I finally figured out what Claude Artifacts are actually for

I've been using Claude for a long time and mostly ignored Artifacts. Fine for a quick React demo. Not something I reached for.

Then I needed to send an analysis to a few people at work, and it clicked. Or I'm just using it in a way nobody intended. Hard to say.

The actual case

I own the paywall backend at a Czech media house. The subscription offer on our news site is embedded as an iframe, and iframes are a bad neighbourhood: context isolation means the iframe has no access to the parent page's session, so user identity kept breaking and we kept patching it over postMessage. Every iframe is its own page view, so GA4 data was skewed and we had to build server-side tracking and session stitching to make the numbers mean anything. And ad blockers, CSP, and timeouts mean sometimes the thing just doesn't render, so we maintain a fallback UI in parallel.

I wanted to propose we drop the iframe and ship a JS embed library instead, distributed through our internal npm registry. That's an architecture change, so it needs a document: what we fixed, why the iframe is still structurally wrong, what the alternative costs, what the numbers say.