Live Artifacts, not static reports
“Build the artifact once. Open it whenever. It’s never out of date.”
A photograph, or a window?
Everything you make is one or the other. Most people have never noticed they're choosing.
You don't need to update a window.
So what is an ARTIFACT?
A saved page inside Cowork that re-pulls your data every time you open it.
Either one can be published to a claude.ai link — and a published copy never re-reads. That's the one people build by accident.
How do I make one?
3 questions before you build one.
This is not a prompt. It's a thinking frame. Answer these out loud and the artifact describes itself.
Building a Campaign Tracker
Move a campaign tracker somebody maintains by hand - to a live Artifact, in three steps.
Build a live artifact called Weekly Campaign Tracker.
Read from: the Google Sheet "[YOUR SHEET]", tab "[YOUR TAB]", through the Google Sheets connector. Read-only — never write anything back.
Hard rule: no numbers baked into the page. Every value must come from reading the sheet at the moment I open it.
Definitions: Budget is the target, Spend to date is the actual, the gap is the difference as a percentage of Budget. "Behind" means any campaign under Budget — not only the ones past the 10% line.
Show me three numbers across the top — total spend, how many campaigns, how many are behind. Then one row per campaign whose Status is Live, sorted biggest gap first, with anything more than 10% under target flagged red. At the bottom, the time it read the sheet.
Keep it readable on a laptop without scrolling to find the problem.
Adjusting a Live Artifact
Three sentences. Each one changes the page and saves a version.
Creating a Live Artifact with a Willow tool.
Session #4 plugged Claude into Wix through Willow. An artifact can use those same tools.
Sending it to someone.
Three clicks, and two things nobody expects.
Unsharing kills the link. Sharing again makes a new one.
5 Live Artifacts Examples
Build each of them in 10 minutes
The weekly campaign tracker
The sheet you check almost every day.
What's waiting on me
Mentions, comments and unanswered threads, one page.
Competitor watch
What they shipped, priced and published since you last looked.
Localization status board
Which locales are live, which are stuck, which need review.
Launch readiness
The pre-launch checklist that checks itself.
Pick the one you always delay checking. That's the one worth ten minutes.
Four things that actually bite.
None of them are reasons not to build one. All of them are reasons to build it a certain way.
It uses your connectors without asking
You approve them once when you build it. After that it just uses them, even in modes that would normally stop and check with you.
It lives on your laptop
It's a file on your laptop. New machine and it's gone, with nothing to migrate.
You might not have built the live one
Asking for an artifact can get you a published page that never re-reads. It looks identical. It just quietly never changes.
The dashboard nobody opens
If it doesn't change a decision, it's a screensaver with numbers on it.
1 Name the one report you rebuild by hand. That's your first artifact.
2 Build it badly, in ten minutes. Then talk it into shape.
3 Next time, open it instead of rebuilding it.
Thank you.
Open the one you build. That's the whole trick.