I would go one step farther - if you're vibe coding, skip Tauri altogether. I've been on-and-off vibecoding a GitKraken replacement using egui instead, and the memory footprint is very low. Otherwise can't tell the difference, as I'm not reading the code either way.

You can just skip Tauri entirely and get true native apps. No web wrapping required

Like these https://goodapps.store/

Disclaimer: All mine, open-source, ai-assisted, less than 5MB each. I love rust+tauri combo.

Much better it can give us just webview in wry and winit without tauri bloat

Tauri doesn't solve the problems Electron solves. It just externalizes the solution so things can subtly stop working randomly.

> forcing function to clean up tech debt

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.

The new version of Epic is based on Tauri. Also written in JS and probably React (haven't decompiled it yet) but the web runtime is part of Windows instead of shipped with the app so it takes less disk space and RAM. And you can write perf sensitive code in Rust for even more speedup.

Interesting, I didn't know they moved to a Chromium based desktop application. But honestly, I don't feel like there's any performance issues with the steam desktop client (I'm running it on Fedora, but I'm assuming performance is relatively similar on different platforms).

Ref: https://docs.steambrew.app/developers/environment

They already are. I asked opus 5.5 to plan out and begin building a swift version of my electron notes app, using a similar architecture / feature set. I hut enter and honestly forgot about it. 2 hours later im reading slack while making my next round of coffee, and my session is interrupted by a native app opening on my phone (the model installed it for me to test). It.... has 2/3 of the features already and looks awesome, holy crap. It skipped my suggestion to use the Lexical (web) editor and is.... using. platform native one.

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.

I wonder what best practices here look like at this point. In my world, we've moved past skills for something like this, having porting helper/validator/etc things be harness level is measurably better than what skills look like right now. The open plugin spec is certainly an improvement (namely in packaging and distribution)- but, really you'd be leaving perf on the table if you were not to tune your harness. I wonder if something like dsh, pi, or other extensible (coding) harnesses have something like a concept of "harness as an extension".

It’s just that the vibe coded stuff has so many assumptions baked in, that you will be constantly surprised about the behaviors your slopped codebase has. Doesn’t matter for small tools, where you’ll be delighted that clicking that one label copies it to your clipboard - nice one, Claude, that’s delightful!

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.

It's because no matter how 'good' the AI output is, "vibe coding" is strongly associated with "completely unreviewed and untested". LLMs have brought the skill floor straight through the ground and into the depths of hell, so people are doubly cautious with it because there's a very good chance with any vibe coded app that there's not a single person in the world that truly understands what it actually does just behind the scenes. It could be completely fine, or it could be breaking your system or uploading your sensitive data somewhere because the vibe coder provided flawed instructions or the LLM decided to make an unexpected 'optimization'. Wanna roll the dice and find out which one it is?

I'm reserving "vibe coding" in my head for "the programming style where you just prompt your way around without even looking at the code and only caring if your happy path works".

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.

Yeah I'm really impressed by what Opus 5.5 can manage.

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.

I feel bad for your employer

> Human code is slop.

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...

Opus 5.5 is impressive and I'm happy using it to write a ton of code.

But it also still writes awful code with poor maintainability if you don't keep a very close eye on it.

Trust me I know what it's like. I do a lot of it. Even with Opus you still have to guide it aggressively or your codebase turns to slop.

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.

> People still talk about "Vibe coding" or implying "vibe coded" stuff is poor quality

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".

Creating slop was already a solved problem before AI. AI just made it much more efficient.

human code is slop. tell us all what the LLMs were trained on? slop?

I'll try: It's dangerous to broadcast your AI use to competitors, users and the public for fear of being attacked.

It's "sort of" a dark forest problem because admitting you're using AI is socially risky. Indeed, this entire thread is built on the idea that Epic's lazy use of AI has been bested by the savvy & righteous programmers at Valve[1].

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

Epic Games wants to make an "AI-first" game, so they need to push "vibe coding" onto the gaming audiences to get them to accept it before they lay off people and ask $69 for a game where the art is made by an AI model.

https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3mxp...

> They clearly know what they are doing at Valve

Yeah, at promoting child gambling. Not sure about games

This is getting tiring.

I think the "fanboyism" of Steam is a bit different to platform wars like PS vs Xbox, etc.

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.

Don't forget big picture mode. Nowadays Steam is a better game console than an actual game console. That's the only way I use it anymore.

...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!

> unmodderated community forums

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.

