A startup called Pig.dev, who joined Y Combinator’s winter 2025 batch, was working on AI agent technology to control Microsoft Windows desktops.
However, in May, the founder announced that he would abandon his technology and adopt the company in a completely different way. MuscleMem is an AI agent caching system that can offload repeatable tasks.
Of course, early stage YC companies’ pivots are not normal. What’s interesting is that what sparked the dynamic conversation on Thursday’s Y Combinator Podcast was how the pigs were working on computer use. Another company, and another YC alum, are working on calling it browser use for the browser.
Using the browser surged in popularity when Chinese agent tool Manus was dependent on it. Using a browser essentially scans the buttons and elements of a website to convert it into an agent’s more digestible “text-like” format, which helps AI understand how to navigate and use the website.
During the Y Combinator Podcast released on Thursday, partner Tom Blomfield compared PIG to the use of a Windows desktop browser. The podcast featured Amjad Massad, founder and CEO of the popular Vibe Coding Startup Replica.
Massad, Blomfield and YC partner David Lieb had debated whether long-term computer use, not minutes, is still a faulty block for agents. As the context window for inference increases, the accuracy of the agent will fluctuate and the cost of LLM will increase.
“The advice we offer today to founders is to try and apply it to businesses using browsers or Windows Automation with Pig,” suggested Blomfield.
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Massad agreed. “The moment the technology works, both of these companies are really, really trying to do well,” he said.
But, alas, Pig founder Eric Duntéman has already given up on the idea. In his post in May, he explained that he initially wanted to implement a cloud API product (a common way of providing AI technology). But his clients didn’t want it. So he tried to sell it as a development tool. And they didn’t want that either.
“What users of Legacy App Automation Space actually want is to give me money and receive the automation,” he said. Essentially, they wanted to hire consultants to ensure that the Windows Robotic Process Automations they wanted was working.
However, Dunteman didn’t want to do a one-off project. He wanted to build development tools. So he abandoned the pigs and began working on AI cashing tools. Dunteman declined to further comment on his decision to abandon Windows Automation, but the Pig.dev website and GitHub documentation remain available.
But Dunteman told me that his new tool was inspired by computer use issues. It cuts it from a different angle. The idea is to allow agents to offload repetitive tasks to the muscle MEM service. This way, agents can focus on new problems and inferences on edge cases.
“All we’re working on now is the developer’s touring layer, and it’s directly in contact with computer use and applied. I’m still very optimistic about computer use as ‘The Last Mile’,” he told TechCrunch.
That doesn’t mean that no one is working on Windows Automation.
Perhaps the farthest company on top of that is Microsoft itself. For example, in April, Microsoft announced that it had added computer usage technology to Copilot Studio for graphical user interfaces such as Windows. The technology was released as a research preview. Additionally, earlier this month, Microsoft announced the Windows 11 agent tool, which helped end users manage their settings.
