Nearly eight years after Epic took on Steam with its own Game Store and launcher, the Fortnite maker is deploying a new tool to give it an edge over Valve: vibe coding.

In announcing the new publicly available “Preview” build of its Epic Games Launcher, Epic writes that “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.” And while that might sound a little tongue-in-cheek, Epic Games Store General Manager and VP Martin Keely told PC Gamer that the team “started from scratch” and used AI as “a tool to write and review new features and new capabilities from the ground up in a different tech stack than what we had previously.” The goal, Keely said, was to “look at functionality that existed [in the current Epic Games Launcher] and [say] we want to replicate that, but not the code itself.”

Speaking to IGN, Keely clarified that using AI to code the new Launcher “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.”

We vibe coded the Epic Games Launcher to be faster than the other guy.

Don’t believe us? Test it out for yourself in Preview:
https://t.co/pdtAeEIri4 https://t.co/aMxojUUVPV

— Epic Games Store (@EpicGames) October 14, 2026

The focus on startup speed extends to Epic’s social media announcement, which once again stresses that “we vibe coded the Epic Games Launcher to be faster than the other guy.” Ars’s own testing confirms that the new Launcher goes from a cold start to the store page a few seconds faster than Steam (assuming no login or update issues get in the way). Epic also claims the new Launcher can restore from the system tray to the Library screen slightly faster than Steam, though the claimed difference of 0.06 seconds in this seems so small as to be unnoticeable (and was in our testing).