The team at Bluesky has built another app — and this time it’s not a social network, but an AI assistant that lets you design your own algorithm, create custom feeds, and one day vibe-code your own app.
At the Atmosphere conference over the weekend, Bluesky’s former CEO Jay Graber, now chief innovation officer, and Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee unveiled the AI app, called Attie, for the first time. Conference attendees will be the first beta testers for the new experience, which leverages Anthropic’s Claude under the hood to create an agent social app built on Bluesky’s underlying protocol, the AT protocol (or atproto for short).
“It’s a new product — it’s not part of the Bluesky app,” interim CEO Toni Schneider explained in an interview. (In addition to his CEO role, Schneider is a partner at Bluesky backer True Ventures.) “We’ve launched a lot of things inside Bluesky — Starter Packs and custom feeds and all that kind of stuff. This is a standalone product, and it’s the first one built by Jay’s new team.”
With Attie, anyone will be able to build their own custom feed just by entering commands in natural language, the same as if they were chatting with any other AI chatbot. To use the app, people log in with their Atmosphere login (which means their login to any app running on atproto, which includes Bluesky). Attie will immediately understand what you’ve been talking about, what kinds of things you like, and more, because Bluesky and the wider ecosystem are open systems that share data across apps.
You can ask Attie questions, e.g. which posts you’d like to see or repost, and you can use the app to curate your own custom feed, customized for you.
“You control it, you shape it without having to write code or know how to set up these feeds,” says Schneider. “It’s the beginning of just having a lot more people able to build on top of the atmosphere.”
Additionally, he adds, “It’s an AI product, but it’s an AI product that’s very human-focused… We think AI is a very powerful technology, but we want to make sure we’re using it to build things that really benefit people.”
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At launch, Attie can be used to build and view these feeds, which will later be available to you in Bluesky or any other atproto app. Over time, the plan is to allow Attie’s users to vibe-code their own social apps as well as build tools for other people.
Schneider says Graber and her team started working on the app a few months ago, which was around the same time she decided to return to building instead of running the company.
“I think she realized there was so much more that she wanted to build and just doing the CEO job kept her busy and she felt like she wanted more time,” Schneider tells TechCrunch. “As she spent more time, [and] got released, I think it became clear that this is her happy place. She is a great leader and visionary and we want her to build more things and not worry about running the business,” he says.
Graber says today that AI is being used by the big platforms to serve themselves, not their users, by trying to increase people’s time spent in their apps, harvest data and control their algorithms.
“We believe AI should serve people, not platforms,” Graber said in his announcement about Attie. “An open protocol puts this power directly in the hands of users. You can use it to build your own feeds, create software that works the way you want it to, and find signal in the noise.”
Graber’s decision to refocus on protocol and product was followed by the company’s announcement that it now has $100 million in additional funding from a round that closed last year. The team hopes the news serves as a signal to the wider community that Bluesky will still be around.
“It means we have over three years of runway, which is great. It means stability and security for the rest of the ecosystem,” Schneider told TechCrunch. It also means Bluesky’s team has time to tackle the bigger challenges ahead, which include adding privacy controls to the protocol and finding a way to monetize the 43.4 million-user social network.
One thing that Schneider assures us is not in the works, however, is any crypto integration — despite the financial backing of several crypto investors. This is something that had worried some Bluesky users, who feared that the app would be filled with crypto scams or become a payment tool.
“These are the kinds of investors that were attracted to crypto because of its decentralization, and they invested in things built on blockchain that were super decentralized,” Schneider says of Bluesky’s backers in the crypto space. “This is decentralized socially, so it suits those who are invested in believing in the platform and ecosystem opportunity.”
Instead, the company can experiment with other ways of making money. The team has not yet decided if Attie will eventually require a fee, as it is only a private beta for now. Other ideas being tossed around include subscriptions and hosting services for those who want to host their own communities on the protocol.
Schneider, the former CEO of Automattic, home of the WordPress.com publishing platform, sees the potential for Atmosphere as similar to WordPress in this way.
“At the center of [the Atmosphere] is a completely open system so anyone can participate,” he says. “You can have all these independent, decentralized pieces working together. With WordPress, it became a huge ecosystem with billions of dollars—over $10 billion a year now—flowing through it.”
Schneider continues, “So it’s become very large, even though it’s completely decentralized. And that’s what we’re hoping for is that the Atmosphere has that same ability for a lot of these apps and services to co-exist and work together and build an ecosystem.”