The Bluesky team has created 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.
Bluesky’s at the weekend Atmosphere conference former CEO, Jay Grabernow chief innovation officer and Bluesky CTO Paul Frezeeintroduced an artificial intelligence program called Attie for the first time. Conference attendees will be early beta testers for a new experiment that uses Anthropic’s Claude under the hood to create an agent social application built on top of Bluesky’s core 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 said in an interview. (In addition to his role as CEO, Schneider is a partner at Bluesky backer True Ventures.) “We’ve launched a lot of things within Bluesky — Starter Packs and custom tapes and all that sort of thing. It’s a stand-alone product, and it’s the first product built by Jay’s new team.”
With Attie, anyone can create their own custom feed just by typing natural language commands, just like any other AI chatbot. To use the app, people will sign in with an Atmosphere login (meaning a login for any app that runs on atproto, including Bluesky). Attie will instantly understand what you’re talking about, what you like, and more, because Bluesky and the wider ecosystem are open systems that share data between apps.
You can ask Attie questions, such as what posts you’d like to see or repost, and use the app to manage your own personal feed, customized just for you.
“You control it, you shape it without having to write code or know how to set up these tapes,” says Schneider. “This is the beginning of more people being able to build on top of the Atmosphere.”
Plus, 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 create things that really benefit people.”
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Initially, Attie can be used to create and view these feeds, which will then be available to you in Bluesky or any other proto software. Over time, the plan is to allow Attie users to vibe-code their own social apps, as well as build tools for other people.
Graber and his team started working on the app a few months ago, Schneider says, when he decided to return to construction instead of running the company.
“I think he realized there was more he wanted to build, and just doing the CEO job kept him busy and felt like he wanted more time,” Schneider told TechCrunch. “As he spent more time (and) loosened up, it became clear that this is his happy place. He’s an amazing leader and visionary, and we want him to build more things and not worry about running the company,” he says.
Today, AI is being used by major platforms to serve themselves, not their users, by trying to increase the amount of time people spend in their apps, collect data and control their algorithms, Graber says.
“We think AI should serve people, not platforms,” Graber said in a statement about Attie. “An open protocol puts this power directly into the hands of users. You can use it to create your own feeds, create software that works the way you want, and find signals in noise.”
The company’s announcement followed Graber’s decision to once again focus on the protocol and product. now has $100 million in additional funding from the tour that closed last year. The team hopes the news serves as a signal to the wider community that Bluesky will continue to be around.
“It means we have more than three years of runway, which is great. It means stability and security for the rest of the ecosystem,” Schneider tells TechCrunch. It also means the Bluesky team has time to tackle bigger challenges ahead, including adding privacy controls to the protocol and figuring out ways to monetize the social network. 43.4 mln users.
Schneider assures us that any crypto integration is not in the works, despite the financial support of many crypto investors. This is something that worries some Bluesky users who fear that the app will be filled with crypto scams or become a payment tool.
“These were investors who were attracted to crypto because of its decentralization, and they invested in things that were built on the blockchain, super decentralized,” Schneider says of Bluesky’s backers in the crypto space. “It’s decentralized social, so it suits those who are invested in believing in the platform and the ecosystem opportunity.”
Instead, the company can experiment with other means of monetization. The team has not yet decided whether or not Attie will charge, as this is only a private beta for now. Subscriptions and hosting services for those looking to host their own communities on the protocol are other ideas being discussed.
Schneider, the former CEO of Automattic, home of the WordPress.com publishing platform, sees the potential of Atmosphere in being similar to WordPress in this way.
“At the heart of (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’s become a huge ecosystem with billions of dollars—now more than $10 billion a year—flowing through it.”
Schneider continues, “So it’s been huge, even though it’s completely decentralized. What we hope is that Atmosphere has a similar ability for many of these applications and services to live together, work together, and build an ecosystem.”
