A short, visual explainer for xai-org/x-algorithm — the open-source code behind X's For You feed.
Built as a hand-drawn technical zine. Real weights, real stage names, plain English.
Important
This is an independent, unofficial explainer. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to X Corp. or xAI. It contains no X or xAI branding. Everything it describes is derived from the public xai-org/x-algorithm repository as published 13 August 2026. The algorithm changes — the code is the source of truth, not this page.
- What this is
- The algorithm, explained
- What's not in the source repo
- About this site
- Accuracy and sources
- License
In August 2026, xAI open-sourced the code that assembles the For You feed on X. It is a large, multi-service codebase — Rust services, a JAX-trained ranking model, roughly two dozen top-level components. The official README is genuinely good, but it assumes you already read architecture diagrams for a living.
This project is a single scrollable page that gets a non-engineer to an accurate mental model in a few minutes, while leaving real technical vocabulary intact for engineers who want to go read the source afterward.
The page is deliberately short — seven sections. This README is where the depth lives.
Design goals
| Goal | How |
|---|---|
| Accurate, never "simplified into wrong" | Every number and stage name traces to a file in the source repo |
| Serves two audiences at once | Plain-language narrative in marker; real code taped in as photocopy |
| Teaches by doing, not telling | An interactive weight bench you drag to re-rank a feed |
| Never impersonates X or xAI | No logos, no branding, disclaimed in the header, footer, and here |
There are two independent systems, and conflating them is the most common misunderstanding:
flowchart LR
A["Your refresh"] --> B["RANKING<br/>decides the ORDER"]
A --> C["VISIBILITY FILTERING<br/>decides IF a post can<br/>be shown at all"]
B --> D["Your For You feed"]
C --> D
style B fill:#FFE84D,stroke:#111,stroke-width:2px,color:#111
style C fill:#FF6FAE,stroke:#111,stroke-width:2px,color:#111
style D fill:#2DD4BF,stroke:#111,stroke-width:2px,color:#111
style A fill:#FFF8E8,stroke:#111,stroke-width:2px,color:#111
Different services. Different inputs. Different rules. Ranking never sees the safety rules. A post is scored and sorted first, and only then asked whether it is allowed on your screen.
Every refresh pulls from two pools in parallel, and both are then ranked together by the same model.
| Pool | Component | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| In-network (people you follow) | thunder/ | Holds recent posts in memory as they're published, returns those from accounts you follow |
| Out-of-network (strangers) | phoenix/ retrieval | Embeds you and each post as vectors, returns the posts nearest to you |
| Out-of-network | simclusters/ | Clusters accounts and posts by who engages with what, pulls candidates from your clusters |
Note
A common myth is that in-network and out-of-network posts are ranked separately and then interleaved. They aren't. They go into one list, scored by one model. What does differ is a deliberate out-of-network discount applied after scoring — see Three thumbs on the scale.
flowchart TD
S1["1 · QUERY HYDRATION<br/><i>your engagement history, follows,<br/>blocks, mutes, muted words, seen posts</i>"]
S2["2 · CANDIDATE SOURCES<br/><i>Thunder + Phoenix + SimClusters,<br/>queried in parallel</i>"]
S3["3 · CANDIDATE HYDRATION<br/><i>text, media, author, language,<br/>engagement counts</i>"]
S4["4 · PRE-SCORING FILTERS<br/><i>17 filters — see table below</i>"]
S5["5 · SCORING<br/><i>PhoenixScorer then RankingScorer<br/>then VMRanker</i>"]
S6["6 · SELECTION<br/><i>sort by score, keep top K</i>"]
S7["7 · POST-SELECTION FILTERS<br/><i>visibility filtering applied here</i>"]
OUT["Ranked For You timeline"]
S1 --> S2 --> S3 --> S4 --> S5 --> S6 --> S7 --> OUT
style S4 fill:#FFE84D,stroke:#111,stroke-width:2px,color:#111
style S5 fill:#2DD4BF,stroke:#111,stroke-width:2px,color:#111
style S7 fill:#FF6FAE,stroke:#111,stroke-width:2px,color:#111
style OUT fill:#FFF8E8,stroke:#111,stroke-width:3px,color:#111
This is the Post Pipeline (PhoenixCandidatePipeline). It's wrapped by a Blending Pipeline (ForYouCandidatePipeline) which adds everything the model doesn't rank: ads, Who-to-Follow recommendations, and prompts. Stages can be toggled individually, with defaults in home-mixer/params/param.rs.
