AI was "used as a tool as part of [its] development process" to "allow a small team to rewrite the code base and be able to launch it faster across platforms"

Epic Games has released a beta version of its new launcher, claiming it is 46% faster than Steam from cold start to the store page.

The launcher, currently available in preview mode, is also reportedly 14% faster than its competitor when restoring from system tray to library.

"The library loads 30 times faster [than in the previous launcher]," Martin Keely, vice president and general manager of Epic Games Store, told IGN. "The startup is twice as fast. And it's a small footprint, only 300mb. That was another thing that we wanted to continue to make as small as possible to support the wide range of hardware that players have."

"It's been rebuilt entirely from the ground up," Keely continued. "So this is a completely new tech stack, a complete new rewrite of both the shell, which has the download manager, library, and the app itself, as well as the new store architecture. So features like discover and product detail pages, those have all been rewritten."

In a blog post, Epic stated that the rebuilt launcher is "vibe coded," a term referring to coding with AI.

When asked how much the launcher was built with AI, Keely told IGN that AI was "used as a tool as part of [its] development process."

"It's obviously an issue that's of high visibility at the moment across the industry, but for us, it made us more efficient and allowed a small team to rewrite the code base and be able to launch it faster across platforms, support Windows and Mac, and we're going to have a Linux version as well."

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