Artifold

Decks, reports and pages from AI that look designed, not generated. And one library that keeps every one of them.

Artifold has two parts that work together:

• craft, a skill for Claude Code and Codex. Ask it for slides, a report, a tracker or an explainer, and it works like a designer would: it edits the content first, then picks a layout, type and voice for that subject. No purple gradients, no rows of identical cards.
• The library, which finds every HTML page on your disk, keeps its history, and makes it easy to find again and share.

Pages made with it have been passed around and praised by a designer at Figma, engineers at OpenAI and Meta, and a data engineer at DoorDash.

_{Same prompt, same model. Left: plain Claude. Right: with craft. See all eleven in the gallery.}

Why this exists

I made a 30-day workout tracker for my partner with Claude. A few weeks later I couldn't find it. It was somewhere in a pile of project folders and downloads, so I asked for it again and got a worse one.

Two problems there. The pages were easy to lose, and the second try came out generic: the same purple gradient and the same row of cards as everything else. Thariq on the Claude Code team described the first one:

"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

craft fixes the second problem, and the library fixes the first. Each one makes the other better: craft reads your library so a new page doesn't repeat your last few, and every page it makes lands in the library already described and searchable.

Making pages: craft

Type /craft a 30-day strength tracker for a beginner in Claude Code, or $craft ... in Codex, and it:

• decides how much design the job needs, so a daily checklist stays quiet and a deck, a gift or a public page gets the full treatment
• edits the content before styling it: what the reader should remember, what to cut, and what belongs in a table or chart instead of prose
• picks a layout, a visual style, a tone of voice and one hand-built detail for this subject, and reads your library first so the new page doesn't repeat your last few
• avoids a long list of named AI-design habits (the purple gradient hero, identical cards, emoji bullets)
• renders the page in a headless browser and fixes what it finds
• saves it to ~/artifold-inbox/, where it shows up in the library within seconds

You can also point it at something you made before: /craft a poker odds explainer, like dobble starts from that page's actual CSS.

Keeping pages: the library

Finds everything

Point it at a few folders and it indexes every HTML file in them. Each artifact gets a screenshot thumbnail, a category, and a one-line description of what it is for, so two similar cheat sheets are easy to tell apart at a glance. Search covers titles, headings, opening text, prompts and intents. ⌘K jumps to anything.

It leaves out what isn't yours: node_modules, build output, cloned git repos, server templates, and anything nested too deep.

Keeps the history

Files named report-v2.html or report (1).html, or dated copies of the same page, collapse into one card with a version picker and a diff view. Pages you edit in place keep a revision history too, and a card shows how many times you have revised or opened it. "Most used" sorts by that, so the trackers you open every day stay near the top instead of sinking under last week's one-offs.

Shares in one click

Click share on any card and, usually within a minute, you get a permanent link like https://you.github.io/artifold-share/abc12345.html, copied to your clipboard. It publishes to your own GitHub Pages: free, no expiry, and the person you send it to needs nothing installed. You can also export any artifact to PDF.

Works with other design skills too

The library indexes any HTML, whatever wrote it: Claude, ChatGPT Canvas, v0, Cursor, or another design skill. What differs is how much it can learn about each page.

The last row needs nothing from the page and covers most of what the library does. The first two rows exist because a page can say what it is in a few lines of <head>. If you build a design skill, that format is documented in docs/ARTIFACT-METADATA.md, and nothing in it is specific to Artifold. Skills with their own format are read through adapters; pull requests for new ones are welcome.

Run artifold skills to see which of these you have installed.

Stays out of the way

A running artifold serve uses about 30 MB of memory and no CPU while nothing changes. When a file changes, a rescan takes well under a second, because unchanged files are recognized from their size and modification time and never reread. While you are iterating on a page, its thumbnail waits until you stop editing, so a burst of saves launches the headless browser once instead of once per save.

Install

Everything: let your agent do it

Paste this into Claude Code or Codex:

Just the skill

If you only want better-looking pages and no library, paste this instead:

Or run it yourself. For Codex, change ~/.claude/skills to ~/.agents/skills:

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && curl -sL https://github.com/shubhamgoel27/artifold/archive/main.tar.gz \
  | tar -xz -C ~/.claude/skills --strip-components=3 artifold-main/artifold/skills/craft

The skill works without the library. It just can't look at your past pages, so it has less to go on when it avoids repeating itself. You can add the library later and nothing changes.