The Phoenix model predicts a probability for each action you might take on each post — roughly twenty of them:
| Group | Actions |
|---|---|
| Engagement | favorite · reply · repost · quote · share · share via DM · share via copy link |
| Clicks | post · profile · link · photo expand · video open · quoted post |
| Attention | video quality view · dwell · dwell time · click dwell time · active seconds |
| Author | follow author |
| Negative | not interested · mute author · block author · report · not dwelled |
Those probabilities are collapsed into a single number by RankingScorer:
Final Score = Σ ( weightᵢ × P(actionᵢ) )
Positive actions carry positive weights; negative actions carry negative ones. That's the whole idea.
These are the actual production defaults from home-mixer/params/param.rs. xAI runs cron scripts to keep the checked-in defaults matching the primary production values.
| Action | Weight | |
|---|---|---|
| Share via copy link | +20.0 | the single biggest positive |
| Reply | +5.0 | |
| Quote | +5.0 | |
| Share via DM | +5.0 | |
| Follow author | +4.0 | |
| Share | +2.0 | |
| Repost | +1.0 | |
| Favorite (like) | +0.5 | 10× less than a reply |
| Click | +0.4 | |
| Open link | +0.2 | |
| Photo expand | +0.05 | |
| Video open | +0.05 | |
| Video quality view | +0.05 | |
| Quoted click | +0.05 | |
| Post unexplored | +0.02 | |
| Continuous dwell time | +0.004 | |
| Profile click | 0.0 | switched off |
| Dwell | 0.0 | raw time-on-post counts for nothing |
| Quoted VQV | 0.0 | |
| Click dwell time | 0.0 | |
| Not dwelled | −0.02 | |
| Block author | −31.2 | |
| Not interested | −43.2 | |
| Mute author | −58.8 | muting hurts more than blocking |
| Report | −234.0 | 468× a like, in the opposite direction |
What this table tells you
- Conversation beats approval. A predicted reply is worth ten predicted likes.
- Sending a post to someone is worth more than anything else. Copy-link share at +20.0 outweighs a reply, a repost and a like combined.
- The negatives dwarf the positives. A single predicted report outweighs hundreds of predicted likes. Negative-action weights are most of what keeps engagement bait out of a feed.
- Time-on-post, alone, is not the target. Plain
dwellsits at 0.0.
After the weighted sum, three adjustments are applied:
| Adjustment | Effect |
|---|---|
| Author diversity | Each post after an author's first is multiplied by a decaying factor, down to a floor — so one account can't take over your feed |
| Out-of-network discount | Posts from accounts you don't follow are multiplied by a factor below 1 (as are replies and reposts from accounts you do follow) |
| New-author boost | Posts from authors below an impressions threshold are lifted toward a target position, so new accounts aren't invisible forever |
VMRanker then calls vm-ranker/, a separate service that reorders results using a determinantal point process over post embeddings — trading a little score for less similarity between neighbouring posts.
