The paper introduces the student-coined term "digital instinct" which describes students' disposition to resorting to digital technology for solving problems and doing school assignments. Taking cues from the term "digital instinct," the paper describes a student perspective on digital literacy emerging from 100 lived experience descriptions and interviews with 37 Danish upper secondary students. The findings show that students' digital practice is characterised by experience-based, intuitive and familiar use of technologies. Most notably, students employ digital technologies as cognitive partners that help them carry on with assignments that they initially did not understand, but that they were able to complete with the help of the computer. The study examines the nature of this partnership through the words of the students and identifies how technologies expand student agency but fall short of a reflective use of digital technologies. Recognising the strengths and weaknesses of students' digital practices may inform the concept of digital literacy and encourage teachers to acknowledge the digital instinct as a steppingstone to foster students' reflective use of digital technologies.