Module 1 · Foundations — what Manus is Lesson 3 of 15
The screen: where every control lives
A tour of the interface you will live in — a chat with an attached workspace: the agent shows its plan, its steps, the files it makes, and a result panel you can download from. 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 Manus is a chat with an attached workspace: the agent shows its plan, its steps, the files it makes, and a result panel you can download from. 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.
Common mistakes
Do this once, properly: write one brief and watch the plan it produces before it starts. If the plan is wrong, correcting it there costs ten seconds.. It takes fifteen minutes and saves you those fifteen minutes every week after.
Worked example
The step list is the part to watch — it is where you see the agent misunderstand the task, before it spends twenty minutes working from the wrong idea.
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 Manus is a chat with an attached workspace: the agent shows its plan, its steps, the files it makes, and a result panel you can download from.
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Finish every lesson to unlock the certificate. Each one ends in a practice task — do them and the final project brief writes itself.