I’m somewhat indifferent to artifacts. While they can produce useful code occasionally when the codebase is relatively small, they become excessively cumbersome once it reaches around 500 lines. This makes it difficult to even add or remove code. If you want to change a few colors in a webpage, they have to rewrite the whole artifact. It frustrates me that you can’t edit a single line in an artifact; you have to rely on the LLM to do it.
I have ran into a few situations where there's some console error that is fixed by rewriting the thing from scratch. Artifacts are awesome for being able to display some sort of interactive tutoring tool I've made on the fly, but realistically I could just have that HTML/CSS/JS file myself and push it to my own site relatively easy. For others though, it's hosted there easily
I think that's a good decision. They know their market and it's intended for small projects and demo mostly from non tech people. And they did not built half baked editor for which people would have further complaints about. AI assisted coding is a whole different thing and there are many players.
> OpenAI appears to have basically abandoned Custom GPTs since their Spring ‘24 update, and I’m a bit stumped as to why.
It simplifies the product, reducing the number of hurdles the user has to jump through. "Hmm, which gpt should I use for this task?" That should be OpenAI's problem, not mine!
Custom GPTs are not abandoned, see heavy usage, and their selection is not a dichotomy between the user's problem and OpenAI's problem. Custom GPTs exist so they can benefit from custom prompts which are highly relevant. Unless you're asserting that custom prompts are useless, which would be an absurd assertion to make, it cannot be asserted that Custom GPTs are useless. And no, this is not something that OpenAI is going to select for you because the customization is a personal one.
Custom GPTs don’t support a bunch of newer ChatGPT features like chat history and projects and they can’t be edited from mobile. There is no real advantage to using a custom GPT over adding a custom prompt to a project at this point, given that the latter doesn’t isolate you from the rest of ChatGPT’s feature set. It really seems like they stopped working on custom GPTs and just expect users to use projects instead.
> There is no real advantage to using a custom GPT over adding a custom prompt to a project
The two features, namely Custom GPTs and Projects, are orthogonal. This is because a Project is for related explorations of a theme, whereas a Custom GPT is for unrelated explorations of a theme.
> chat history
What chat history? Each chat is in the user's history by default, which is how it's supposed to work for Custom GPTs. I don't need a filtered chat history for a Custom GPT like I do for a Project.
> It really seems like they stopped working on custom GPTs and just expect users to use projects instead.
That's more a personal belief rather than a conclusion; it's not even a formal declaration by OpenAI.
Hilariously, today, I unsubscribed from claude due to the increased api timeouts and expensive usage costs when I can use other models for way cheaper that perform equally as good.
> slowly / painfully delete every single line one by one before rewriting
I think this one is a visual artifact. I think it always rewrites artifacts from scratch internally, but the UI tries to make it look like it isn’t doing that. The result is that it looks like it’s deleting lines from the inside of the text instead of just writing them.
That said, I’ve also experienced all of your complaints, except the bad edit one (but I see that all the time in Claude Code/Aider).
For the bad edit one, to clarify, I mean, it would "put its edit pointer" at the top of the file and start deleting/inserting there, instead of where it "intended to" which would have been somewhere in the middle, for example.
---
Erroring in that way specifically makes me think the "deleting every line" issue isn't just a visual artifact but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The extra system prompt can definitely cause some performance issues, and it can over use them. The deleting every line behavior is gone though. It's definitely not something you should turn on for every conversation, but it's quite compelling for creating little capsule web apps.
I tell Claude not to put anything in the artifacts because it always fucks then up. I see it writing code in it and then it disappears leaving the last artifact in place causing me to waste tokens having it recreate the artifact.
I find it useless most of them time and wish I could disable it.
I'm skeptical of Anthropic's product approach with Artifacts. They made a real winner with claude code and their subscription decision (basically giving up on the profitable api metered billing to win over the professional user base) for this product. Otherwise they are making now the same mistakes Openai did with the GPT Marketplace. As a customer i don't want millions of half-baked ai mini apps to choose from. This is what i'm getting with Artifacts and those gpt stores - decision fatigue and disappointment. I want the best app to solve my problem - this almost certainly won't be these hobbyist custom instruction wrappers but well designed apps by professionals (who know the limitations of these platform won't allow them to build the best-in class solution). Just like Claude Code isn't an artifact but a complete standalone app that doesn't fit into the limitations of such marketplaces.
I totally missed you can embed AI features directly into claude artifacts. I ran the first GPT store hackathon in NYC and I feel like people were very underwhelmed. What could you do in a custom GPT you couldn't with a shared chat? The integration felt very annoying. Claude I feel nails how easy it is to build + how easy it is to share
Artifacts can reduce token usage by a factor of 2 or more.
I had an [agent evolution framework](danieltan.weblog.lol/2025/06/agent-lineage-evolution-a-novel-framework-for-managing-llm-agent-degradation) before that dumped the output analysis into chat. It often timed out before the 10th conversation. After dumping the analysis into an artifacts, and have the LLM only edit it as required, I can go to 15 or more rounds without hitting the context limit. While they seem to re-output the entire artifact each time, they don't actually consume the tokens for the entire artifact.
