Second Brain / Industry term
Artifact
A produced object that can be identified, inspected, or consumed by another step, such as a file, report, dataset, build, image, or record.
An artifact can be temporary or durable, structured or free-form, generated or manually created. A chat response may itself be persisted by the product; the operational distinction is whether downstream work has a stable identity, format, destination, and provenance rather than whether the text first appeared in chat.
Builder example
When you build with AI, the difference between a demo and a tool is whether each run leaves an artifact behind. A summarization feature that only prints to the screen forces the user to copy and paste before the answer is lost. Instruct the assistant to write its result to a named destination in a fixed structure, such as a draft email or a dated record, and the same workflow becomes something a person can review, correct, and reuse instead of regenerating from scratch.
Common confusion: Artifact does not imply correctness, approval, or permanence. A build artifact can be broken, and a draft artifact can be disposable.