Optimizing a project with AI is one of the most trivial things you can do with AI.
I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI, especially for something as trivial as "hey claude rank the top causes of slow startup" -> "oh okay now fix". The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
Once I had a good benchmark script, Opus 4.8 or whatever made my terminal app faster with less memory than ghostty and kitty. It's not even interesting.
The dark forest hypothesis is that we can't find any alien life because it's dangerous to broadcast your existence and location to competitors. So rational thing for every alien civilian to do (and arguably for us) is to keep quiet.
But what does it mean in this context?
So people who think AI is actually a really useful tool and that using it to make your project better will imagine that everyone who makes things better today uses AI at least a little, and assumes they don't talk about it because they don't want to get yelled at. Meanwhile, if you think AI does bad work (or is often used badly) you can ascribe bad software to bad uses of the tool. We can never know for sure because people don't talk about it.
[1] I happen to agree with this dichotomy but that belief precedes AI
Your "dark forest" analogy sounds reasonable but Epic's outright admission of "vibe coding" is a bit of a footgun considering how rabidly anti-AI the folks on sites like Reddit are. If they had just been like, "it's faster and supports Linux" they would be the darling of the internet.
https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3mxp...
I don't see why not. They clearly know what they are doing at Valve, and for an engineer who knows what he's doing, LLMs are of very limited use.
That's not even getting to some of the "missing" features.
No Community marketplace for in-game items
No Direct player-to-player item trading
No Digital trading cards, levelling, and points shop
I hope more application developers "forget" to add these features.
Anyway, what are useful features of Steam:
- their dedication to getting Windows games running on Linux (to see off the existential threat Microsoft poses to them, but nonetheless greatly appreciated)
- community forums / screenshots / artwork / guides etc. for every product. Very useful if the game vendor doesn't have its own, and most game vendors don't
- that Steam Sales encourage vendors to offer games at much more reasonable prices (e.g. a few pounds/dollars/etc.) for what is effectively a license, revocable at any time, not a real purchase. £60? Ha ha fuck off, I'm waiting for the sale when it's £5
- also, as far as I've seen, every game distributed can still be downloaded today. People may complain that publishers update a title e.g. to remove licensed music 10 years later... but you can still download the old version with some trickery. And I've never seen Steam actively remove downloads for existing customers, I've only seen games removed from the store so no future customers
- pirates have found that most games, if their only DRM is Steamworks, are incredibly easy to crack. I am very glad Steam has convinced most publishers to use that alone and nothing worse, and I curse publishers who insist on their own DRM, their own launcher, etc. If Valve goes tits-up, I have a lot of confidence most of peoples libraries will still be playable with a little bit of cracking.
There are other useful features, even if Valve is getting rich and fat off selling gambling and day-trading to teenagers.
Fundamentally Valve has built up a lot of trust with the gaming community, and other than microtransactions and gambling, I think it's very fair to say they've been a net good for both the PC gaming community; as well as the ecosystem.
Proton is a great example.
It took them 10 years to make Linux a competetive gaming platform.
They invested in VR early and still do a lot for this niche market.
They brought back hanfheld PC from being niche chinese devices to being mainstrean and maintain support for Steam Deck for 5 years.
As game developer I do find 30% cut abysmal, but it's not any worse than consoles and I dont like Epic as a gamer for being awfully anti-consumer. I certainly dont want PC game market to be controlled by chinese Tencent subsidiaries.
Valve rightly get a lot of flak for the gambling and high % cut, but you do get a functional useful service in return at least, that doesn't appear to be actively trying to screw you over
FTFY. Steam forums are a cesspoll most often than not. No, we do not want a easy accessible place where people can spew their crap on the internet. It's either moderated and useful or it shouldn't exists.
To pick a random game's forum: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1623940/discussions/ we find:
- bug reports, feedback to the devs, etc.
- asking for help in the game
- story discussion
- requests for games like this one
- concern troll (locked)
- begging for the game to be released on GOG
Seems above board to me. I've also seen plenty of trolling, incivility and unreasonable expectations from manchildren, but they tend to get locked.
