Organizing Your Workspace

Artifacts are the documents, reports, notes, and drafts that your agents produce and that you create yourself. As your workspace grows, keeping artifacts organized becomes essential. This guide covers how to create, browse, and manage artifacts effectively.

What is an artifact?

An artifact is any piece of content stored in your workspace. It might be a report generated by a workflow run, a note you wrote during a brainstorming session, or a draft document an agent prepared for your review. Every artifact has a type, an owner (the agent or user who created it), and a history that tracks how it came to exist.

Artifact types

Pencel supports nine artifact types:

Type	When to use it
Document	Finalized, polished content — policies, SOPs, client deliverables
Report	Data-driven outputs with analysis — monthly summaries, audit results, performance reviews
Note	Quick captures — meeting notes, ideas, observations
Draft	Work in progress — content that needs review or revision before it is finalized
Folder	A container for organizing other artifacts into logical groups
Dashboard	Interactive data visualization — KPI dashboards, metric overviews
Slides	Presentation decks — quarterly reviews, project updates
Spreadsheet	Tabular data and calculations — budget trackers, data exports
Email Draft	Pre-composed email for review — client follow-ups, weekly updates

TIP

Use the Draft type for anything an agent produces that you have not reviewed yet. Once you review and approve it, change the type to Document or Report as appropriate.

Browsing artifacts

Open the Artifacts view

Click Artifacts in the left sidebar. You see all artifacts in your workspace displayed as a list.

Search and filter

Use the search bar at the top to find artifacts by name or content. You can also filter by:

• Type — Show only specific types such as documents, reports, notes, drafts, folders, dashboards, slides, spreadsheets, or email drafts.
• Date — Find artifacts created within a specific time period.
• Agent — See only artifacts created by a particular agent.
• Tags — Filter by any tags you have applied.

Sort options

Sort the artifact list by:

• Date created — Newest or oldest first.
• Date modified — Most recently edited first.
• Name — Alphabetical order.

Creating artifacts manually

While agents often create artifacts automatically during runs, you can also create them yourself:

1. Open the Artifacts view.
2. Click New Artifact.
3. Choose the artifact type (document, report, note, draft, folder, dashboard, slides, spreadsheet, or email draft).
4. Give it a name.
5. Write or paste your content.
6. Add tags if desired.
7. Save.

Manually created artifacts are useful for reference material that agents might need — company policies, style guides, templates, or project briefs.

Organizing with folders

Folders let you group related artifacts together:

1. Create a new artifact and set its type to Folder.
2. Name the folder descriptively (e.g., "Q1 2026 Reports," "Client Deliverables," "Team Policies").
3. Move artifacts into the folder by editing each artifact and setting its parent folder.

You can nest folders inside other folders for deeper organization. However, keep the structure shallow — two or three levels deep is usually sufficient.

INFO

Agents can also create folders and organize artifacts during workflow runs. If you include instructions like "Save the report in the Q1 Reports folder," the agent will create the folder if it does not already exist.

Using tags

Tags provide a flexible way to categorize artifacts across folders. Unlike folders (which impose a strict hierarchy), tags let you label artifacts with multiple categories.

Good tagging practices:

• Use consistent naming. Decide on a tagging convention and stick to it. For example: client:acme, type:monthly, status:reviewed.
• Keep the tag list manageable. Ten to twenty well-chosen tags are more useful than a hundred one-off labels.
• Tag by use case, not just topic. Tags like needs-review, ready-to-send, or template help you find artifacts based on what you need to do with them.

Understanding provenance

Every artifact tracks where it came from. This provenance information tells you:

• Created by — Which agent or user created the artifact.
• Run — If the artifact was produced by a workflow run, you see which run created it. Click through to inspect the run details.
• Session — If the artifact was produced during a chat session, you see which session it came from.
• Date — When the artifact was created and last modified.

TIP

Provenance is especially valuable when reviewing agent-generated content. If a report contains unexpected data, you can trace it back to the exact run and step that produced it, then inspect the agent's reasoning in the execution trace.

Editing artifacts

Click on any artifact to open it in the editor. You can:

• Edit the content directly.
• Change the artifact name.
• Change the type (e.g., promote a draft to a document).
• Add or remove tags.
• Move it to a different folder.

All changes are saved automatically. Pencel tracks version history, so you can see what changed and when.

Bulk operations

When you need to manage many artifacts at once:

• Select multiple artifacts using the checkboxes in the list view.
• Use the bulk action menu to move, tag, or delete the selected items.
• This is particularly useful for end-of-quarter cleanup or when reorganizing your workspace structure.

Tips for a well-organized workspace

• Establish a folder structure early. Before your agents start producing content, create a basic folder hierarchy. Agents follow your lead — if folders exist, they use them.
• Review drafts promptly. Drafts pile up quickly when workflows run on schedule. Set aside time each week to review, approve, or discard agent-generated drafts.
• Archive, do not delete. If you no longer need an artifact but it might have historical value, move it to an "Archive" folder rather than deleting it. Agents can still reference archived artifacts when relevant.
• Use consistent naming conventions. A name like "Monthly Client Report - March 2026 - Acme Corp" is immediately understandable. A name like "Report v3 final FINAL" is not.
• Let agents handle the routine. Add instructions in your workflows to create artifacts with proper names, types, tags, and folder placements. This saves you from manual organizing after every run.

Next steps

• Building a Workflow — Configure workflows to produce well-organized artifacts automatically.
• Using Memory — Understand how agents use workspace knowledge alongside artifacts.
• Monitoring Runs — Trace which runs produced which artifacts.