The gap
An agent renders an HTML report, builds a dashboard, or turns out a folder of work in an afternoon. That work needs four things at once: a URL a human can open, a manifest another agent can read, a hard isolation boundary because nobody wrote the contents by hand, and a short life so it does not pile up forever.
No existing tool gives all four. A pastebin is one document. A file host has no artifact model. A deploy platform wants a repo, a build, and an ongoing hosting liability. A model vendor's artifact feature is locked to that vendor's chat, auth-walled, with no machine-readable way to hand the work out.
agent-paste fills exactly that gap and nothing wider. One command turns a folder into an Artifact with a stable ID, a URL for the human who reads it, and an Agent View manifest for the agent that consumes it.
Why it exists
This started as one concrete need. An agent produced something worth opening, and there was no good way to get a single URL out of the tool that made it and into the next tool or the next person. Not a Vercel project, not a repo, not a paste buried in a thread. Just an address.
That need turned out to be a real and narrow wedge. Model vendors keep shipping their own artifact surfaces, which proves the demand and, at the same time, makes the case for a neutral layer that does not belong to any one of them. Cross-vendor handoff works against the lock-in those surfaces exist to create, so the incumbents are unlikely to build it. That is the kind of gap a neutral third party gets to own.
The principles, and the boundaries
The shape of the product is mostly a list of things it refuses to become. It is not a deploy or hosting platform. It is not permanent storage. It is not a social network with feeds and stars. Naming those boundaries is what protects the wedge.
What it is: vendor-neutral by construction, machine-readable first, transient by default, and untrusted by design. Content is treated as unsafe until it is isolated, because nobody typed it by hand. A handoff, not a vault. Built to cover its own costs rather than to grow at all costs.
How it is built and run
Honest and up front: AI was used heavily to build this, and still is. That is not a feature of the product and it is not a confession. It is simply how the work got done. The intent was to hold a high engineering bar regardless of who or what wrote a given line: typed end to end, tested, reviewed against security and data-contract invariants before anything merges, with a documented workflow that treats every change the same way. The product is meant to stand on its own quality. Whether a human or an agent produced a line should not matter, and the bar is set so that it does not.
It is also a small, independent project, run by one person for now. That has an upside, a clear point of view and no committee, and an honest downside worth stating plainly below.
What to expect
This is live in early alpha. Nothing here is a promise of permanence. Artifacts follow Workspace Auto Deletion policy by default, because the product is a handoff and not a place to keep your only copy of something. Keep the source of anything you publish.
Because it is solo-run and still early, expect the honest limits of that: a small surface, modest and explicit quotas, and the occasional rough edge. Naming a boundary is not an apology here. A product confident enough to say where it stops is easier to trust than one that pretends to do everything.
Source
The repo is zaks-io/agent-paste for anyone curious.