...and the hardware ecosystem, too. I just got my Steam controller last week, and it's wonderful. It's so good I'm playing Civ with it. Civ! On a gamepad!
Bonus points, this is the text from the post.
> How out of touch can you be as a company, this is embarrassing
Rocket league used to have a Linux build, then epic decided to kill that off entirely.
I recently bought the steam frame. It's years past when I would have wanted this VR headset the most, but half the reason I bought it was to support Valve's R&D with Linux desktop support, arm JIT translation, etc.
People bitch and moan about "voting with your wallet", then you have a company that tons of people continually vote with their wallet for, then people complain about others defending the one company that doesn't seem to want to screw their userbase over.
Sure Steam has some blind spots for the very sweaty semi-pro gamer. I don't care about virtual stickers and little treats. I care that all my games run on my Linux desktop after years of devs not giving a shit and other companies being openly hostile.
Valves competitors suck. Their VR competitor is Meta which in a just world would not exist as an organization. Their gaming marketplace competitor is Epic, which produces the character-slop extraction shooter and a launcher that gets more annoying to use every time I open it.
The other "competitors" if you can even call them that, are microsoft who has basically deleted a dozen game studios in the last year via moneyball, and other game companies like EA and Ubisoft who routinely delete purchased games and tell the users to go suck it.
Valve is basically the only company out there who is resisting the constant urge to make everything shitty to increase investor profits. They stay private and everyone loves what they do with that power. I'm sure a ton of fail-son PE bros are dying for the chance to buy out valve and turn everything it's ever done to absolute dogshit. We'd be getting half-life 3, 4, 5, 6, mobile, etc and they'd all be shit.
Why bother defending them about this specific issue though?
Either Epic is right, and this pushes Valve to improve Steam performance.
Or Epic is wrong, and then who cares? People will continue to not use the Epic store and continue to use Steam.
It just feels more "defensive" then "defending" if that framing makes sense.
People are fans of Steam (of Valve, actually) because Steam has been a boon for the gaming world and for Linux gaming in particular, in a way others (like Epic) haven't. I suscribe to this opinion. I'm just so glad gaming on Linux is mostly seamless now, I simply don't care anymore for which OS a game was built (within reason... but then again, Windows games are not guaranteed to always run on Windows either!).
I'll happily pay to have a game on Steam vs getting it for free on Epic. Steam has been a good experience for me the past 2+ decades :)
It would be under a 'most-favoured nation' type deal, after an initial launch period (exclusive distribution for 1 year, say) if my distribution service pays the same per-view amount then I can stream/distribute your media regardless of your deals. If a producer/creator makes a work available they are required to allow it on other registered channels (no setup cost beyond actual price of downloading the content).
Essentially make rights holders honour the idea that they'd make works S available if only people would pay.
Refuse to make a work available and you'd get a warning, then it enters the public domain. The copyright deal is "things enter the pubic domain after a limited monopoly to allow recompense", enforce it. So, if eg Netflix/Sony/BBC/etc stop offering their back catalogue then the works enter the public domain.
Unfortunately literally everything is wrong with EGS specifically.
Their stance on intentionally not having user reviews because consumers shouldn't have power to react to publisher or developers decisions.
Their giving away games for free and then revoking licenses then removing them from accounts even though it was purely their own fault. They were most successful company ever back then and could certainly eat that loss.
Their shitty account system that certainly got hacked multiple times because it's the only gaming platform where someone constantly trying to access my accounts even though I'm Linux and cybersecurity nerd with random 32-char passwords. They also dont have straightforward way to change account region without trying to deal with their shitty support.
Tim Sweeney decided to make a platform to fuck over gamers and we gamers returned favour.
Things nobody has said since like 2005? A faster startup is certainly appreciated, but steam's 10 second cold launch time is hardly a big deal. Especially when everyone just leaves it running anyway. There's far more significant aspects like memory usage, game library, and general features.
I could go on. Its still the only store with acceptable linux experience sadly.
When I hear about a game on social media I often want to add it to a wishlist on Steam but I dread opening the app because I know it will take forever to open on MacOS.
