Why A Y Combinator Startup Tackling Ai Agents For Windows Gave Up And Pivoted

A startup called Pig.dev that participated successful Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch was moving connected a imaginable revolutionary idea: AI agentic tech to power a Microsoft Windows desktop.

But successful May, nan founder announced he was abandoning nan tech and pivoting his institution to thing wholly different: Muscle Mem, a cache strategy for AI agents that allows them to offload repeatable tasks. 

An early-stage YC institution pivoting is thing retired of nan ordinary, of course. What’s absorbing — and what sparked a move speech connected Thursday’s Y Combinator podcast — is that Pig was moving connected machine use, 1 of nan large areas that needs to beryllium solved for agents to beryllium genuinely useful successful nan workforce. Another institution – and different YC alum – that is tackling that for nan browser is called Browser Use.

Browser Use surged to fame erstwhile Chinese agentic instrumentality Manus, which relied connected it, went viral. Browser Use fundamentally scans nan buttons and elements of a website to move them into a much digestible, “text-like” format for agents, helping nan AI understand really to navigate and usage nan website.

During nan Y Combinator podcast, released Thursday, partner Tom Blomfield likened Pig arsenic nan Browser Use for Windows desktops. The podcast featured Amjad Massad, nan laminitis and CEO of celebrated vibe-coding startup Replit.

Massad, Blomfield, and YC partner David Lieb were discussing really semipermanent machine usage of hours, alternatively than minutes, was still a stumbling artifact for agents. As nan discourse model for reasoning grows, an agent’s accuracy wavers while LLM costs increase.

“The proposal I would springiness founders coming is taking either Browser Use aliases Windows automation pinch Pig and trying to use that into enterprise, into a vertical industry,” Blomfield suggested. 

Massad agreed, “The infinitesimal that exertion works, those 2 companies are going to do really, really well,” he said.

But alas, Pig’s laminitis Erik Dunteman has already fixed up connected nan idea. In his station successful May he explained that he astatine first wanted to tally a unreality API merchandise (a communal measurement of delivering AI tech). But his customers didn’t want that. So he tried trading it arsenic a dev tool. And they didn’t want that either. 

“What users successful nan bequest app automation abstraction really want is to manus maine money, and person an automation,” he said. Essentially, they wanted to prosecute a advisor to make their desired Windows robotic process automations activity for them. 

But Dunteman didn’t want to do one-off projects. He wanted to build improvement tools. So he abandoned Pig and started moving connected an AI caching tool. Dunteman declined further remark astir his determination to ditch Windows automation, though nan Pig.dev website and Github documents stay available. 

However, Dunteman did show america his caller instrumentality was inspired by nan machine usage problem. It is chipping distant astatine it from different angle. The thought is to let nan supplier to offload repeated tasks to nan Muscle Mem service, truthful nan supplier tin attraction connected reasoning for caller problems and separator cases.

“What we’re moving connected now is straight inspired by and applicable to machine use, conscionable astatine nan developer tooling layer. I stay very optimistic for machine usage arsenic ‘the past mile’,” he told TechCrunch.

That’s not to opportunity that nary 1 is moving connected Windows automation.

Probably nan institution farthest on connected that is Microsoft itself. For instance, successful April Microsoft announced it added machine usage tech to Copilot Studio for graphical personification interfaces for illustration Windows. That tech was released arsenic a investigation preview.  Plus, earlier this month, Microsoft announced an agentic instrumentality successful Windows 11 that helps extremity users negociate settings.