Module 1 · Foundations — what DeepSeek is Lesson 3 of 15
The screen: where every control lives
A tour of the interface you will live in — a chat with a reasoning toggle, where the thinking appears above the answer and can usually be collapsed. 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 DeepSeek is a chat with a reasoning toggle, where the thinking appears above the answer and can usually be collapsed. 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: ask one arithmetic question with reasoning on and time both the wait and the answer, then ask the same with it off. It takes fifteen minutes and saves you those fifteen minutes every week after.
Worked example
The toggle is the whole product decision: fast answers for chatting, slow answers for problems. Using the wrong one wastes either your time or your money.
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 DeepSeek is a chat with a reasoning toggle, where the thinking appears above the answer and can usually be collapsed.
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