Docognito hides ChatGPT or Claude in a cafe or co-working space by disguising the screen as a document. A cafe stranger has no stake in you, so the cost of being seen is discomfort rather than consequence. A co-working regular is different, since badges and repeated visits make you identifiable over many days rather than one glance.
A cafe stranger has no stake in you
Nobody at the next table works with you, grades you, or reports to the same manager you do. A stranger glancing at your screen in a cafe has nothing riding on what they see, and that fact changes what is actually at risk when they look. There is no consequence sitting behind the glance, only the discomfort of being seen doing something you would rather keep to yourself. That discomfort is worth taking seriously on its own terms. Not wanting a stranger to register what is on your screen does not need a consequence attached to it to count as a real reason to want the screen disguised.
the visible page, redrawn as a document editor answers exactly that discomfort. A cafe neighbour's eyes register the shape of a window rather than reading actual words at that distance, and the shape a document editor gives off passes for ordinary paperwork rather than the two column, alternating pattern a chat log makes even from a metre or two away.
A co-working regular is a different risk entirely
A co-working desk changes the equation in a way a cafe table never does. Entry is frequently badged or tied to a paid membership, so the people around you are not anonymous passers-by, they are identifiable regulars, people whose name you probably know and who probably know yours. And you will very likely see the same person again tomorrow, and the day after that, at the same desk or the one next to it.
That repetition is the actual difference. A single glance from a cafe stranger disappears the moment they look away, since there is no second visit for it to connect to. A co-working neighbour who notices the same open chat window across several visits is not forming a single impression, they are forming a pattern, and a pattern is harder to undo than a moment. The disguise matters just as much on visit twelve as it does on visit one, since the shape on the screen is what everyone there sees, every time, rather than something a first glance either catches or misses for good.
What a badge and a membership do not change
Being identifiable at a co-working desk does not make the underlying problem different in kind, only in stakes. The screen still gives away the same thing to a badge holder that it would give away to a stranger, a chat window with the same alternating message pattern either setting can read from a short distance. What changes is only what happens after someone notices, since a co-working regular can mention it, ask about it, or simply remember it the next time they sit nearby, none of which a cafe stranger who leaves in twenty minutes ever gets the chance to do.
Ordinary seat sense, a wall behind you rather than an open room, still helps in either setting, though a cafe chair is easy to move in a way a fixed library carrel is not, so seating is rarely the harder part of this particular problem. What is harder is that the software cannot tell a one time stranger from a daily regular, and does not need to, since the same document shape works for both.
Where the disguise still stops
A network connection is a separate channel from who is sitting nearby
anything a workplace network, proxy, DNS log or monitoring agent can see. Nobody at the next table has a stake in what you are doing, but if the laptop stays joined to a company network or a work account while you work from the cafe, that connection exists independently of the room around you, and the disguise does not reach it.
A stranger and a regular are different audiences
Treat a cafe stranger and a co-working regular as different problems even though the screen fix is identical for both. The stranger costs you a little discomfort for a few minutes and then forgets you entirely. The regular sees the same screen across weeks, so what they notice compounds rather than resets. Docognito keeps the same document shape on screen either way, which is the one part of this that does not need to change depending on who happens to be nearby today.
Use Docognito for the screen itself, in a cafe seat you will leave in an hour or a co-working desk you will be back at tomorrow.