Bluesky just unveiled something unexpected: a standalone AI assistant called Attie that lets anyone build custom social feeds using plain English. The app, first presented at the Atmosphere conference this weekend, runs on Anthropic’s Claude and represents Bluesky’s first product outside its core social network, TechCrunch AI reports.
Former Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, now chief innovation officer, and CTO Paul Frazee showed off Attie to conference attendees, who’ll serve as the first beta testers.
What Attie Actually Does
The core idea is simple but powerful: talk to an AI chatbot, get a personalized feed.
- Natural language feed building: type what you want to see in conversational language, no coding required. Attie creates a custom feed based on your instructions.
- Deep context awareness: sign in with your Atmosphere login (any atproto app, including Bluesky), and Attie immediately understands your interests, posts, and preferences. That’s possible because the AT Protocol ecosystem shares data openly across apps.
- Feed curation and discovery: ask Attie what posts you might like, what’s worth reposting, or have it filter signal from noise.
- Future: vibe-coded social apps: the roadmap includes letting users build their own social tools and apps through Attie, essentially vibe-coding on top of the protocol.
“You control it, you shape it, without having to write code or know how to set up these feeds,” interim CEO Toni Schneider told TechCrunch AI.
Why This Matters
What stands out here is the philosophical positioning. Graber drew a sharp line between how major platforms use AI (to maximize engagement and harvest data) and what Bluesky wants Attie to be.
“We think AI should serve people, not platforms,” Graber said during the announcement. “An open protocol puts this power directly in users’ hands.”
This is a direct shot at the recommendation algorithms running Instagram, TikTok, and X. Those systems optimize for the platform’s goals. Attie flips the model: you tell the AI what you want, and it builds the algorithm for you.
It’s also significant that Bluesky chose Anthropic’s Claude as the underlying model. With the agentic AI space heating up, this is a real-world implementation of an AI agent that operates within a social protocol, not just a chatbot wrapper.
Availability and Pricing
Attie is currently in private beta, limited to Atmosphere conference attendees. The team hasn’t decided on pricing yet. Options on the table include:
- A potential subscription fee for Attie itself
- Hosting services for communities on the protocol
- Broader subscription models across the ecosystem
Feeds built in Attie will eventually be accessible inside Bluesky and other atproto apps.
The Bigger Picture
Bluesky also confirmed it has $100 million in additional funding from a round that closed last year, giving it three-plus years of runway. The 43.4 million-user network still needs to figure out monetization, but Schneider explicitly ruled out crypto integration, despite backing from crypto-adjacent investors.
Schneider, formerly CEO of Automattic (WordPress.com’s parent company), sees the Atmosphere ecosystem following a WordPress-like trajectory: an open core that spawns a massive ecosystem. WordPress now drives over $10 billion a year through its decentralized network of services and plugins.
Granted, that’s an ambitious comparison. But Attie represents the first concrete step toward making the AT Protocol accessible to non-developers. If anyone can build a custom feed or a simple social app by just describing what they want, the barrier to building on Bluesky’s protocol drops to nearly zero.
The big question is whether users will actually want AI-curated feeds they control, or whether the convenience of platform-driven algorithms wins out. Bluesky is betting on the former.
More details are available in the full report from TechCrunch AI.