I don't mind a game launcher taking time, but the store is a part of that which makes it annoying I avoid the native app for that reason.
In the web world and 7-10 seconds for a pageload is forever. Same with mobile, if you tapped an app icon and it loaded that slow it would never be tolerated.
Given that its primary purposes are to start video games that take anywhere from five to thirty+ seconds to start and to download video games and their patches which range in size between many hundreds of MBs to a hundred+ GBs, the client taking roughly ten seconds to start is no problem.
Optimize where it makes sense, yanno? I'd much rather have to "deal with" the Steam client taking ten seconds to start than to have to deal with the Epic Games Launcher's download rate being limited to 100->150 mbit/s. [0]
[0] Last I checked on this was a few years ago -like twelve months after Sea Of Thieves stopped being widely popular- so it may have improved. The absurdly slow download speeds [1] are one of the bigger reasons why I stopped using EGS.
[1] Sure, many people don't have connections any faster than that. I do. Steam saturates it, and -at the time- EGS absolutely did not and occupied 100% of one logical CPU while failing to do so.
But a game client is not a web page. You open it once (some people, on boot) and then it's just sitting there. You don't randomly starting from scratch whenever you run a game...
And even if you did, 7-10 seconds waiting for a game to start is not the same as waiting for a page to load. You can wait for the game.
A very obvious non-deck example is how bad it can be at loading and showing videos on the store page. They consistently have issues with smooth playback, this is not my network, others i know have the same issue. it’s to the point that I scroll down and look at gifs in the description for gameplay footage first. I use the discovery queue often and it’s pretty apparent.
The upsides of having a de facto monopoly, I suppose—lamentably common story in tech.
Steam is dogshit and it’s crazy they haven’t optimised it all in 20 years.
It only looks good if you compare it to the Epic client, which somehow manages to be much worse.
But for the Steam Frame, which is probably booting while it is strapped to your face and completely obscuring your vision, every second is felt much more intensely. Anything that can be done to get to first interaction sooner has a much, much larger effect on the feel of the experience.
The speed would always have been nice to have, but it moves beyond "nice to have" for the Steam Frame case into having a significant effect on how it feels to use and the out-of-box experience. Yes, you'll use sleep most of the time, but when you do a full boot or reboot, you feel the seconds.
So I wonder if it's the other way round, Epic rushed out the boast because they knew the window that it would be even remotely correct to most users was closing.
It's bad, but I wouldn't call it terrible.
It does have unresolved annoyances, like how context menus randomly stop working on Linux, and tweaking that setting (whose name I forget) on/off does little to fix them. You have to resort to using Big Picture mode, which is annoying. If they ever fix this, I'd have zero problems with the Steam client.
Mostly though I don't care about the client, I care about the games and they work seamlessly in Linux!
I’m curious what issues you have run into that you consider it terrible?
Just recently I learned Listary has a new beta written in Rust. It is fast! The previous one kept crashing. Asking AI to code Rust style, is probably a shortcut method.
Steam client was always fast, majority of load time is (and forever will be) network speed.
What’s the issue they have with South Africa?
It is fast though!
Truly something to be proud of..
Or you can download 66MB of data on a 100mbit/s internet connection in 5 seconds.
Say you need to load 1gb from disk and need to download 1MB of data from internet. It should take ~75 milliseconds to do that.
It is incredibly slow, considering Valve is a billion dollar company. This level of optimization is closer to what you would expect from a person who is programming as a hobby.
This article is completely worthless and contains zero useful information, no conclusions about anything can be derived from it.
From my own testing the Epic launcher is still significantly faster than steam at launch, but I do not know if I have gotten the update or if its on a beta branch.
Presumably people here understand how software profiling or whatever works, why can no one here see how obviously nonsensical the reporting here is.
borderline murderous eyetwitch
This feels like a strange argument given site we are on. "Why are applications so slow and bloated these days" has been a pretty constant complaint around here for many, many years.
How are you twisting more efficient software into a bad thing?
