Steam Beats Epic's Vibe-Coded Launcher Just 24 Hours After It Bragged About Speed

I used to think vibe coding would get us slow Electron apps but now we got speed wars between game launchers. I hope this comes for all types of software.

With that said, I tested it right now and Steam takes about 2 seconds to restore from tray and 10-15 for cold boot. The new Epic launcher is around 0.5 and 5 like the article mentioned. Maybe it's still in A/B testing or something.

> Epic may have “vibe coded” a faster client, but Valve proved that targeted optimization on a decades-old ecosystem can still beat out AI speedruns.

Optimizing a project with AI is one of the most trivial things you can do with AI.

I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI, especially for something as trivial as "hey claude rank the top causes of slow startup" -> "oh okay now fix". The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.

Once I had a good benchmark script, Opus 4.8 or whatever made my terminal app faster with less memory than ghostty and kitty. It's not even interesting.

All I can think with this whole situation is how much time is wasted by people getting angry and defensive on behalf of a Valve. It's almost like people have a parasocial relationship with the application itself.

That's not even getting to some of the "missing" features.

No Community marketplace for in-game items

No Direct player-to-player item trading

No Digital trading cards, levelling, and points shop

I hope more application developers "forget" to add these features.

This is why software is slow and everything uses 2GB of RAM at idle: because nobody really cares.

I'm sure that AI made this speedup work much easier and quicker; probably just access to the monorepo and a prompt of "make the launcher boot up faster while changing no functionality. Keep track of before/after benchmark numbers" would be fine as long as you can get your co-workers to approve whatever diff gets spat out the end.

But either of these companies, presumably with dev teams of dozens-hundreds of SWEs, could have pointed to one of them 5 years go and said "spend the next 2 months optimizing the performance of the launcher" and would probably have gotten similar results.

I make my software fast and efficient mostly because I enjoy it. Absolutely nothing stopping web apps, Electron, everything else from being efficient, slim, and performant. It's just that the modicum of effort required to set that up was outweighed by the convenience of just importing and parsing the full 16MB icon cache and 13 unused analytics SDKs every pageload and not worrying about it.

Ok but why didn't they do it sooner? The Steam client is terrible and there is no excuse for it.

I have to say, Epics vibe is just malicious and toxic. Steam is silent and just lets things speak for themselves. What is the value of an idea if it does not work in the real world?

I just wish the people at Epic collectively took some vacation and came back with a less breathing down neck attitude towards everything. Just chill out, relax, it is a browser for searching, buying and downloading games

Thank you Epic for improving Steam! Appreciated