Anthropic’s Claude Cowork now includes Live Artifacts — a feature that lets you build persistent, interactive dashboards from natural language prompts, automatically synced to apps like Shopify, Linear, Slack, Gmail, and calendar sources. No code required.

Here’s how to build your first Live Artifact dashboard, step by step.

What Are Live Artifacts?

Live Artifacts are HTML/JS mini-apps that Claude generates and hosts directly inside the Claude Cowork sidebar. Unlike static documents or one-off code snippets, Live Artifacts:

  • Auto-refresh with live data from connected apps
  • Persist across sessions — they live in your sidebar, not in a chat thread
  • Maintain version history — you can roll back to earlier versions
  • Are fully interactive — buttons, filters, and clickable elements all work

The key distinction: these are not just code Claude writes for you to deploy elsewhere. They run inside Claude Cowork, pulling data from your connected integrations directly.

Prerequisites

Before building your first Live Artifact, make sure you have:

  1. Claude Cowork access — available on Pro and Team plans
  2. At least one connected app — go to Settings → Integrations and connect Slack, Linear, Gmail, Shopify, or Google Calendar. You need at least one live data source for the auto-refresh to work.
  3. A clear idea of what you want to track — the more specific your prompt, the better the first draft

Step 1: Open the Live Artifacts Panel

In Claude Cowork, look for the sidebar panel on the right side of the interface. Click “Live Artifacts” to expand it.

If you haven’t created any yet, you’ll see an empty panel with a “Create new artifact” button. Click it.

Step 2: Describe Your Dashboard

In the creation prompt, describe what you want in plain English. Be specific about:

  • What data you want to display (e.g., “unread Slack messages from the #engineering channel”)
  • How you want it organized (e.g., “group by sender, sorted by time”)
  • Any interactivity you need (e.g., “a filter dropdown to select the last 24h, 48h, or 7 days”)
  • Which connected app it should pull from

Example prompts that work well:

For a Linear task board:

“Build a dashboard showing all open Linear issues assigned to me, grouped by project. Include priority badges, due dates, and a button to mark each issue as ‘In Progress’.”

For a Gmail overview:

“Create a dashboard of unread emails from the last 48 hours, grouped by sender domain. Show subject line, preview text, and a link to open each email. Include a counter for total unread.”

For a Slack pulse:

“Show me all messages mentioning my name or @here in the last 24 hours across all channels I’m in. Sort by most recent, and include the channel name and sender for each.”

For a Shopify snapshot:

“Build a sales dashboard for today showing total revenue, order count, and top 5 products by revenue. Auto-refresh every 5 minutes.”

Step 3: Review and Refine the First Draft

Claude will generate the Live Artifact and display it immediately in the sidebar. The first draft is often very close to what you want, but don’t be afraid to iterate.

Common refinements:

  • “Make the font larger for the priority badges”
  • “Add a total count header at the top”
  • “The date format is showing UTC — convert to my local time”
  • “Add a color-coded status bar: green for on-track, red for overdue”

Each refinement creates a new version in the artifact’s history. You can click the history icon to compare versions or roll back.

Step 4: Pin the Artifact to Your Sidebar

Once you’re happy with the dashboard, click “Pin to sidebar”. It’ll now appear every time you open Claude Cowork, persisting across sessions and continuing to auto-refresh.

You can have multiple pinned artifacts — useful for keeping a project tracker, an inbox summary, and a calendar view all visible at once.

Step 5: Set Your Refresh Interval (Optional)

By default, Live Artifacts refresh when you open Claude Cowork and when the connected app sends an update. For more time-sensitive data (like sales figures or CI status), you can specify a refresh interval in your prompt:

“Auto-refresh every 2 minutes”

Note: very frequent refreshes may count against your connected app’s API rate limits. For most use cases, the default refresh behavior is sufficient.

Tips for Better Dashboards

Keep the scope tight. A dashboard that shows 3 things clearly is more useful than one that tries to show everything. You can always build a second artifact for other data.

Use the “explain this” feature. If the generated HTML looks wrong or a data element isn’t showing, ask Claude to explain how it’s pulling that data. This often surfaces misconfigured integration permissions.

Connect before you prompt. Live Artifacts can only show data from apps you’ve already connected in Settings → Integrations. Prompting Claude to pull from an unconnected app will result in a placeholder dashboard.

Version history is your friend. If you accidentally break a dashboard while iterating, the version history lets you jump back to any prior state with one click.

What’s Possible (and What Isn’t Yet)

Currently supported integrations: Shopify, Linear, Slack, Gmail, Google Calendar

Not yet supported: Notion, Jira, GitHub, Salesforce, or any integration requiring OAuth to third-party enterprise APIs. Anthropic has indicated these are on the roadmap.

Limitations: Live Artifacts run client-side in your browser. They can display and interact with data, but they can’t write back to connected apps (no “mark as done” in Linear, no “send reply” in Gmail — yet).

Sources

  1. Anthropic Support Docs — Use Live Artifacts in Claude Cowork
  2. Anthropic product page — feature overview
  3. r/ClaudeAI — community walkthroughs and examples
  4. Geeky Gadgets — secondary coverage

Researched by Searcher → Analyzed by Analyst → Written by Writer Agent (Sonnet 4.6). Full pipeline log: subagentic-20260429-0800

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