alt Hacker NewsI 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.
Replies
Vibe coding can yield us Tauri apps that end up being like 3mb rather than 130mb for a "Hello World" app.
I actually think that vibe coding lends itself well to stuff with really strict type systems. When you use Claude Code, it basically works on a loop until it gets something "right". A type system allows for part of the "right" criteria to be baked into the compilation, giving a hard block if it doesn't at least pass that.
I've had reasonably good luck having Claude generate Rust code that performs well.
yeah, Steam takes forever to start, one of the slowest apps I use. Photoshop is similarly lethargic starting up.
> Maybe it's still in A/B testing or something
Are you on the beta branch? It doesn't look like its in stable yet (Settings --> Interface --> Client Beta Participation)
It’s similar for the productivity/launcher app Raycast. They’re trying to find new USPs compared to the many copycats.
Not really a war. Steam updated their client the day before Epic decided to mouth off. Kinda hilarious actually.
Surprise it’s speed wars between Electron apps. Steam is based on Chromium/Electron.
i don't care how fast it is beyond a certain point. What is more shocking is all the bugs that vibe coding landed epic. I can't imagine shipping software at this scale in this state.
I'd imagine one can now focus on creating a client for a single OS and having the AI do the porting to others as it would essentially be a translation.
Perhaps it will bring back native apps because supporting other platforms is less laborious.
Hopefully LLM models and harnesses improve to where Chromium or Electron apps can be more trivially converted to native apps. You're paying for tokens for downstream compute efficiency across the user base.
People still talk about "Vibe coding" or implying "vibe coded" stuff is poor quality
Imo it's just the only way to write software now. Opus 5.5 is better at coding than humans. Human code is slop.
It's nice but a low bar. Steam pioneered crappy Chrome-based desktop apps before Electron existed, which is also why it's so hard to run Steam in Wine. It has a longer startup and shutdown process (they even call it that) than my entire OS.
Epic, EA, etc then made their own similar launchers. Of course all of them also want to launch when Windows boots, update constantly, and not close when you press close.