Artifacts & Deep Links — Sharing Session Output

Artifacts — Publish Live Pages From a Session

An artifact is an interactive web page Claude Code publishes from your session to a private URL on claude.ai. It updates in place as the session continues. Use it when output is easier to look at than read as terminal text.

Pro/Max/Team/Enterprise, /login auth (not API key), Anthropic API only. Pro/Max artifacts stay private to you; Team/Enterprise can share within the org.

Create / update

Make an artifact that walks through this PR with the diff annotated inline.

Build a dashboard artifact of last week's deploy failures by service and
keep it updated as you investigate.

Claude writes an HTML/MD file, asks permission to publish, prints the URL. Ctrl+] reopens the latest artifact. Ask for revisions and it republishes to the same URL — viewers see it update live. To update from a different session, give Claude the artifact URL.

What works well

• PR walkthroughs with margin annotations, color-coded by severity
• Option comparisons: 4 layout variants side by side with tradeoffs
• Interactive tuning: sliders bound to an easing curve/duration, animation live
• Decision boards that flow back: a drag-to-triage board with a “Copy as prompt” button whose output you paste back into the session
• Live progress: a migration checklist Claude checks off as it works

Constraints

One self-contained page: no external requests (CSP), no backend, no multi-page routing, ≤16 MiB, .html/.htm/.md only. It’s a capture of work, not an app. Put your design tokens in CLAUDE.md and Claude will match your branding.

Disable: "disableArtifact": true or CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ARTIFACT=1.

Deep Links — Launch Sessions From URLs

A claude-cli:// URL opens a local Claude Code session with a working directory and a pre-filled (not sent) prompt. Put them in runbooks, alerts, dashboards, wikis.

claude-cli://open?repo=acme/payments&q=Investigate%20the%20failed%20deploy

Param	Meaning
q	URL-encoded prompt to pre-fill (max 5,000 chars, %0A = newline)
cwd	Absolute path for the working directory
repo	GitHub owner/name — resolves to your most recently used local clone

Safety: the link never executes anything — a “Prompt from an external link” warning shows until you review and press Enter. Registration is automatic on first interactive session; disable with disableDeepLinkRegistration.

Note: GitHub-rendered Markdown strips claude-cli:// links — put them in code blocks there. From the shell: open/xdg-open/Start-Process the URL. VS Code variant: vscode://anthropic.claude-code/open.

Real Case: Incident Runbook

## High 5xx rate on web-gateway
1. Acknowledge the page in PagerDuty.
2. [Open Claude Code in the gateway repo](claude-cli://open?repo=acme/web-gateway&q=5xx%20rate%20is%20elevated.%20Check%20recent%20deploys%20and%20error%20logs%20from%20the%20last%2030%20minutes.)
3. Post initial findings in #incident — ask Claude for an artifact timeline
   and share the link in the channel.

🧠 Quick Recall

• Trick: “Artifacts go OUT (publish results); deep links come IN (launch sessions).”

👨‍🏫 Teach It

• Show: publish a PR-walkthrough artifact and open it on the projector.
• They’ll trip on: expecting artifacts to fetch live data — the CSP blocks all external requests.

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Learning path: ⬅ 50-agent-view-and-workflows.md · Index · ➡ 52-output-styles-voice-ui.md