Artefacts
Creating an artefact
Walk the create flow and pick the right kind, category, and content mode for what you're capturing.
Most artefacts in your workspace will be created from inside a session or a playbook context — Gleo will pre-fill the collection and most of the metadata for you. But you'll also create artefacts from the Library directly when you want a free-standing piece of content (a strategy doc, a policy, a vision statement) that doesn't belong to one specific session.
This page covers the manual create flow. The choices you make at create time shape the artefact's life — get them right and editing later is straightforward; get them wrong and you'll often find yourself recreating from scratch.
The create form, in four choices
Click New artefact in the Artefact Library. The create form asks you to pick four things, in roughly this order:
1. Kind
Managed, derived, generated, or referenced. Determines who edits it and how.
2. Category
Decision, action, question, risk, deliverable, strategy, policy, or vision. The "what" of the artefact.
3. Content mode
Embedded (in Gleo), external (a pointer), or snapshot (a captured copy). Determines where the body lives.
4. Body
The actual content — typed in for embedded; pasted as a URL for external; captured automatically for snapshot.
The full reference for what each value means is in What are artefacts. The decision-flow below covers the choices in the order they affect what happens next.
Picking a kind
The kind dictates the edit affordances the artefact will have once it's created. Pick the one that matches reality:
- Managed — you'll be the one writing and updating it. This is the most common kind for human-authored content.
- Derived — created automatically from other artefacts or session data. You won't usually create one of these by hand; they're produced by Gleo workflows.
- Generated — produced by an AI step (e.g. a session synthesis). Marked as such so the team knows to treat it as a proposal until reviewed.
- Referenced — a link out to something that lives elsewhere. Pair this with a content mode of external; Gleo will hold a pointer, not a body.
Picking a category
Category is the what. The eight options cover the most common categorical splits in operating documents and strategic outputs:
| Category | Pick when... |
|---|---|
| Decision | The artefact captures a call the team has made or is being asked to make. |
| Action | The artefact is a piece of work that needs doing. |
| Question | The artefact represents an open question the team hasn't resolved yet. |
| Risk | The artefact identifies something that could go wrong and needs watching. |
| Deliverable | The artefact is an output the team is producing for someone (a client, a stakeholder). |
| Strategy | The artefact captures the team's thinking on direction. |
| Policy | The artefact is a rule the team operates by. |
| Vision | The artefact describes a longer-time-horizon view of where the team is headed. |
If two categories feel right, pick the one your future self is most likely to filter by.
Picking a content mode
Content mode is where the body lives. The three modes have different next-step UIs:
| Mode | What happens next | When to use it |
|---|---|---|
| Embedded | Gleo opens an inline editor and you type the body. | The team will edit this in Gleo over time. |
| External | Gleo asks you to pick an external system (Google Docs, Notion, Figma, Miro, Confluence) and paste a URL. | The source-of-truth lives elsewhere; Gleo holds a labelled pointer. |
| Snapshot | Gleo captures the current contents of the linked source and stores them as a frozen copy. The original keeps changing; the snapshot doesn't. | You need a "this is what it looked like at the moment we shipped it" record. |
External vs snapshot is the single most-confused pair. External keeps Gleo synced to the live source — change the document, and the artefact reflects whatever's there next time you open it. Snapshot freezes the content at capture time — change the source, and the snapshot stays the same.
Walkthrough
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1
Open the create form
Sidebar → Artefacts → New artefact. (Or, from inside a playbook, use the New artefact action on the Artefacts tab so the playbook collection is pre-selected.)
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2
Pick kind, category, and content mode
Three dropdowns, each described above. The form will show / hide later fields depending on the content mode you pick.
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3
Add the content
Type the body (embedded), paste the URL and pick the source system (external), or confirm the source you want to capture (snapshot). Add a title.
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4
Save
The artefact lands in the chosen collection (or "Unorganized" if you didn't pick one) at draft status. From here, you can promote it through the lifecycle — see Statuses and versioning.
Tips & pitfalls
Pick a collection at create time. Picking later is one click, but most artefacts that land in "Unorganized" stay there. A 5-second decision now saves a quarterly clean-up later.
If you might want to capture how it looked, snapshot. External keeps the live link; snapshot freezes the content. Once you've moved on from a piece of work, the snapshot becomes audit evidence — the live link only tells you what the document says now.
Don't pick "generated" by hand. Generated is a marker that says "AI made this." Setting it manually for a human-authored artefact will confuse anyone reviewing the artefact later. Use managed instead.