☀️ AI Morning Minute: Artifacts
The feature that turned a chatbot into a workshop
Dear reader, this week is all about Claude from Anthropic. It has been in the news a fair amount this year, so I wanted to help get everyone up to speed. Plus, it’s fun to do a theme!
Most AI chatbots give you text in a chat window. You copy it, paste it somewhere else, and hope the formatting survives. Artifacts changed that equation by giving Claude a second window where it builds things you can actually see, use, and share.
What it means
Artifacts are interactive, standalone pieces of content that Claude creates in a dedicated panel next to your conversation. Instead of just describing a chart, Claude builds one. Instead of writing code and telling you to paste it into an editor, Claude renders it live. Artifacts can be documents, spreadsheets, diagrams, websites, interactive apps, data visualizations, and even games.
You can edit them, iterate on them through conversation, publish them to a shareable URL, or let others remix them. Anthropic launched Artifacts in June 2024 alongside Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and tens of millions have been created since.
Why it matters
It collapsed the gap between describing and doing. Before Artifacts, an AI conversation about building a budget tracker ended with a block of code you had to figure out how to run. With Artifacts, it ends with a working budget tracker in your browser. The output went from text you read to tools you use.
Published Artifacts work without a Claude account. You can share a link to an interactive app, a calculator, or a data visualization and anyone can use it. A community gallery at madewithclaude.com collects the best ones. People have built everything from physics simulators to word games to AI-powered snake.
Artifacts now support persistent storage and MCP connections. That means an Artifact can save data between sessions and connect to external services like Google Calendar, Slack, or Asana. A chatbot response is temporary. An Artifact is starting to look like a real application.
Simple example
You ask a coworker to help you plan a seating chart for a wedding. In a normal conversation, they’d describe ideas out loud and you’d scribble them on a napkin.
With Artifacts, they sketch the chart on a whiteboard next to you. You can see it, point at it, move things around, and say “swap table 4 and table 7.” The whiteboard is the Artifact. The conversation is still happening, but now there’s a shared thing you’re both looking at and building together.