The team at Bluesky 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 your own custom feed, 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 Blusky CTO Paul Frazeeintroduced the first AI app, called Attie. Conference attendees will be early beta testers for the new experiment, which leverages the Anthropics Cloud to build an agentive social app built on 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 Tony 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 within Bluesky — starter packs and custom feeds, and all that kind of stuff. It’s a standalone product, and it’s the first thing that Jay’s new team has built.”

With Attie, anyone will be able to create a custom feed by typing commands in natural language, just as if they were chatting with any other AI chatbot. To use the app, people will sign in with their Atmosphere login (ie their login for any app that runs on atproto, including Bluesky). Attie will instantly understand what you’re 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, like what posts you might like to see or repost, and you can use the app to curate the feed as you like.

“You control it, you shape it, without having to write code or know how to set up those feeds,” Schneider says. “This is just the beginning of what a lot more people can build on top of the environment.”

Also, he adds, “It’s an AI product, but it’s an AI product that’s very people-centric … We think AI is a very powerful technology, but we want to make sure we use it to build things that really benefit people.”

At launch, Attie can be used to create 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 users to Vibcode 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, at which point he decided to return to the building rather than run the company.

“I think she realized there was more she wanted to create, and just the CEO job kept her busy, and she felt she wanted more time,” Schneider told TechCrunch. “As he spent more time, [and] Set free, I think it became clear that this was his happy place. She’s an amazing leader and visionary, and we want her to create more things and not worry about running the company.

Today, AI is being used by big platforms, rather than serving their customers, by trying to increase the time people spend in apps, harvesting data and controlling their algorithms, Graber says.

“We believe AI should serve people, not platforms,” ​​Graber said in his announcement about Attie. “An open protocol puts that power directly in the hands of users. You can use it to create your own feeds, build software that does what you want, and find signals in the noise.”

Grabber’s decision to refocus on the protocol and product comes after the company announced it had $100 million in additional funding from a round it closed last year. The team hopes the news serves as a signal to the wider community that Bluesky will 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 told TechCrunch. It also means Blusky’s team has time to tackle the big challenges ahead, including adding privacy controls to the protocol and figuring out how to monetize the social network. 43.4 million Consumers

One thing that Schneider assures us is not in the works, however, is any crypto integration — despite the financial backing of numerous crypto investors. This is something that worried some Bluesky users, who worried that the app would be overrun with crypto scams or become a payment tool.

“These are the kind of investors who were attracted to crypto because of its decentralization, and they were investing in things built on blockchain that were highly decentralized,” Schneider says of Bluesky’s supporters in the crypto space. “It’s decentralized social, so it fits those who are invested in believing in the opportunities of the platform and the ecosystem.”

Instead, the company can experiment with other means of monetization. The team hasn’t yet decided if AT will eventually require a fee, as it’s currently just a private beta. 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 publishing platform WordPress.com, sees the potential for an environment similar to WordPress.

“At the center of the [the Atmosphere] is a completely open system, so anyone can participate,” he says. “You can have all these independent, decentralized pieces that work together. With WordPress, that has grown into a huge ecosystem with billions of dollars – now over $10 billion a year.

Schneider continues, “So it’s become huge, even though it’s completely decentralized. And that’s what we’re hoping for, is for the environment to have the same ability for these many apps and services to coexist and work together and build an ecosystem.”