll never understand how you were able to live without it
yesterday i prototyped kimi k2 on townie, val town's coding assistant it seemed reasonably good at making val town apps, which exciting because it's ~4x cheaper & faster than claude 4 sonnet (on groq)
must-read, so good
Some reflections: calv.info/openai-reflect…
No-code tools threw out the baby (coding) with the bathwater (all the complexity to run & deploy code) Val Town is, as @tylerangert phrased it, "just code"
After 12+ years of publishing tactical company building playbooks on The Review, we’ve decided to start a brand-new publication, dedicated to AI actually working in production. We're calling it Applied Intelligence. The aim is to close a gap we’ve spotted: Everyone's talking…