Epic's vibe-coded launcher boots in 5.47s. Valve patched Steam to 5.23s within a day
Epic marketed its new launcher as faster than Steam. According to one outlet's benchmark, Valve shipped a small client update within 24 hours and took the cold-boot race back.
Epic Games Launcher V2 preview, which Epic built with AI assistance, starts in about 5.47 seconds against Steam's 5.23 after Valve's quick patch, though Epic still restores from the tray faster (0.36s vs 0.42s).
The stopwatch did not survive HN. A commenter who timed both launchers got 10-15 seconds for a cold Steam boot, and others replied that the faster client had already been sitting in Steam's beta channel.
A launcher race measured in tenths of a second
Epic released a preview of Epic Games Launcher V2 on October 14, 2026, and Respawn First describes it as vibe-coded, meaning built with AI assistance. Epic pitched it as faster than Steam, long criticized for slow loading. Valve answered within 24 hours with a small client update. The outlet's approximate numbers:
| Client | Cold boot | Tray restore | Architecture |
|---|---|---|---|
| Epic Games Launcher V2 (preview) | ~5.47 s | ~0.36 s | AI-assisted |
| Steam (post-patch) | ~5.23 s | ~0.42 s | Optimized modular CEF |
The article also lists about 18 features Epic's client lacks, among them user reviews, guides, trading cards, an item marketplace, Remote Play, Big Picture mode and family sharing. Its verdict: targeted optimization of a decades-old platform can still beat an AI speedrun.
The 5.23-second Steam may be a beta build
The outlet's benchmark did not hold up in the thread. A commenter who timed both launchers on their own machine got different numbers for Steam:
"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." — commenter who timed both launchers
A reply asked whether they were on the beta branch, since the faster client "doesn't look like its in stable yet". Another commenter said the build had sat in the beta channel for some time and gets promoted to the general channel every now and then. A kernel and hypervisor engineer at AWS went further and called it "a planned update since long before. Just a coincidence in timelines." That is a commenter's claim, not a Valve statement. Another reader asked for the obvious control: Steam's startup numbers before and after the update, on the same device as Epic's.
Why Valve never bothered
The same sub-thread asked why Valve waited. A developer whose bio lists Guild Wars, Firefox and Unity work thought the answer was boring:
"The typical user may have Steam launch at startup or launch it once after booting their PC and then leave it running for days or weeks." — game developer with Guild Wars, Firefox and Unity credits
A commenter with 94k karma guessed the timing pointed at the Steam Frame instead: a headset that is "probably booting while it is strapped to your face and completely obscuring your vision", where every boot second is felt.
Optimizing with AI is trivial, says one commenter, and the pushback
A commenter with 23k karma rejected the outlet's moral that targeted optimization beat an AI speedrun:
"Optimizing a project with AI is one of the most trivial things you can do with AI." — commenter who sped up their own terminal app with a benchmark script and an LLM
They said they would not believe Valve's engineers avoid AI either, and that with a good benchmark script a model made their terminal app faster, with less memory, than ghostty and kitty. One reply disagreed: for an engineer who knows what they are doing, LLMs are "of very limited use". A programmer who says they enjoy prompting LLMs less than programming split the difference: both teams likely used AI-assisted coding, so "vibe coded" should go.
The cost side came from a commenter with 40k karma, who said that telling an agent to "keep working till everything loads inside 100 milliseconds" ends in "a super hideous codebase" with a custom memory allocator and handwritten assembly. A reply saw nothing wrong with either, as long as the result is reliable.
Chromium inside a launcher is a trade-off, not an accident
When a commenter asked why anyone puts Chrome in everything, the answer came from a former Wine hacker at CodeWeavers who now works in security:
"Steam is an app that is shipped to 3 platforms and at least 2 architectures; the web platform is a platform- and architecture-agnostic target; and there is an extremely large set of tools and large developer pool to pull from." — former CodeWeavers Wine developer
If Steam's faster client was already in beta, the "within a day" in the headline belongs to the story, not to Valve. The race then says little about AI against human engineers, and the comparison that would settle it is stable against stable, same machine, before and after.
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