PreBlog Banter

I play basketball in NYC. Been helping my buddy grow his pickup crew lately, “Saturday Hoops“. For the record I am in terrible shape. Like, embarrassing shape. But I’m top 3 in my “league” for highlights this year so who’s really winning. It’s not a real league per say, but what are you a cop?

Anyways…

Hermes is good. It just can't ship.

I stumbled upon Hermes Agent when I met the founder of a startup called Honcho at a hackathon in the city. Been running it for a few weeks. It’s pretty good ngl. It writes its own skills. It remembers me across sessions. It has access to my personal computer and can do almost anything I ask.

Almost.

What it cannot do is ship new ideas to production. Like, instantly. Right now. While I’m still excited about them. Before the idea dies the way all 1am ideas die, which is slowly, in a terminal window, while I’m setting up a Vercel project with Supabase and Resend, I will never look at again.

If I already have a repo hooked up to Vercel, fine, Hermes can push. But the whole point of having an agent is so I don’t have to spin up another repo and another Vercel project and another Supabase for every dumb idea I have at 1am. I can chat with my agent and have it deploy something locally. Cool. Then I want to show my friend a link to my already deployed shitty web app I just vibe coded, and I’m right back doing the configuration I was trying to avoid. The git repo, the Vercel project, the Supabase instance, etc. The whole song and dance. Every time.

I could use v0 or Lovable. But those don’t have access to my chat history or my agent’s memory. Hermes does. Hermes knows me. V0 doesn’t know me. V0 doesn’t know anybody. V0 is a stranger.

Then I thought, what about… Val Town.

Val Town deploys TypeScript in seconds. You write a function, you get a URL. Crons, webhooks, small websites, SQLite, all of it live and addressable and permanent. I actually had the pleasure of meeting one of the founders a couple of times. Cool guy, big nerd (in a good way). But Val Town is special to me because it was where I developed my first vibe coded application, a push-up tracker, with Townie, their coding assistant. It popped my vibe coding cherry. And like all first times, it changed how I saw everything after.

What “shipped” looks like now

I wired Val Town into Hermes. Wrote a skill, validated it against the live API, opened a PR: NousResearch/hermes-agent#12678. The skill teaches the agent when to reach for a val, how to deploy one, and how to hand the URL back to me.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

me: email me a notification with Val Town every day we have a game on saturdayhoopsnyc.com

Before the skill: Hermes writes a Flask app. Tells me to run it somewhere. I don’t. The conversation dies.

me::( ← sad.

After the skill: Hermes creates a val, deploys it, and hands me a URL. I used Hermes to create this val and it immediately deployed and started working. Here’s the code to the actual val.

That. That right there. That is the superpower.

My agent didn’t set up a pipeline. I didn’t set up a pipeline. Nobody set up a pipeline. There was no Github→to→Vercel→to→Supabase→to→Resend dance. I said one sentence. It works. It’s live. It would be a pain in the ass to go wire this up the normal way, with Resend and Supabase and GitHub, when I just want the thing to work immediately. So I didn’t. My agent did it in seconds.

Nothing else I know does this. If you know something that does, tell me. I’ll be wrong in public. (sike, I am never wrong)

Here are other ideas I’m thinking of cooking up:

Personal intelligence feed. A cron monitors 20 sources like HN, arXiv, competitor changelogs, security advisories, my GitHub repos. Then hits Hermes to do the analysis of things I’m interested in, just based on it knowing me. (Maybe with Honcho memory?)

AI automatic replies. Wire my email to a val, have it webhook to Hermes, and automatically reply for me using Hermes as the brain. Hermes knows how I write. Hermes knows who I reply to and who gets ghosted. The val just gives it a door to the internet.

See the pattern? The val is the hands. Hermes is the brain.

Val Town is at a crucible moment and I don't think they see it

Val Town is built for developers. That seems obvi from the site. The marketing is for people who already want to write TypeScript and are looking for a nicer deploy surface than Vercel. It is, in the most literal sense, a product from the world where humans write code and share snippets.

But that world is probably over…

I don’t mean to be dramatic. I mean the fastest growing population of Val Town users over the next year is not going to be developers writing vals. It's going to be agents writing vals. On behalf of users who don't know or care that TypeScript exists. The user says "give me a reminder by email everytime the Knicks play". The agent writes the val. The URL deployed is the product. The TypeScript? Invisible. The user never sees it.

Val Town has already done 90% of the hard part for this world:

• Instant deploy. Agent doesn’t time out waiting for a build.

• Permanent URLs. The thing the agent shipped? It outlives the conversation. It has an address. You can send it to your mom.

• SQLite per val. State without setting up a database.

• Email already configured.

• A public REST API that doesn’t hate you. An agent can create and run vals with a token and a POST.

Val Town accidentally built the best deploy target in agentic computing.

Val Town’s ICP should be people with personal AI agents. Not developers. Not nontechnical people. That difference? It doesn’t really exist anymore. The agent is the user now. Build for the agent and the human comes along for free.

Being able to send texts from a val. My agent wants to ping my phone. Right now it has to go through Telegram or some middleman. Just let me send a text.

Being able to call LLMs easily from a val, or to integrate with my personal assistant agent like Hermes from a val. Both are possible today. But it should be instaneous like the email Val. The next million users are agents trying to get something done before their turn ends. Build the platform for them.