> Steam hasn't meaningfully changed in a decade

They completely rewrote their UI? Do you not remember the old library? The old downloads page? The old big picture mode? You may be suffering from selective memory

I "defend" valve because they're seemingly the only company that cares about the end-user linux experience.

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.

hear, hear!

I do genuinely dislike their game launcher, but also I don't want to have multiple game launchers even if it was working well given it's just overhead.

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 :)

I wouldnt mind Epic if their platform wasn't so intentionally anti-consumer. I dont have any issues with Epic other products - I dont play Fortnite, but Unreal was net positive for gamedev and Epic also sponsored a lot of open sourcr software including Godot which is nice of them.

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.

luckily, epic is worth hating.

The client is definetly terrible. Slow to start. I have frikkin 2 different topbars that seemingly have similar options. Way to many locations for settings, spammy store page. Hard to navigate game library. The fact that the store page often is a better look at the game than the one in the library. Impossible to see what dlcs that is enabled unless you happen to borrow the game from someone in your family. Why van games corrupt and un and reinstalling is the only fix (verifying does sometimes not catch it).

I could go on. Its still the only store with acceptable linux experience sadly.

> A faster startup is certainly appreciated, but steam's 10 second cold launch time is hardly a big deal.

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.

I definitely don't leave the Steam launcher running all the time, on macOS it takes up a non-trivial amount of memory that I want to have available for other apps. I launch Steam when I want to play some games, then quit it when I want to do other stuff.

When I browse the store, I specifically do it in a browser because the client is so unpleasant to use. For launching games I have no choice. I love Steam as a concept and company, but it is not an enjoyable app to use by its own merits, in my opinion.

Startup is one thing, using the program is another. Steamwebhelper, the chromium based tool that renders everything web based in the client is awfully optimized and likes to noticeably utilize the CPU even when minimized on the tray, yet somehow always serves me with a blank page whenever I go store, community etc. on first try, I have to click the label multiple times to get anything. You can't even kill the process, because it's immediately relaunched, I just wish there was an option to disable it and only get the library.

the steam client is definitely kind of terrible, maybe i’m just biased because i have used steam deck since launch which uses big picture, but there have been bugs in the client that were extremely annoying and obvious that took years to fix (for example, closing a store page and losing page position, but then the page would scroll up when pressing down on a controller for years).

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.

I find it very annoying. But not annoying enough to make me stop using Steam.

The upsides of having a de facto monopoly, I suppose—lamentably common story in tech.

Steam crashes my window manager every time I close it now. This started a couple weeks ago.

it changed from a small, fast native client to webshit quite a few years ago. the performance is acceptable now but it is indeed magnitudes slower. it also steals focus several times during startup which is the single greatest thing a developer of client software can do to be a shithead

Well two of us have said it just today so you’ll have to update your assumption.

Steam is dogshit and it’s crazy they haven’t optimised it all in 20 years.

the steam client on my current windows system is using 115mb of ram. I don't care how long it takes to start up, i just start it and leave it running.

I said it back when they first migrated to Electron, and I'll say it again now. It's not the slowest thing ever by modern standards, but it's definitely not fast, either, and is pretty bloated in terms of memory usage.

It only looks good if you compare it to the Epic client, which somehow manages to be much worse.

I definitely don’t leave the resource hog Steam running, because it can be slow and terrible. I turned off Steam Overlay and Notifications to get substantial speed up improvements.

They might've pushed it from beta to stable reactively, but an improvement to startup times was in their beta channel last month: https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4397053?emclan=103...

Good to know. I would have hated if Valve was capable of such optimization in 24h all this time but didn't if it wasn't to answer Epic.

They released it like a day or two after Epic right? That is quite a coincidence ...

Personally, my longest and loudest complaint with steam is reliably putting a long hold on inputs when it starts up. If I launch steam on startup then I can't start doing anything else until it's done because it will jump on top of everything else when it feels like it. This is a particularly bad sin because this behavior is a way for credentials to leak.

> You can't really avoid a long running process for a game launcher though

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.

> They would have to rewrite the app and use Tauri/WebView2 or native code. CEF blows up your memory use because you ship a whole ass Chromium browser.

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.

Why would features like cloud saves cause startup time to be long. That shouldn't be in the critical path.

I was in my 30s before I understood that people say "could care less" when they mean "couldn't care less." I'll never understand how people can say it without wanting to claw out their larynx as badly as it makes me want to claw out my eardrums, but I'm gradually learning acceptance -- and how not to let my horror show on my face.