artifold 0.5.2

Local-first library for your AI-generated HTML artifacts (Claude, ChatGPT, v0, …).

Artifold

Your AI artifacts have a home now. Index, search, preview, share with one click, and use your past work as the style guide for your next one.

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"I've started preferring HTML as an output format instead of Markdown. The added expressiveness means I get overall better output, and the chance of someone actually reading your spec, report or PR writeup is much higher if it's in HTML. … When writing this article, I asked Claude Code to read through my code folder and find all the HTML files I've generated, group and categorize them …"

— Thariq, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of HTML (Claude Code team)

Artifold is that library. If you're shifting from Markdown to HTML for specs, reports, designs, prototypes, throwaway editors — the way Thariq describes — Artifold is where they live.

You've been making a lot of HTML with AI lately: Claude Artifacts, ChatGPT Canvas, v0, Lovable, Cursor. They land in ~/Downloads or some project folder, you bookmark a tab, you mean to come back to that ROI calculator you made three weeks ago — and you can't find it.

That's the whole reason this exists. I made a 30-day workout tracker for my partner, lost it in a maze of folders, regenerated a worse version, and decided to just build the index myself.

Local-first, fast, runs entirely on your machine. Plus the part where, when you do want to share an artifact, it's one click to a permanent public URL.

Three things you can do

1. ✨ Share any artifact in seconds → public URL anyone can open

Click any card → hit the share icon → in ~30 seconds you get back a permanent URL like https://you.github.io/artifold-share/abc12345.html that you can paste into iMessage, Slack, email, anywhere. URL is copied to your clipboard automatically.

Free forever (uses your GitHub Pages quota — no Artifold infrastructure, no sign-up, no per-share fees, no expiry). Anyone with the link sees the fully-rendered report; recipient needs nothing installed.

2. 📚 Browse everything you've made, in one place

Sidebar filters by tool, status (shared / local), category, date. ⌘K palette to jump to anything by name, prompt, or intent. Click → in-app preview pane, no tab spam. Dark/light themes. Live auto-rescan — drop a new file in any watched folder and it appears within seconds.

3. 🎨 Generate new artifacts that match your style — /craft skill

After installing the Claude Code skill, type /craft a 30-day strength tracker for a beginner in any session. The skill:

• Reads your library to see styles you've used, then deliberately picks a different direction so your next artifact doesn't look like the last one (the "all AI output looks the same" problem, actively fought)
• OR inherits a specific style: /craft a poker probability explainer, like dobble — pulls dobble's actual CSS as the design baseline
• Applies 12 opinionated design principles distilled from Refactoring UI, Linear, and Vercel/Geist (every one cited)
• Avoids 15 specific AI-slop signatures (purple-gradient hero, identical bento cards, decorative emoji on every list item, glassmorphism, etc.)
• Saves to ~/artifold-inbox/2026-05-26-<topic>.html — auto-indexed in Artifold within ~2 seconds

Your past work becomes your style guide for the next one. The loop closes.

Install

🪄 Easiest: ask Claude Code to do it

If you have Claude Code, paste this prompt — Claude figures out the rest, installs everything, and walks you through first-run:

[!TIP] Copy this into Claude Code:

Install Artifold from https://github.com/shubhamgoel27/artifold using pipx
(or pip if pipx isn't installed). Then run `artifold init` and help me
pick a folder to watch. After that, run `artifold install-skill` to set
up the /craft skill. Open the dashboard when ready and tell me what
to try first.

That's the whole install. No terminal commands to memorize, no dependencies to debug — Claude handles the awkward parts.

Or do it yourself

If you'd rather drive:

pipx install artifold          # or: pip install artifold
artifold init                     # interactive wizard
artifold                          # serves dashboard + opens browser
artifold install-skill            # adds /craft to ~/.claude/skills/

Don't have pipx? Run brew install pipx (mac) or python -m pip install --user pipx (anywhere), then the above.

After install, in Claude Code

/craft a one-pager comparing three SF apartments
/craft a 30-day strength tracker, like my last one
/craft a probability explainer for poker, in the style of dobble

(Restart Claude Code once after artifold install-skill so the skill loads.)

The first run installs Playwright's headless Chromium (~170 MB) for artifact thumbnails. After that, only new/changed files re-shoot.

What it actually does

Auto-indexes every *.html in your watched folders. Groups -v2, (1), print variants into one card with a version dropdown. Skips templates, .git repos, and anything buried 3 levels deep — your library stays clean even when your folders aren't.

Source-aware — fingerprints Claude / ChatGPT / v0 / Lovable / Bolt / Gemini artifacts from HTML markers, tags each card with the tool that made it. Also reads <meta name="artifold:*"> tags (which the /craft skill emits) for zero-effort provenance.

Visual — every artifact gets a real screenshot thumbnail. Click a card → slide-out preview pane with tabs for Provenance (source URL, prompt, model, tags) and Design (palette swatches, fonts, mood flags).