This also greatly reduces the tendency of HALO-style rampancy, or AI psychosis which is also what the recent paper on context-rot/poisoning (https://research.trychroma.com/context-rot) is about.
"OpenAI appears to have basically abandoned Custom GPTs since their Spring ‘24 update, and I’m a bit stumped as to why"
My guess is it was always meant as marketing scheme, having others promote OpenAI for free, while at the same time they would be able to see which topics got traction and which not, providing potentially valueable business development clues.
I think it turned out both of these turned out not to be as valueable as they hoped.
Custom GPTs are a meme product anyway. It’s just someone else writing a prompt that you can’t see. There’s no fundamental difference between the default model and the custom GPT, so there’s no real point to them.
If they were fine-tuned models then it would be interesting.
I'm guessing the OP is looking at this through the lens of more mom and pop users on the chat interface rather than the greater product line of these companies with all their dev tooling.
Claude Code is radically better than anything ChatGPT has right now. If anything it's the other way around -- ChatGPT has the mom and pop mindshare and more first-mover name recognition, but they have an objectively worse product for 'serious' users.
yeah, it's been a bitt iffy for me this week. took a few days off and came back yesterday and in the mean time feels like claude code took 15 steps backwards
I tried to make an artifact that would simplify Wikipedia articles [0] but the artifacts stubbornly won't let you do ANY input into them, not even via query strings. I think I'd be able to make cooler artifacts once they allow more input/output stuff. I understand the security issues, and it makes sense to roll this out slowly, but I want it now!
I’m somewhat indifferent to artifacts. While they can produce useful code occasionally when the codebase is relatively small, they become excessively cumbersome once it reaches around 500 lines. This makes it difficult to even add or remove code. If you want to change a few colors in a webpage, they have to rewrite the whole artifact. It frustrates me that you can’t edit a single line in an artifact; you have to rely on the LLM to do it.
I have ran into a few situations where there's some console error that is fixed by rewriting the thing from scratch. Artifacts are awesome for being able to display some sort of interactive tutoring tool I've made on the fly, but realistically I could just have that HTML/CSS/JS file myself and push it to my own site relatively easy. For others though, it's hosted there easily
I think that's a good decision. They know their market and it's intended for small projects and demo mostly from non tech people. And they did not built half baked editor for which people would have further complaints about. AI assisted coding is a whole different thing and there are many players.
> OpenAI appears to have basically abandoned Custom GPTs since their Spring ‘24 update, and I’m a bit stumped as to why.
It simplifies the product, reducing the number of hurdles the user has to jump through. "Hmm, which gpt should I use for this task?" That should be OpenAI's problem, not mine!
False all around.
Custom GPTs are not abandoned, see heavy usage, and their selection is not a dichotomy between the user's problem and OpenAI's problem. Custom GPTs exist so they can benefit from custom prompts which are highly relevant. Unless you're asserting that custom prompts are useless, which would be an absurd assertion to make, it cannot be asserted that Custom GPTs are useless. And no, this is not something that OpenAI is going to select for you because the customization is a personal one.
Custom GPTs don’t support a bunch of newer ChatGPT features like chat history and projects and they can’t be edited from mobile. There is no real advantage to using a custom GPT over adding a custom prompt to a project at this point, given that the latter doesn’t isolate you from the rest of ChatGPT’s feature set. It really seems like they stopped working on custom GPTs and just expect users to use projects instead.
> There is no real advantage to using a custom GPT over adding a custom prompt to a project
The two features, namely Custom GPTs and Projects, are orthogonal. This is because a Project is for related explorations of a theme, whereas a Custom GPT is for unrelated explorations of a theme.
> chat history
What chat history? Each chat is in the user's history by default, which is how it's supposed to work for Custom GPTs. I don't need a filtered chat history for a Custom GPT like I do for a Project.
> It really seems like they stopped working on custom GPTs and just expect users to use projects instead.
That's more a personal belief rather than a conclusion; it's not even a formal declaration by OpenAI.
The chat history is probably referring to the referencing across chats feature:
https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1910378768172212636
Hilariously, today, I unsubscribed from claude due to the increased api timeouts and expensive usage costs when I can use other models for way cheaper that perform equally as good.
yeah their efforts seem to show no care for their consumer level subscribers. all they do seems to be tiered to enterprise customers.
How stable are these now?
I turned off artifacts months ago because it would:
- frequently update code incorrectly / bad edit diff
- act like it updated / created an artifact when it just did nothing
- slowly / painfully delete every single line one by one before rewriting
- use artifacts for things that shouldn't have had any code written at all
Just wasn't worth the value it provided. This was before claude code.
> slowly / painfully delete every single line one by one before rewriting
I think this one is a visual artifact. I think it always rewrites artifacts from scratch internally, but the UI tries to make it look like it isn’t doing that. The result is that it looks like it’s deleting lines from the inside of the text instead of just writing them.
