When we started building Campsite's public API, I wanted a way to rapidly prototype and test integrations without thinking about deployments or infrastructure. That's when we turned to Val Town – a browser-based development environment that I'd describe as "GitHub Gists that you can run with a web server".
What started as a quick experiment has become an essential part of our API development workflow. The platform's AI assistant, Townie, often writes most of the initial integration code, and everything is instantly deployed to public URLs, making it easy to test conversational workflows that incorporate webhooks within our own workspace.
One of the best things about Val Town is how quickly you can go from idea to working code. Recently, Brian asked if we could support email forwarding in Campsite channels:
Val Town has an "email" primitive that gives you a public email address and pipes incoming emails into your handler function. I asked Townie, Val Town's AI assistant, to get us started: