Module 1 · Foundations — what Replit Agent is Lesson 3 of 15
The screen: where every control lives
A tour of the interface you will live in — a workspace with a file tree, an editor, a terminal, a preview pane and a chat panel — all of it in a browser tab. 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 Replit Agent is a workspace with a file tree, an editor, a terminal, a preview pane and a chat panel — all of it in a browser tab. 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: break your own application on purpose — delete a field from the database and see what breaks — then use the agent to fix it and read what it changed. It takes fifteen minutes and saves you those fifteen minutes every week after.
Worked example
The preview pane next to the chat is the loop: describe, run, look, correct. Without looking at the result, the correction is a guess.
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 Replit Agent is a workspace with a file tree, an editor, a terminal, a preview pane and a chat panel — all of it in a browser tab.
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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.