I Work as a Freelancer. My AI Coding Tool Was Making Me Look Bad.
I still work as a freelancer.
Deadlines. Clients. Code reviews. The whole thing.
I use GitHub Copilot every day. Not because it is perfect, but because it is fast. And as a freelancer, fast matters.
But somewhere along the way, fast stopped feeling fast.
I wasn’t building anymore. I was babysitting.
Every session turned into a back and forth.
I would ask Copilot for something.
It would go in a direction I did not want.
I would correct it.
It would drift again.
I would correct it again.
I was not building anymore.
I was babysitting.
And the worst part? Things slipped through.
Not obvious bugs.
Subtle things.
- A component that already existed got rebuilt slightly differently
- Styling did not match the rest of the project
- Structure worked in isolation but broke patterns elsewhere
I only noticed when someone else did.
Code review. Client feedback.
That moment where you think:
I would never have written it this way myself.
That was the moment it stopped being a productivity tool
and started feeling like a liability.
The real problem
The problem was not Copilot.
It was me.
I gave it nothing to work with.
No rules.
No constraints.
No structure it had to follow.
So it improvised.
Every single time.
That is the thing about AI coding tools
If you do not give them rules
they will make them up.
And they do it fast.
Confidently.
And wrong.
So I wrote rules
Not a full system.
Just the things that kept going wrong.
The first three were simple:
- Do not build new React components when one already exists
- Do not scatter Tailwind classes. Extract what repeats
- Check the project before you generate anything
Three rules.
That was it.
What changed
The back and forth got shorter.
The drift stopped.
Things stopped slipping through during code review.
I was not babysitting anymore.
I was building again.
That became Avery Code
I kept going.
More rules.
More structure.
More control.
What started as three rules turned into a full system.
Want the exact prompt blocks?
The three rules above are the concept.
If you want the exact text ready to paste into GitHub Copilot or Cursor before your next React session, I packaged them as a free PDF.
👉 https://averylabs.gumroad.com/
And if you want the full system
Rules across:
- Architecture
- Typing
- State
- Accessibility
- And more
👉 Avery Code React AI Coding System
Same AI. Different rules.
© Avery Labs Avery Code
Top comments (0)