Pig.dev dropped its Windows desktop AI automation. The Y Combinator Winter 2025 startup pivoted hard in May. Founder Erik Dunteman announced he’s killing the original cloud API and dev tool idea. Instead, Pig.dev is now building Muscle Mem, a caching system to offload repeated AI agent tasks.
The shift came after customers rejected a dev tool or cloud API route. They want turnkey automation solutions—pay a consultant, get results. Dunteman refused to do one-offs, so he scrapped Windows AI control.
“What users in the legacy app automation space actually want is to hand me money, and receive an automation,” Dunteman explained.
Pig.dev’s pivot follows ongoing challenges in AI agent computer use. On Thursday’s Y Combinator podcast, partners and startup CEOs like Replit’s Amjad Massad debated this tough area. AI agents struggle with long computer sessions due to swelling context window costs and degraded accuracy.
YC partner Tom Blomfield called Pig “the Browser Use for Windows desktops.” Browser Use is an agentic startup tackling browser navigation by converting site UI into text AI can read. It gained hype when Chinese agent tool Manus went viral.
Blomfield pushed founders to take these automation tools and target enterprise or vertical industries next.
Tom Blomfield stated on the YC podcast:
“The advice I would give founders today is taking either Browser Use or Windows automation with Pig and trying to apply that into enterprise, into a vertical industry,”
Massad agreed:
“The moment that technology works, those two companies are going to do really, really well,” he said.
Dunteman says Muscle Mem tackles the computer use problem differently. Instead of automating UI directly, it lets AI agents store and reuse task solutions, focusing reasoning power on new edge cases.
“What we’re working on now is directly inspired by and applicable to computer use, just at the developer tooling layer. I remain very optimistic for computer use as ‘the last mile’,” Dunteman told TechCrunch.
Microsoft itself is pushing Windows AI automation. In April, it added UI automation tech to Copilot Studio as a research preview. Earlier this month, Windows 11 got a built-in agent tool for user settings management.
Pig.dev’s old site and GitHub remain live, but the future is Muscle Mem, not direct Windows control.
More updates expected as this space wrestles with making AI agents work smoothly over long sessions. Meanwhile, Pig.dev quietly shifts focus amid a brutal market for AI process automation tools.
