07Working with artefacts

Share an artefact: links, expiry, downloads and views

Everything your agents publish lands in your library privately. Sharing hands out one link to one artefact. You decide how long it lasts and whether visitors may save the file, and you can see who opened it and where from.

Private until you share it

Every artefact is born with its own link: https://myartefacts.com/s/ followed by 24 random characters. Nobody can guess it, and until you share the artefact it goes nowhere at all. There is no public profile and no index of your work. A share page also asks search engines not to list it, so a link only travels as far as the people you give it to.

That is why the library calls it a private link: it is private to whoever holds it. Anyone you send it to can open it, and so can anyone they forward it to, which is exactly what the expiry and the view log are for.

One artefact, one link. People who open it are counted; Slack, X and other link previews are logged but left out of the count.

Share from the library

Find the artefact on its sheet. Move between frames with the arrow keys (or h j k l), or press ␣ to open it in the loupe.
Press C, or choose Copy private link in the loupe. The link goes on your clipboard, the artefact is shared from that moment, and a toast says “Private link copied”.
Paste it wherever you like: an email, a chat, a document. In the loupe the status now reads “Private, link shared”, and a Share link section appears with its expiry, saving and views.

The Shared view in the rail lists every artefact you have shared, so you can check on them in one place. If you have not shared anything yet, the advice there is the same as here: star a keeper with S, then copy its link to send it.

Or let your agent share it

An agent can turn the link on as it publishes. publish_artifact, update_artifact and create_upload_url all take share: true, and the reply carries a share_url the agent can paste straight back to you or to whoever asked for the work.

{
  "slug": "q3-pricing-review",
  "title": "Q3 pricing review",
  "share": true
}

A share link is public, so only an agent you have vouched for gets one. If the agent is still waiting for your approval, or the account was opened by an agent and its owner has not yet claimed it from the email, the artefact is still published, just privately, and a share_note in the reply explains what has to happen first. Once it has, the agent publishes again with the same slug and share.

Set when the link expires

The Expires menu in the loupe offers Never, In 1 hour, In 1 day, In 7 days and In 30 days, counted from the moment you pick. A new link never expires until you say so.

Once the time passes, a visitor sees a plain page: “This link has expired. Ask whoever sent it for a new one.” In your library the status changes to “Private, link expired” and the menu shows when it closed.

Handing it on again is one key. Press C on an expired artefact and the same link opens again, set to never expire, with the toast “Private link copied. It no longer expires.” An agent that asks to share a lapsed artefact reopens it in the same way. The address is unchanged, so the messages you sent before work again too.

Closing a link early. There is no separate off switch. To shut a link quickly, set it to expire in 1 hour. Deleting the artefact stops its link for good. Archiving with F does not: archived artefacts keep their links.

Let visitors save the file

The Saving menu has two settings. View only is the default: visitors can read the artefact in their browser. Visitors can save adds a Save button to the page, which downloads the file itself, so a client can keep the PDF or a colleague can open the spreadsheet in their own tools.

What a visitor sees

The artefact fills the screen, with nothing of your library around it. A small dock floats at the foot of the page, and when the visitor scrolls past the end of the artefact, the page fades to black onto a plate drawn after Hilma af Klint.

The dock on a shared page. Save appears only when visitors can save; signed-in visitors see their own library instead of Sign up.

SaveDownloads the file, when you have chosen Visitors can save.
ShareOpens the phone’s share sheet, or copies the link on a computer, so it can be passed on.
Send to my agentClaude, ChatGPT and Grok open a new chat already pointing at the artefact. Gemini opens with the prompt copied, Hermes gets it to paste, and Copy as prompt takes the whole text of a text artefact up to 100 KB, or its title and link.
Sign upFor a visitor who wants a library of their own. Signed-in members get a link back to theirs.

Pasted into Slack, iMessage or X, the link unfurls with the artefact’s title, its summary and a picture of the top of the artefact itself. Publish a new version and the preview is drawn again, while the link keeps showing the latest. Updating without breaking the link explains how versions work.

See who opened it

Views in the loupe reads “None yet” until someone opens the link, then counts them. Under the count is a log of visits, newest first, five at a time with Show all for the rest. Each line tells you:

where: the city and country, such as “Lisbon, Portugal”;
when: “Today 14:02”, “Yesterday 09:10” or a date, in your time zone;
on what: “Chrome on macOS” or “Safari on iPhone”;
from where, when the browser says: “via” the site the link was clicked on, as its host only, never the full address;
and the visitor’s name, if they were signed in to myartefacts.

Your own visits are never recorded, so checking your link does not inflate it. Link previews and crawlers (Slack, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, Google, Bing and anything else that announces itself as a bot) appear in the log in grey as, say, “Slack link preview”, and are left out of the count. Paste a link into a busy channel and the number still means people who looked.

Before you send it

Give it a clear title and a one-line summary, because those are what the unfurl shows. File it in the right project so you can find it again when the replies come in. And if the person you are sending it to would like a library of their own, invite them.