Applied in this order, before anything is scored (home-mixer/filters/):
| # | Filter | Removes |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | DropDuplicatesFilter | The same post returned by more than one source |
| 2 | CoreDataHydrationFilter | Posts whose text and metadata failed to load |
| 3 | AgeFilter | Posts older than 48 hours |
| 4 | SelfTweetFilter | Your own posts |
| 5 | OONRetweetReplyFilter | Reposts/replies from accounts you don't follow, and replies whose parent is missing |
| 6 | OONNsfwSimclustersFilter | SimClusters posts whose author is flagged for adult content, when you don't follow them |
| 7 | RetweetDeduplicationFilter | Repeated reposts of the same post |
| 8 | IneligibleSubscriptionFilter | Subscriber-only posts you can't access |
| 9 | PreviouslySeenPostsFilter | Posts you've already been shown |
| 10 | PreviouslySeenPostsBackupFilter | The same, from a second record of impressions |
| 11 | PreviouslyServedPostsFilter | Posts already served earlier in the session |
| 12 | MutedKeywordFilter | Posts matching your muted keywords |
| 13 | AuthorSocialgraphFilter | Posts from accounts you block or mute |
| 14 | VideoFilter | Video posts, when the request excludes video |
| 15 | TopicIdsFilter | Posts outside requested topics, and posts in excluded topics |
| 16 | NewUserMinEngagementFilter | For new accounts, out-of-network posts below an engagement threshold |
| 17 | InventoryHoldoutFilter | A configured percentage of posts, chosen deterministically per post and viewer |
And after ranking:
| Filter | Removes |
|---|---|
VFFilter | Posts that visibility filtering answered DROP for |
AncillaryVFFilter | Posts whose parent, quoted, or reposted post was itself dropped |
DedupConversationFilter | Additional branches of the same conversation |
6. What gets hidden
visibility-filtering/ is asked about every surviving post, and answers one of three ways:
| Answer | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 🟢 ALLOW | Show the post normally |
| 🟡 INTERSTITIAL | Show it behind a cover the viewer taps through (e.g. adult or graphic media) |
| 🔴 DROP | Don't show it — and drop anything whose parent, quoted post, or reposted post was dropped |
Two rules worth knowing:
- The first rule that answers
DROPends evaluation. - Some rules only fire for recommendations. A further rule set applies only when a post is being recommended from an account you don't follow, and those rules can only drop. Suspected spam is caught aggressively on the recommendation path — while the same post is allowed through to an actual follower.
Rules are listed in evaluation order in visibility-filtering/rules/registry.rs.
Visibility filtering reads labels, produced continuously in the background — nowhere near your refresh.
flowchart TD
subgraph CU["CONTENT UNDERSTANDING"]
G["grox/<br/><i>text + media classifiers</i>"]
M["media-model-proxy/<br/><i>image + video models</i>"]
C["clip/<br/><i>image/text embeddings</i>"]
AG["agatha/<br/><i>blocks + reports vs favorites</i>"]
BD["bdsm/<br/><i>inauthentic behaviour</i>"]
UC["user-cred-v2/<br/><i>PageRank over follow graph</i>"]
end
subgraph LR2["LABELING RULES"]
SC["scarecrow/ + botmaker/<br/><i>event-driven rules</i>"]
AE["abuse-enforcement-service/<br/><i>acts on model scores</i>"]
SL["safety-label-user-agg/<br/><i>aggregates to accounts</i>"]
end
ST["LABEL STORAGE"]
VF["visibility-filtering/<br/>ALLOW · INTERSTITIAL · DROP"]
CU --> LR2 --> ST --> VF
style VF fill:#FF6FAE,stroke:#111,stroke-width:2px,color:#111
style ST fill:#FFE84D,stroke:#111,stroke-width:2px,color:#111
Plus your own inputs: who you block, who you mute, your muted keywords, your country, and whether you've opted into sensitive media.
All top-level components in the source repo (click to expand)
Pipeline framework
| Component | What it does |
|---|---|
home-mixer/ | Builds the For You feed — pipeline stages, scoring weights, calls to other systems |
candidate-pipeline/ | The framework home-mixer runs on: source, hydrator, filter, scorer, selector, side effect |
Candidate sources & retrieval
| Component | What it does |
|---|---|
thunder/ | In-memory recent posts from accounts you follow |
phoenix/ | Retrieval + ranking model (JAX training, Rust serving) |
simclusters/ | Cluster-based candidate discovery |
phoenix-rankall/ | Maintains the index Phoenix retrieval queries |
phoenix-rankall-strato/ | Event layer deciding which index a post belongs in |
vm-ranker/ | Diversity re-ranking via determinantal point process |
Content understanding
| Component | What it does |
|---|---|
grox/ | Classifiers run as posts are published |
media-model-proxy/ | Adult content, violence, hateful symbols, subject matter, known-media matching |
clip/ | Trains the image/text embedding model the classifiers consume |
agatha/ | Batch jobs labelling accounts from how others respond |
bdsm/ | Reads action sequences to spot inauthentic/abusive behaviour |
user-cred-v2/ | PageRank over follow and engagement edges |
adult-content/ | Trains and calibrates an adult-media classifier |
pnsfwmedia/ | Adult-media classifier combining CLIP embeddings with account scores |
Visibility & enforcement
| Component | What it does |
|---|---|
visibility-filtering/ | The ALLOW / INTERSTITIAL / DROP decision |
visibility-filtering-client/ | Client + post safety-label types |
scarecrow/ | Applies label rules to events as they happen |
botmaker/ | The rule engine: language, compiler, runtime |
botmaker-rules/ | The rules scarecrow loads (some withheld) |
abuse-enforcement-service/ | Labels, challenges, or suspends accounts from model scores |
safety-label-user-agg/ | Labels an account for what its posts collected |
under-the-hood/ | Builds the per-account label transparency report |
xAI deliberately withheld a small set of files to reduce gaming, and says so openly:
- Grox prompts — the
.j2files containing specific LLM prompts - Some botmaker rules
To compensate, they ship a transparency tool — Under the Hood — which shows aggregate statistics about the visibility-affecting labels on your own account and posts. Code + transparent outputs, rather than code alone.
