Epic Games Launcher Preview

Project intro

The biggest company to ever say the words out loud: Epic's official announcement for its new launcher preview opens with "Programming is hard. So, instead of doing that, we vibe coded a new Epic Games Launcher that's way faster and more responsive than the current one, and has a new look." The Epic Games Store account put it even more bluntly on X: "We vibe coded the Epic Games Launcher to be faster than the other guy." This is not a weekend toy. General manager Martin Keely told The Verge that "we definitely had agents write and review all of the code" while the team "managed that process" and "supervised the entirety" — a from-scratch rewrite of both the store and the launcher shell on a new architecture, built through most of 2026. The payoff Epic claims: 5.47-second cold starts (vs. 10.07 for Steam, per an independent lab Epic commissioned), a library that loads 30 times faster, a 300 MB footprint, and — for the first time ever — a native Linux version alongside Windows and macOS. It is still a preview: some social and account features are missing, and early users have posted their share of bugs. But as the largest-scale "vibe coded" ship in software history, it belongs in the record. Free to download from the official preview site.