LLM prompting

Val Town provides multiple ways to leverage LLMs in your coding workflow:

• Townie for working with individual vals
• OpenTownie for working with multi-file projects
• Your favorite IDE (ie. Cursor, Windsurf, Zed, GitHub Copilot) for working with projects locally
• Your favorite LLM with llms.txt for any external AI assistant

Edit Single Vals with Townie

Townie ↗ is a great AI assistant for creating and editing individual vals.

You can also access Townie by clicking Edit in Townie in any val.

• Documentation
• View Townie’s system prompt

Edit Projects with OpenTownie

OpenTownie (Beta) ↗ is designed for editing multi-file Val Town Projects.

• Documentation
• View OpenTownie’s system prompt

Edit Projects with your Favorite IDE

Step 1: Setup

Use Val Town with your preferred IDE by first cloning your project locally with our Val Town CLI:

# Install CLI
deno install -gAfr jsr:@valtown/vt

# Set API token
export VAL_TOWN_API_KEY=vtwn_replaceThis

# Clone project locally
vt clone my-project

Step 2: Add Val Town System Prompt

For each IDE, add our system prompt as follows:

• Cursor: Add to Project Rules
• Windsurf: Use @-mention command
• Zed: Use /file command
• GitHub Copilot: Create .github/copilot-instructions.md at the project root

Your favorite LLM

Use our llms.txt and llms-full.txt with any LLM. The llms.txt standard provide structured information to help LLMs understand Val Town.

You can also click Copy page [in markdown] or Open in ChatGPT on the top right of any docs page to chat about our docs with any LLM.

Troubleshooting

If things go wrong:

• Broken code? Visit the “Versions” tab of your val or “History” of your project to revert
• Complex changes? Use branches and merge when stable
• Code doesn’t work? Ask AI to debug the specific errors by copy and pasting, or screenshotting error messages

Not working? Get help on our Discord.