Steve Krouse's Val Town Platform

Table of content

Steve Krouse is the CEO and co-founder of Val Town (with Tom MacWright), based in Brooklyn. He studied computer science at the University of Pennsylvania and previously worked at Looker and First Round Capital. Before Val Town, he co-founded The Coding Space, an after-school coding program for kids, and created the Future of Coding podcast and research community.

Steve founded Val Town — a social platform for writing and deploying code instantly. Every edit goes live at a public URL in 100ms. With the Val Town MCP server, Claude Code can deploy directly to the platform.

The Vision

From Krouse’s LinkedIn:

“I’m obsessed with programming languages and user interfaces. I believe that a well-designed tool can enable people to think and work in more powerful and flexible ways.”

Val Town embodies this: remove deployment friction entirely. Write code, it’s live.

What Val Town Does

Capability	Description
Instant deploy	100ms from edit to live URL
Social sharing	Fork, remix, and build on others’ work
Scheduled runs	Cron jobs without infrastructure
API endpoints	HTTP handlers in single files
TypeScript/JavaScript	Modern runtime, no setup

Users describe it as “Zapier for developers” — automation without the complexity.

MCP Integration

The Val Town MCP server connects Claude Code directly:

# In Claude Code
> Deploy this function to Val Town
# Claude creates a val, deploys it, returns the live URL

Krouse’s take on MCP (from his announcement):

“Yes, I think MCP is dubious as a protocol. But for now, MCP is the right way for Val Town to meet developers where they are.”

Pragmatic adoption despite skepticism about the protocol itself.

Future of Coding Background

Before Val Town, Krouse ran Future of Coding from 2017 to 2019 — a podcast and research project asking “what is programming and where is it going?” He maintained an open research log as an experiment in radical transparency.

He reviewed dozens of programming languages, no-code, and low-code tools, documenting alternatives to traditional development. In late 2019, he stepped away from the community to put his research into practice, founding startups Compose and Zaplib before Val Town. The podcast is now hosted by Ivan Reese, Jimmy Miller, and Lu Wilson.

Fast Following

Val Town’s blog post on learning from competitors (January 2025) describes their AI feature evolution:

Tool	What Val Town learned
GitHub Copilot	Autocomplete expectations
ChatGPT	Conversational code generation
Claude Artifacts	In-browser prototyping
Bolt, Cursor, Windsurf	Full-app generation patterns

Krouse calls their approach “fast-follows” — adopting innovations from others rather than inventing everything.

Use Cases

From Val Town’s template gallery:

Slack notifications — Get updates from various sources
Hacker News monitoring — Track mentions
Sales automation — Research and enrich contacts
Data pipelines — Transform and move data

The pattern: small, focused automations that would be painful to host traditionally.

Team Culture

Val Town’s approach from the Scaling DevTools podcast:

“Every Thursday, the team is not allowed to work on the product. They all have to try and make cool things with Val Town.”

Using your own tool reveals friction and sparks ideas.

Puck Academy Podcast

On the Puck Academy podcast (March 2025), Krouse discussed:

Challenges of traditional code collaboration
AI tool integration into Val Town
Growth strategy focused on interoperability
Long-term vision for democratizing programming

Key Insights

Principle	Application
Remove deployment friction	100ms to live
Social by default	Code is shareable
Meet developers where they are	MCP despite skepticism
Fast-follow innovations	Adopt what works elsewhere
Dogfood aggressively	Team uses product weekly

Links

Next: Sahil Lavingia’s AI-First Company