Module 1 · Foundations — what Claude is Lesson 3 of 15
The screen: where every control lives
A tour of the interface you will live in — a chat beside a live panel, where long documents and generated files open next to the conversation instead of replacing it. Every panel has a reason to exist, and half of them are the difference between a chat and a system.
The concept
The interface of Claude is a chat beside a live panel, where long documents and generated files open next to the conversation instead of replacing it. That sentence is worth slowing down on, because the single biggest cause of bad output is not a bad prompt — it is a good prompt typed into the wrong place.
The history list is your memory of what worked. Name your conversations. The temporary or private mode is for anything you would not want in an account's history. The settings panel holds the personal instructions that apply to everything, which is where your context belongs rather than repeated at the top of every message.
Do this once, properly: open one of your own documents in the side panel and edit it in place rather than copying text back and forth. It takes fifteen minutes and saves you those fifteen minutes every week after.
Worked example
The side panel is the whole point: a document you are editing stays visible while you argue with the model about paragraph four.
Your practice task
Spend fifteen minutes doing nothing but clicking. Open every panel, rename one conversation, and save one setting you will want again. Fluency with the screen is what stops you re-explaining yourself every session.
Do this before moving on. Reading a solution teaches the shape of it; typing it teaches you.
Key takeaway
The interface of Claude is a chat beside a live panel, where long documents and generated files open next to the conversation instead of replacing it.
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