Is My Dock Buddies an AI companion?
"AI companion" usually means something you talk to: a character with a chat window, a personality prompt and a language model behind it, remembering what you said last week. My Dock Buddies is not that, and it is worth saying plainly before you download it expecting one. Our buddies do not speak, do not listen and have nothing to type into. They are company in the way a cat on the windowsill is company — present, busy with their own thing, and glad to see you.
There is no chat, and no model
Nothing in the app sends anything to a language model. There is no text box, no voice, no conversation and no memory of one. What a buddy does next is chosen from a small set of activities by a few rules and a weighted shuffle — closer to how a game character idles than to anything generative. That is why it costs almost nothing to run and why it works with the internet switched off.
What they do respond to
Real things about your machine, if you let them: the charger going in, minutes since you last touched the keyboard, a locked screen, the hour of the evening. Step away and they stretch, make coffee or read; come back and they are at their desk again. It reads five small signals and nothing else, and it is off until you turn it on.
The one place AI comes into it
If you use Claude Code or Codex, your buddies can take a cue from your agent — working while it works, waving when it is waiting on your answer. Even then there is no AI in our app: it is watching whether the agent’s own session file changed recently, the way you might glance at a colleague’s screen to see if they are still typing. The intelligence is in your agent, not in the buddy.
Why we did not build a chatbot
Because the good part of having someone at the next desk is not the conversation — it is the presence. Something moving in the corner of your eye, getting on with its own work, that you can ignore for an hour and glance at when you need to. A companion that wants to talk is another thing demanding attention, and most of us have enough of those. These ones never interrupt, never notify and never say a word.
Who each kind is for
If you want to talk to a character, keep a diary with it or have it answer questions, you want an AI companion app and we are the wrong shop. If you want a little life on your desktop while you work — something with a body, a face and a routine, that costs you nothing in attention — that is what this is. They are not competing products; they solve different lonelinesses.
What "3D" adds that a sprite does not
Our characters are rigged 3D models rather than flat pictures: a skeleton, joints to the fingertips, hands that hold a mug, a face that changes with their mood. That is what makes them read as present rather than decorative — they turn, they lean, they look up at you. No language model required.