Artifact

What is an Artifact

An artifact is a standalone piece of output, a document, a rendered page, a file, that exists as its own deliverable rather than being embedded inline in the chat reply. The distinction matters when the output itself is the point: a report meant to be shared, a page meant to be viewed, something with its own identity beyond the sentence that introduced it.

Producing an artifact instead of a chat-formatted answer is a deliberate choice about what the user actually needs: a wall of markdown in a chat window is fine for an explanation, but a genuine deliverable, something to hand to someone else or come back to later, usually works better as its own object with its own address.

An artifact is not the same as an ordinary tool result, a tool result is intermediate, consumed by the agent as it works. An artifact is the finished thing, meant for a human to actually use, view, or share, which is why it is treated and delivered differently even when the underlying content overlaps.