Artifact Shelf is a collection of small interactive things that run in a browser: simulations, explainers, generative art, games and toys. Each one is a single HTML file. There is no app to install and no account to make. Open one, play with it, and if you like it, download the file and keep it.
How they're made
Every artifact here started as a conversation with Claude. I describe what I want, we go back and forth, and the result is one self-contained page: markup, styles and code in the same file, with an occasional library pulled from a public CDN. Some went through a dozen versions.
Keeping each one to a single file is a deliberate constraint. It means an artifact can't quietly depend on a server that disappears, it can be read top to bottom by anyone curious about how it works, and it will still open in ten years.
Taking one home
Every artifact page has the same toolbar under the running piece:
- Open on its own loads the raw file at full size, with nothing around it.
- Download .html saves the exact file from the repository. Double-click it later and it runs, offline if it doesn't load a library.
- Source shows the file on GitHub.
- Embed gives you an iframe snippet to put it on your own page.
How the site works
The site is generated from a folder of artifacts by one Node script with no dependencies. Each artifact lives in its own folder next to an about.md that holds its label and writeup. The script turns those into this site, plus a sitemap, an Atom feed, a JSON catalog and an llms.txt. Posters are screenshots taken with a headless browser.
The whole thing is open source. If you make artifacts too, fork the repository, empty the artifacts/ folder, drop yours in, and you'll have a shelf of your own.
