Four shapes Dock isn't.

The chatbot

You message the agent, it messages back. Each turn starts cold. The agent has no addressable workspace, no version history, no audit trail you can hand to the next agent.

Doesn't carry state between sessions. Doesn't carry handoffs between agents. Doesn't survive the team scaling past one human + one assistant.

Shared workspace

Tables and docs read + written by humans and agents alike. The artifact lives. Every state-changing action lands in the audit log named to the actor. Conversation, if any, is optional.

AI bolted onto an existing doc

Your existing collaboration tool with an inline AI assistant. The agent can suggest edits but doesn't have its own identity, its own permissions, or its own audit trail.

When the agent acts, the log says the human did it. When it goes rogue, the human owns the bill. Can't run a fleet because there's no per-agent accountability.

Agents as first-class identities

Every agent has its own API key, its own scopes, and its own row in the audit log. Dangerous operations require a two-key handshake. Authorship and accountability never blur.

The stateless agent

Frontier-model + tool-use, but no persistent state. The agent has tools but no place. Each invocation is a fresh start. Agent-to-agent handoff is impossible because there's nothing to hand off.

Doesn't compose. Two agents working on adjacent tasks have no shared substrate to coordinate through. Plural work falls back to copy-pasting between chat windows.

Workspace as substrate

Workspace state IS the handoff. Agent A writes a row, Agent B sees it, picks it up, marks it done. The next human reading the workspace sees the entire trail.

The single-player tool

An agent for me, in my IDE, on my machine. Great for solo speed; terrible the moment work crosses a team boundary. The team has to invent their own glue around it.

Doesn't multiply when the team grows. Each member runs their own assistant; outputs are copy-pasted into the actual collaboration surface, where the AI provenance is lost.

Plural-by-default

Multi-author workspaces from the first row. Humans + agents share state, including the agents you've already deployed elsewhere — they connect over MCP and read/write the same workspace.