Bluesky just unveiled something that sounds almost contradictory: an AI tool designed to give users more control, not less. At the Atmosphere conference this weekend, the decentralized social network launched Attie, a standalone app powered by Anthropic’s Claude that lets anyone build custom algorithmic feeds using plain English.
No coding. No begging the algorithm gods. Just tell Attie what you want to see.
How Attie Works
Attie runs on the AT Protocol—the same open infrastructure underlying Bluesky—and operates as a separate app from the main Bluesky client. Users sign in with their existing Bluesky credentials and interact through a chatbot interface.
Want a feed of posts about local AI projects? Tell Attie. Interested in seeing more art and fewer arguments? Describe it. The app analyzes your preferences and past interactions to generate customized content streams.
The long-term vision goes further: “vibe-coding” entire social apps through text commands. Jay Graber, Bluesky’s chief innovation officer (and former CEO), described it as letting users “create software that works the way you want it to, and find signal in the noise.”
The Privacy Angle
Here’s where Attie diverges from every other AI feature being bolted onto social platforms.
“We think AI should serve people, not platforms,” Graber said in her announcement. “An open protocol puts this power directly in users’ hands.”
This is a direct shot at how major platforms deploy AI. As one analysis noted, those platforms “aren’t trying to fix this problem. They’re using AI to increase the time users spend on-platform, to harvest training data, and to shape what users see and believe through systems they can’t inspect and didn’t choose.”
Attie inverts this model. The AI works for you, on an open protocol you can leave, using systems you can understand and control.
The Irony Factor
There’s a delicious tension here: Bluesky’s user base has historically been skeptical of AI. Posts expressing anything positive about AI tend to be unpopular on the platform.
But Attie isn’t trying to replace human curation or flood feeds with generated content. It’s a tool for users to escape the black-box algorithms that dominate elsewhere. The AI serves as a translator between what you want and what the firehose of social content contains.
New CEO Toni Schneider emphasized this: “It is an AI product, but it’s an AI product that’s very people-focused.”
What’s Available Now
Attie launched in beta at Atmosphere, with conference attendees as the first testers. A public release is expected “in the coming weeks.”
At launch, users can build and view custom feeds. Those feeds will eventually become available within Bluesky itself or any other AT Protocol app. The vibe-coding of full applications comes later.
Bluesky has $100 million in funding from last year’s round to back this experiment. Graber and her team started building Attie a few months ago—around the same time she transitioned from CEO to focus on building rather than running the company.
What This Means
The timing is notable. X has Grok. Meta is embedding AI everywhere. Google’s AI summaries are rewriting how people consume information. In each case, the AI serves platform interests—engagement, data collection, ad targeting.
Attie proposes something different: AI as infrastructure for user agency. The Claude integration handles the heavy lifting of understanding natural language requests and matching them against content. The AT Protocol ensures you’re not locked into any single platform’s vision of what you should see.
Whether Bluesky’s user base will embrace an AI tool—even one explicitly designed for their benefit—remains to be seen. But the contrast with how everyone else is deploying AI couldn’t be sharper.
Try It
Attie isn’t publicly available yet. Watch Bluesky’s announcements for the open beta. When it launches, you’ll need a Bluesky account to authenticate.
For those tired of algorithmic feeds that optimize for rage-clicks and time-on-platform, this might be worth the wait.