Had a blast live-coding some experimentations with Steve and Shovel yesterday using Val Town. (If you haven't used Val, well, watch the stream — think live, zero-deploy code snippets that can be arbitrarily extended and executed.)

Reflecting on the experience, the most exciting part of the entire hour for me was using Townie, Val's AI live-coding tool. I was — not skeptical, but agnostic — about it (I know exactly what I want to write! What's the point in having an AI potentially-lossily do it for me?) and, as has been the case many times over the past two or so years, my tepid expectations were blown out of the water.

At this point, I'm comfortable using Claude to generate snippets for me as proof of concepts of where I want to go with a larger project, and I'm happy to offload certain menial and easily-verifiable tasks to Cursor (see Using Cursor to port Django tests to pytest), but Townie was the first time I've felt like a tool was both faster and more efficacious than I could have been.