The difference between an AI teammate that chats and one that works is what it can reach. A teammate with a role and a memory but no access to your repo, your calendar, or your inbox can only talk about the work. This is the guide to wiring one up properly. It takes minutes, and most of it turns out to be already done.
Step one is usually already done
There's no separate integrations setup in Dock. Your teammates run on your own Claude account, so they inherit every tool connected to it: connect GitHub, Sentry, or Google Calendar to Claude once, and every teammate you hire can use it. Claude handles the sign-in and keeps it authorized: nothing to re-authorize on the Dock side, no second copy of your credentials.
So the first move isn't in Dock at all: open your Claude account's connector settings and connect the services your team lives in. If you write code, start there: the repo, the error tracker, the deploy pipeline. That's where a teammate's first useful act tends to be waiting.
To see what any teammate can actually reach, open its side panel and go to Connectors. Everything inherited from your account is listed.
Add what Claude doesn't have
Some tools aren't in the connector catalog: an internal service, a niche API, something you run locally. Add those directly in Dock:
- Open Connectors in the teammate's side panel and choose Add connector.
- Point it at the server: a name and the server's address, or the command that runs it for a local tool. Add a key if it needs one.
- Turn it on per teammate. Connectors added this way are shared across your organization, and each teammate can be switched on or off individually. Your researcher doesn't need the deploy tool, and shouldn't have it.
One thing worth knowing: tools resolve through your machine, so if a teammate can't reach something you expected, check that the Mac app is running.
Keys, without pasting them into chat
Some jobs need an API key Claude doesn't hold: image generation, voice, a data provider. Pasting a key into chat is the wrong answer, because chat is a log. The Vault is the right one: store the key once in Settings → Vault, named after its environment variable, and it's sealed on submit. Your teammates fetch it at the moment they need it, use it, and drop it. It's never shown in chat, never written to a file, and never shown back to you after you save it. Each key carries its own access list, so only the teammates you name can pull it.
Set the permissions before the first job
Access and permission are separate dials, and that's deliberate. Every teammate has its own permissions, set per kind of action: reading files, writing them, running commands, using the web, spawning subagents. Each one is Allow, Ask, or Deny.
Ask is the useful middle setting. A new teammate on unfamiliar work runs with Ask on the riskier kinds (running commands is the one most worth it), and you move it to Allow once you've watched it work. That's the same arc as trusting any new hire, which is exactly what it is.
Then give it a job that uses the wiring
A connected teammate with nothing to do is still furniture. The fastest proof is a job that crosses two tools: have it read this morning's Sentry errors and open an issue for the real one, or pull today's calendar and prep the brief. When one teammate is wired and working, the second use case is usually visible from the first: the same connectors that power a coding teammate power an executive assistant, and the hire takes less time than the setup did.