Cowork: artifact deletion from UI leaves orphaned folder on disk
Status Closed — not planned
Maintainer reply None cached
Activity 2 comments · opened May 7, 2026 · closed Jun 5, 2026
Summary
When deleting an artifact from the Cowork UI, the entry is removed from artifacts.json but the corresponding folder in ~/Documents/Claude/Artifacts/ is not cleaned up. This causes create_artifact to fail with:
A folder for "lp-dashboard" already exists in Documents/Claude/Artifacts. It may be from a previous deletion or another account. Choose a different id.
Steps to reproduce
- Create an artifact in Cowork (e.g., id
lp-dashboard) - Delete it from the Cowork UI
- Verify the entry is gone from
artifacts.json - Verify
~/Documents/Claude/Artifacts/lp-dashboard/still exists on disk - Try to create a new artifact with the same id → error
Expected behavior
Deleting an artifact from the UI should also remove the folder from ~/Documents/Claude/Artifacts/.
Actual behavior
artifacts.jsonentry is removed ✅~/Documents/Claude/Artifacts/<id>/folder persists ❌- Re-creating an artifact with the same id fails ❌
Environment
- macOS (Darwin 24.6.0)
- Claude Desktop with Cowork mode
- Session storage:
~/Library/Application Support/Claude/local-agent-mode-sessions/ - Artifact storage:
~/Documents/Claude/Artifacts/
Additional context
In one session, 11 artifacts were tracked in artifacts.json while 14 folders existed on disk — the 3 extra were orphans from prior UI deletions.
This issue has 2 comments on GitHub. Read the full discussion on GitHub ↗