Artifacts
Durable Markdown attached to your work — what survives the session, and why that matters more than it sounds.
An artifact is a Markdown document attached to durable work: a plan, a summary, a review, a decision record.
Three properties make them worth using deliberately:
| Property | Consequence |
|---|---|
| Durable | Outlives the session that produced it |
| Agent-independent | A human or a different agent can pick it up |
| Referenceable | # resolves it later, from any client |
Why not just read the transcript
Because the transcript is a view and the artifact is a record.
A conclusion that exists only in scrollback is a conclusion you will re-derive — after a crash, after a compaction, or three days later when you cannot remember which pane it was in.
Write anything you will want after the terminal is gone. That is the whole heuristic.
A pattern that works
- Ask for the work.
- Ask for an artifact summarising what changed and why.
- Read the diff yourself.
- Keep the artifact; the transcript can go.
Step 3 is not optional. An artifact is what the agent says it did, which is a different thing from what it did.
IMPORTANT
An artifact is not evidence. It is a claim, written down durably. Where a task carries a verification gate, evidence has to exist too — see verification.
Artifacts and compaction
Long sessions fill the context window, and compaction is lossy by design.
Writing a conclusion to an artifact before compacting keeps the conclusion while reclaiming the budget. Compacting alone just loses detail.
This is the single most useful habit in a long session.
Where they live
The daemon owns them, which is why they survive closing the window, closing the terminal, and rebooting — and why the same artifact is visible from the desktop, the TUI, and the CLI.
nala tasks list
In the TUI:
/artifacts
/artifact
Good and bad artifacts
| Good | Weak |
|---|---|
| What changed, and why | "Task completed successfully" |
| A decision and the alternatives rejected | A restatement of the request |
| Reproduction steps for a bug | A transcript excerpt |
| A plan with its assumptions named | A list with no reasoning |
An artifact that only says work happened tells you nothing you did not already know from the task state.
Exporting
Artifacts can leave Harmony with /export.
WARNING
Exported material carries whatever the work carried — file paths, repository names, and any content the agent handled. Review before sending it anywhere.