What is an artifact?
A web page your agent makes for you.
An artifact is a living, interactive web page that an AI agent builds at your direction — Claude, Codex, or whichever agent you already work in. You describe what you want; the agent writes it as real HTML: shaped however the content demands, interactive wherever that helps, and revisable with one more sentence to the same agent that made it.
That sounds like a small thing — agents have been producing documents for years. It isn't, and the difference comes down to the format.
HTML is the format agents are fluent in
Documents, decks, and PDFs are containers with fixed shapes: pages of paragraphs, rectangles of bullets. HTML is the language of the web — the medium today's models were trained on more deeply than any office format. Ask an agent for a document and it works through a converter toward a shape fixed decades ago. Ask it for an artifact and it works in its native medium, where three things come for free:
- Any structure, any style. A page isn't 8.5×11 and a slide isn't 16:9. An artifact takes exactly the shape its content needs — a timeline, a side-by-side comparison, a diagram you scroll through — with layout and typography tailored to it.
- It runs. Real scripts execute in the reader's browser: calculators calculate, diagrams respond, prototypes are clickable, charts draw from the data. The page can do things, not just say things.
- Agents edit it as well as they write it. Because an artifact is plain HTML, the agent that made it can read every byte back and revise precisely — no export step, no fidelity loss, no proprietary format standing between you and the change.
What people actually make
The pattern across real artifacts is replacement of something flatter. An interactive ROI calculator goes out where a PDF case study used to — the prospect drags the assumptions instead of taking your word for the math. A sales leave-behind is rebuilt per account, with the customer's own numbers in it. Architecture diagrams that unfold on click. Product prototypes real enough to argue with. Training plans, explainers, dashboards.
Three live ones, published with Send Artifact: a run club's pace calculator, republished weekly to a link that has never changed; an investor's live thesis — memo, model, and charts in one page — whose 2030 numbers move as the reader changes an assumption, republished to the same link as the model is revised; a side-by-side text diff tool that runs entirely in the reader's browser. They're on the homepage too.
The things that were never made
The clearest way to see what artifacts are for is to notice a category of software that doesn't exist. A calculator for one deal. A prototype for one meeting. An explainer for one client's question. A dashboard for one week's decision. None of these were ever built, because even a small piece of software meant a developer's time — so they were flattened into documents, or skipped entirely.
Agents collapsed that cost. A working page of software is now the output of a request, which makes one-off software reasonable for the first time. Artifacts are that category coming into existence: not better documents and not smaller apps — the things that were never either, because nobody could justify making them.
Living, not frozen
A document is finished the moment you export it; every copy in every inbox starts aging immediately. An artifact stays live. Publish it to a stable link and readers always see the current version. When feedback arrives — readers can pin comments to the exact element they mean — you hand the threads back to your agent; it revises, republishes to the same URL, and everyone's link is already up to date. Direct, publish, hear, revise: the artifact is the loop's standing output, not a trail of attachments.
Make your first one
You don't need Send Artifact to try the idea — you need it when you want to share the result. Open the agent you already use and ask for a page: “Make me an interactive one-page explainer of the thing you explained most recently.” Look at what comes back, then push it — more interactivity, a different structure, your own numbers.
When it's worth sending to someone, say “Publish this to sendartifact.com.” The agent sets itself up, you confirm your email once, and the page is live at a stable link you control — private by default, shareable by email, domain, link, or publicly. About two minutes, start to finish.
Real workflows, step by step: the guides · how published pages are protected: security overview · common questions: FAQ · support@sendartifact.com.