@ycombinator: One of the biggest surprises in AI over the last few years has been how well coding agents generalize beyond software. …

One of the biggest surprises in AI over the last few years has been how well coding agents generalize beyond software. In a recent essay, MIT professor Philip Isola 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. In this episode of Decoded, we're joined by the founders of @theWaddleLabs and @Robocurve, two of the startups whose work helped drive this realization. They're working at the frontier of using general-purpose models to control robots, and their recent demos helped inspire the growing conversation around robot-use agents. Together, we dig into the research behind that idea, from code-as-policies and vision-language-action models to the harnesses and evals needed to make these systems work in the real world. 00:00 — What Are Robot-Use Agents? 02:11 — From Vision-Language-Action Models to General LLMs 04:07 — The Bitter Lesson for Robotics 07:04 — How Coding Agents Learned to Control Robots 10:41 — How Robots Learn From Experience 14:22 — The Harness as a Form of Robot Intelligence 16:14 — Watching Astra Control a Robot 20:55 — Why General Models May Win in Robotics 26:05 — How Close Are General-Purpose Robots?