Also generally absent: build and deployment manifests, and internal infrastructure imports (xai_service_runner, xai_kafka). The exception is phoenix/, which ships a Cargo workspace, a pyproject.toml, a quickstart, and synthetic data generation so you can train and serve a small model end to end.
The page is built as a hand-drawn technical zine — cream photocopy paper, marker ink, three flat highlighter accents, and real code taped in as photocopy. The tension it resolves: marker lettering makes a page friendly, but a weighted-sum formula lettered by hand reads as cute, not credible. So the narrative is marker; the facts are photocopied monospace, annotated in the margin. Friendly and verifiable at once.
| Token | Value |
|---|---|
| Paper | #FFF8E8 |
| Ink | #111111 |
| Highlighter yellow | #FFE84D |
| Highlighter pink | #FF6FAE |
| Highlighter teal | #2DD4BF |
| Display | Permanent Marker |
| Margin notes | Caveat |
| Body | Inter |
| Code | JetBrains Mono |
Nothing is a rounded-rectangle div pretending to be hand-drawn. Every border, underline, and arrow is generated SVG geometry from a seeded PRNG (src/lib/rough.ts), so the server and client draw the identical wobble and hydration stays quiet. Each box edge draws into a strip stretched along its own axis only, which keeps the wobble amplitude constant whether the box is 60px or 1200px wide — and the edges overshoot their corners and cross, the way a pen does when the wrist carries past the turn.
The interactive centrepiece (src/components/WeightBench.tsx) puts the real weights on six draggable sliders. Drag one and six posts re-score and re-order live. Pull Not interested up to zero and watch a reply farm climb straight to the top — which is the fastest way to feel what the negative weights are actually doing.
All motion — draw-on ink via stroke-dashoffset, self-painting highlighter swipes, staggered panel rise — is neutralised under prefers-reduced-motion.
src/
├── app/
│ ├── layout.tsx fonts and metadata
│ ├── page.tsx the seven sections
│ └── globals.css design tokens, textures, marker sliders
├── components/
│ ├── zine.tsx RoughBox · Underline · Swipe · Tape ·
│ │ Photocopy · Mascot · doodle icon set
│ ├── WeightBench.tsx the interactive scorer
│ └── Reveal.tsx IntersectionObserver scroll reveals
└── lib/
└── rough.ts seeded hand-drawn SVG geometry
git clone https://github.com/mihhhir08/x-algorithm-explained.git
cd x-algorithm-explained
npm install
npm run dev # http://localhost:3000npm run build && npm start # production build
npm run lint # eslint
npx tsc --noEmit # typecheckZero-config on Vercel — it detects Next.js automatically.
npx vercel # preview
npx vercel --prod # productionEvery factual claim on the page and in this README is traceable to the source repository:
| Claim | Source |
|---|---|
| Scoring weights | home-mixer/params/param.rs |
| Score arithmetic | home-mixer/scorers/ranking_scorer.rs |
| Pipeline stages | home-mixer/candidate_pipeline/ |
| Filter names and order | home-mixer/filters/ |
| Visibility rules | visibility-filtering/rules/registry.rs |
The six example posts on the page are invented, and labelled as such on the surface ("made-up posts, real arithmetic"). Their predicted probabilities are illustrative — chosen so the arithmetic demonstrates what the real weights do. The weights themselves are real.
Found an inaccuracy? Please open an issue — corrections are the entire point of a project like this.
MIT — see LICENSE.
The source repository xai-org/x-algorithm is licensed by xAI under Apache 2.0. This project contains no code from it — only explanation of publicly documented behaviour.
Made to be argued with.