Live — artifold serve watches your folders. Drop in a new artifact and it appears in the dashboard within ~2 seconds, no refresh.

Searchable — ⌘K palette runs across titles, prompts, intents, and exposed actions (toggle theme, switch view, rescan, import). Linear / Raycast pattern.

All commands

artifold                  # default: scan + serve + open browser
artifold init             # interactive setup wizard
artifold add <dir>        # watch another folder
artifold roots            # list watched folders
artifold scan             # one-shot rescan
artifold open             # open the existing dashboard

artifold share <file>     # publish to public URL + copy to clipboard
artifold share --list     # all shares
artifold share --revoke <id>   # take a public share down

artifold import <url>     # fetch a public Claude/v0/Lovable share URL
artifold link <file> --tool claude --source URL --prompt "..."
artifold info <file>      # show provenance for a file

artifold designs                     # list design fingerprints
artifold designs <id> --template     # dump CSS + skeleton (paste into Claude)

artifold inbox [topic]    # print the canonical path for a new artifact
artifold install-skill    # install /craft into ~/.claude/skills/
artifold doctor           # check setup; tells you exactly what to fix

Config

~/Library/Application Support/artifold/config.json on macOS, ~/.config/artifold/config.json on Linux:

{
  "roots": ["/Users/me/Downloads", "/Users/me/work"],
  "allow_repos": [],          // dirs with their own .git to include anyway
  "max_depth": 3,
  "drop_dir": null,           // where `artifold import` saves (default ~/artifold-inbox)
  "enable_intent": false,     // opt-in LLM intent metadata (Claude Haiku)
  "categories": {             // extend the auto-tag keywords
    "Research": ["paper", "experiment", "ablation"]
  }
}

Cache (thumbnails, manifest, dashboard, Playwright Chromium) lives under ~/Library/Caches/artifold/. Wiping it just regenerates everything from your real files — cache is replaceable, your source files are sacred.

Keyboard

Key	What
⌘K / Ctrl+K	palette (actions + artifact search)
↵	open selected in preview / run action
⇧↵	open selected in new tab
Esc	close palette / preview
/	focus the search box
Click card	open in preview pane (in-app, no tab spam)
⌘/Ctrl-click	open in a new browser tab

Optional: AI intent layer

Artifold's core is fully local — no LLM, no network, no API key required.

If you want richer metadata (a one-line intent per artifact, topic tags, audience detection — used for smarter search):

pipx install 'artifold[intent]'
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...
artifold scan --intent

~$0.003 per artifact with Claude Haiku, cached forever by content hash so re-scans are free. ~$0.05 for 15 artifacts. Toggle off with artifold scan --no-intent. Skip the extra and the feature simply doesn't appear.

What Artifold is not

• Not a cloud product. Nothing leaves your machine unless you explicitly artifold share. There's no sign-up, no account, no Artifold server somewhere. Your library is ~/artifold-inbox/ and the dirs you pointed it at — that's it.
• Not a replacement for git or your existing organization. It's a lens on whatever you already have.
• Not opinionated about where your files live. Multi-root by design. Want it to watch ~/Downloads + ~/Documents + ~/work/reports? Run artifold add three times.
• Not trying to be everything for everyone. Built for the specific pain of "where did I put that thing I generated last month."

Why "Artifold"

A artifold is a working collection of pages that informs your next piece of work. Your past artifacts become the reference set for the next one. It's not an archive (cold storage), it's a working library.

The PyPI package is artifold because artifold was taken. CLI command is artifold. Same pattern as open-interpreter / interpreter.

Status

v0.5, alpha. Tested on macOS Sequoia; Linux should work; Windows untested. Single-developer project made in evenings — issues + PRs welcome, but I'm shipping what I personally use rather than what's broadly polished.

If you try it and something feels off, open an issue — even one line is helpful, "the X button is confusing" is exactly the feedback that improves things.

Roadmap

In rough priority order:

• Mobile dashboard — currently breaks below 760px
• artifold adopt <file> — opt-in consolidation into ~/artifold-inbox/ for existing files (keeping multi-root for those who want it)
• Cloudflare Pages backend for artifold share (alternative to GH Pages for users without gh CLI)
• artifold generate --like <id> — direct one-command generation, opt-in via [intent] extra
• Markdown rendering — first-class support for *.md
• Semantic search — when you remember the gist but not the title
• Version diff view — when you iterate v1/v2/v3, see what changed
• A real test suite — currently human-tested

Made by

@shubhamgoel27 — built because I genuinely needed it. If you find it useful, starring the repo is the single best thing you can do so other people building with AI find it.

The /craft skill took real research to make non-generic — the 12 design principles trace to Refactoring UI chapters, Linear's Method, Vercel's Geist, and a couple of recent AI-slop critique articles. If you ship cool reports with it, tag me — I love seeing what people make.

License

MIT