That said, I’ve also experienced all of your complaints, except the bad edit one (but I see that all the time in Claude Code/Aider).
For the bad edit one, to clarify, I mean, it would "put its edit pointer" at the top of the file and start deleting/inserting there, instead of where it "intended to" which would have been somewhere in the middle, for example.
---
Erroring in that way specifically makes me think the "deleting every line" issue isn't just a visual artifact but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Technical term for "its edit pointer" is "the cursor".
The extra system prompt can definitely cause some performance issues, and it can over use them. The deleting every line behavior is gone though. It's definitely not something you should turn on for every conversation, but it's quite compelling for creating little capsule web apps.
I tell Claude not to put anything in the artifacts because it always fucks then up. I see it writing code in it and then it disappears leaving the last artifact in place causing me to waste tokens having it recreate the artifact.
I find it useless most of them time and wish I could disable it.
You can. Go to "Connectors" in settings and toggle it off.
I love you.
I'm skeptical of Anthropic's product approach with Artifacts. They made a real winner with claude code and their subscription decision (basically giving up on the profitable api metered billing to win over the professional user base) for this product. Otherwise they are making now the same mistakes Openai did with the GPT Marketplace. As a customer i don't want millions of half-baked ai mini apps to choose from. This is what i'm getting with Artifacts and those gpt stores - decision fatigue and disappointment. I want the best app to solve my problem - this almost certainly won't be these hobbyist custom instruction wrappers but well designed apps by professionals (who know the limitations of these platform won't allow them to build the best-in class solution). Just like Claude Code isn't an artifact but a complete standalone app that doesn't fit into the limitations of such marketplaces.
I totally missed you can embed AI features directly into claude artifacts. I ran the first GPT store hackathon in NYC and I feel like people were very underwhelmed. What could you do in a custom GPT you couldn't with a shared chat? The integration felt very annoying. Claude I feel nails how easy it is to build + how easy it is to share
Note that this is new; Artifacts launched almost a year ago, but the API to call Claude from within them was added just three weeks ago.
Artifacts can reduce token usage by a factor of 2 or more.
I had an [agent evolution framework](danieltan.weblog.lol/2025/06/agent-lineage-evolution-a-novel-framework-for-managing-llm-agent-degradation) before that dumped the output analysis into chat. It often timed out before the 10th conversation. After dumping the analysis into an artifacts, and have the LLM only edit it as required, I can go to 15 or more rounds without hitting the context limit. While they seem to re-output the entire artifact each time, they don't actually consume the tokens for the entire artifact.
This also greatly reduces the tendency of HALO-style rampancy, or AI psychosis which is also what the recent paper on context-rot/poisoning (https://research.trychroma.com/context-rot) is about.
"OpenAI appears to have basically abandoned Custom GPTs since their Spring ‘24 update, and I’m a bit stumped as to why"
My guess is it was always meant as marketing scheme, having others promote OpenAI for free, while at the same time they would be able to see which topics got traction and which not, providing potentially valueable business development clues.
I think it turned out both of these turned out not to be as valueable as they hoped.
Custom GPTs are a meme product anyway. It’s just someone else writing a prompt that you can’t see. There’s no fundamental difference between the default model and the custom GPT, so there’s no real point to them.
If they were fine-tuned models then it would be interesting.
A great highlight on Claude’s new strategy. I agree authentication and payment are key features for user lock in.
"Claude is kicking ChatGPT's butt"
I'm guessing the OP is looking at this through the lens of more mom and pop users on the chat interface rather than the greater product line of these companies with all their dev tooling.
Claude Code is radically better than anything ChatGPT has right now. If anything it's the other way around -- ChatGPT has the mom and pop mindshare and more first-mover name recognition, but they have an objectively worse product for 'serious' users.
Have you used it this week? Quality has got really bad.
yeah, it's been a bitt iffy for me this week. took a few days off and came back yesterday and in the mean time feels like claude code took 15 steps backwards
Every time I consider max plan or a yearly sub I remind myself that it's their standard operating procedure to degrade their products after launch.
> Claude is the Dropbox of the Gen AI era.
Is this supposed to be a compliment?
Has anyone come across any really cool artifacts? I'd be curious to see
Simon Willison is an incessant champion of AI tinkering. This is a bit dated, but here's a post specifically on his Artifact builds: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/21/claude-artifacts/
Here's all his posts tagged with claude-artifacts: https://simonwillison.net/tags/claude-artifacts/
I tried to make an artifact that would simplify Wikipedia articles [0] but the artifacts stubbornly won't let you do ANY input into them, not even via query strings. I think I'd be able to make cooler artifacts once they allow more input/output stuff. I understand the security issues, and it makes sense to roll this out slowly, but I want it now!
[0] ended up making it a browser extension instead https://mattsayar.com/simple-wikiclaudia/
Color palette generator: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/719b00a3-66e7-46c7-b90d-a...
I like the use case for mini design exploration tools