From Coding Agents to Robot-Use: YC Founders on General-Purpose Robot Control
ycombinator · x · 2026-09-26
MIT professor Philip Isola recently argued that we may be entering the era of robot-use agents: general-purpose models that can control different robots, write policies, and learn new physical tasks with little or no robot-specific training.
On YC's Decoded podcast, the founders of Waddle Labs and Robocurve — two startups whose work helped drive this realization — discuss the five-plus years of research behind their conviction that LLM-controlled robotics was the right bet, and share predictions for what comes next. One of AI's biggest recent surprises has been how well coding agents generalize beyond software.
Related event: YC Decoded Explores Robot-Use Agents: Coding Agents Generalize to Robotics(6 posts)→
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