alt Hacker News> "I would love if the XHTML and TeX were artifacts rather than code"
What's an "artifact"? I don't come from a writing background, so it may be obvious to some people, but I only know that word in a historical-ish context, as something old and important, which doesn't seem to make sense in this context
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In software development, an artifact is a deployable file produced during the build process, such as a .jar, .zip, .exe, or Docker image.
In the publishing world, an artifact is something that is a product of processing code. e.g. the OP wants their code to generate files in various formats.
Artifact in this context is whatever is produced by build process. That is common convention in CI/CD context. And the base definition for "artifact" is very wide: anything artificial, as in not natural but made by humans.
An artifact is the output of an automated process that take some input and outputs artifacts. Its a generic term that can mean all kinds of things depending on the process and type of output. For example if you have a program that take an Open Office document in and produce a pdf and an epub file out then "pdf" and "ebup" would be the artifacts.