You can't really avoid a long running process for a game launcher though. It's just how they work, you need to keep track of play time and respond to any API calls from the game. But it could be a native background daemon instead of two Steam Web Helpers.
The only benefits of Tauri are the smaller application package and the fact that the runtime is always up to date (which can also be a downside). That full package doesn't live in RAM when it's running, so it's "merely" wasted disk space and not RAM. In terms of RAM it uses just as much as electron or CEF.
I disagree. I get that steam has useful features I want while in-game (e.g. invite a friend to play), but there's no reason it couldn't just run this launcher only when a steam game is running and immediately exit once it's done.
Also, I think a lot of people forget how small well written software can be -- we're talking like single or double digit megabytes. Heck there's a whole linux distro that's under 20mb.
It is a simple shell for launching already downloaded apps. This is disgrace and nothing to boast about, especially considering Valve takes 30% cut of basically PC gaming marked for making it.
Again, one may argue how useful all of this is, but it is there, and most users likely have the app on a OS startup anyway.
Somebody clipping how long it takes Steam to open on their computer with no other context is pretty meaningless. For all we know, it's running slower on their computer today. There's no before/after, no comparison to Epic. Yet this article just confidently asserted the figure as universal. Moronic.
1: https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/4299321840544...
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.
I did hit a couple of CSS or rendering quirks, but the rendering perf also seemed noticeably poor, and that's harder to live with.
Fwiw, what it's trying to replace (GitKraken) is slow, clunky, and resource hungry, so it's not hard to beat.
If you go Rust all the way all you need is the installer for each platform
Memory use alone is an interesting case for comparison because websites tend to have a lot more images/videos loaded than other applications. All of those PNGs and JPEGs need to be decompressed before you can paint them to the screen which makes them much larger.
I keep seeing people claim this, yet most UI software I see really doesn't do anything that complicated. It's some basic database CRUD stuff and some basic algorithms, and then all the actual effort lies in making the UI feel good.
Isn’t that what abstraction and interface is about? You can write the common business logic and presentation concerns, and then share it across each native implementation.
That is what web wrapping is in truth, but it’s just inneficient because of the huge surface area of web technologies.
… good? I want my applications to be consistent with the platform they run on, not with their own stupidity on other platforms.
Disclaimer: All mine, open-source, ai-assisted, less than 5MB each. I love rust+tauri combo.
I've had reasonably good luck having Claude generate Rust code that performs well.
The real reason rewrites to fix tech debt used to fail was that it took too long to get to feature partity & the goal posts moved constantly while you were on the rewrite team.
The sunk cost of existing code is no longer considered in a rewrite.
Maybe it was hard to write in the first place, but it is not hard to rewrite anymore, as long you've got decent tests.
Perhaps it will bring back native apps because supporting other platforms is less laborious.
Ref: https://docs.steambrew.app/developers/environment
time will tell if it can make it the way i like but.... it can definitely get far. Used 40% of my session limits on my $20/mo sub.
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 less nice when your web app launches that other service only when the other Tailscale node is up, because the agent interpreted your prompt as a hard access rule.
I have a couple of nice "vibe coded" apps I would never dream of releasing because I'm not interested in the QA, more than anything else. The problem is the other people who are not quite so considerate and think that what they tossed out in 15 minutes is of interest to the rest of the world. The value of a software package release now is more in the QA than the code.
I feel like human code is on a wide quality spectrum. The best human code is way better than what Opus 5.5 can do. But the average code, I'm not so sure.
But it also still writes awful code with poor maintainability if you don't keep a very close eye on it.
I'm not saying you have to be grateful to the millions of people whose work the AI you use was trained on, but why shit on them...
An experienced dev with Claude is better than either of them alone but you can't just point your agent at a repo and expect good results. And when people talk about vibe coding that's usually what they mean.
Yes they do. Because it is. Anyone who cares about the quality of their product is, at minimum, carefully reviewing the output from an LLM to make sure it didn't sneak in anything crazy. More likely they are writing a lot of code by hand, because that is faster than reviewing and correcting the LLM code. Competent developers do not just hand it off and say "the AI is really good so I can trust what it put out".