Everything, by hand

pipx install artifold        # or: pip install artifold
artifold init                # pick folders to watch, install craft
artifold                     # scan, then open the dashboard

No pipx? brew install pipx on a Mac, or python -m pip install --user pipx anywhere. init installs craft for every agent it finds (~/.claude/skills/ for Claude Code, ~/.agents/skills/ for Codex); restart your agent once afterwards so it picks up the skill.

The first scan downloads a headless Chromium (about 170 MB) for thumbnails. After that only new or changed pages are captured.

Commands

artifold                     # serve the dashboard and open it
artifold init                # setup wizard
artifold add <dir>           # watch another folder
artifold remove <dir>        # stop watching one
artifold roots               # list watched folders
artifold allow-repo <name>   # include a folder that is its own git repo
artifold scan                # rescan and rebuild the dashboard
artifold serve --no-open     # dashboard with live rescans, no browser tab
artifold open                # open the dashboard
artifold search <words>      # search from the terminal
artifold doctor              # check the setup and say what to fix

artifold share <file>        # publish to your GitHub Pages
artifold share --list        # everything you have shared
artifold share --revoke <id> # take a share down
artifold share --reconcile   # rebuild share records from what is published
artifold export-pdf <file>   # render an artifact to PDF
artifold trash <file>        # move an artifact to the system Trash

artifold import <url>        # save a public share (Claude, ChatGPT, v0, Lovable, …)
artifold link <file> --tool claude --source URL --prompt "..."
artifold info <file>         # show what Artifold knows about a file

artifold designs             # list design fingerprints
artifold designs <id> --template   # a page's CSS and structure, to reuse
artifold skills              # design skills, and what Artifold reads from each
artifold install-skill       # install craft for Claude Code and/or Codex
artifold inbox [topic]       # the path where a new artifact should go
artifold config [key] [value]  # read or change a setting

Settings

artifold config lists them; artifold config <key> <value> changes one. The file lives at ~/Library/Application Support/artifold/config.json on macOS and ~/.config/artifold/config.json on Linux:

{
  "roots": ["/Users/me/Downloads", "/Users/me/work"],
  "allow_repos": [],        // folders with their own .git to include anyway
  "max_depth": 3,           // how deep to look inside each watched folder
  "enable_intent": false,   // optional AI descriptions, see below
  "categories": {           // add your own category keywords
    "Research": ["paper", "experiment", "ablation"]
  }
}

Thumbnails, the dashboard and the browser live in ~/Library/Caches/artifold/. Deleting that folder is safe; the next scan rebuilds it from your files.

Keyboard

Optional: AI descriptions

Artifold works without any AI or network access. Pages made with craft or Hallmark already describe themselves. For everything else, you can have Claude Haiku write a one-line description of each artifact:

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

Each artifact costs at most about a third of a cent, and runs once: the result is stored by content, so later scans reuse it until the page changes.

What leaves your machine

Artifold has no server and no account, and the CLI holds no credentials for anything. Your library is the folders you pointed it at.

The only thing that sends an artifact anywhere is artifold share, which publishes the one artifact you pick to your own GitHub Pages.

What it isn't

• A replacement for git or your folders. It reads what is already there and moves nothing.
• Locked to craft or to one agent. Hallmark, taste-skill and huashu-design are all good, and the library keeps their output findable too.
• Tied to one folder. Watch ~/Downloads, ~/Documents and a project folder at once.

Status

Version 0.14, alpha. I use it every day on macOS; Linux should work; Windows is untested. There are 178 tests and CI on Python 3.10 to 3.13. It is a one-person project, so I build what I need first, but issues and pull requests are welcome. If something is confusing, open an issue; one line is enough.

Roadmap

• A layout that works well on a phone
• artifold adopt <file> to move existing files into the inbox
• Cloudflare Pages as a sharing option for people without the gh CLI
• First-class Markdown files
• Search by meaning, for when you remember the gist but not the title

Made by

@shubhamgoel27, because I needed it. If it's useful to you, a star helps other people find it. If you make something good with craft, I'd like to see it.

License

MIT