Why GitHub Copilot Ignores Your React Project Structure

I have been a freelance frontend developer for a while now. I use GitHub Copilot and Cursor every day. AI coding tools that are supposed to make me faster. And one thing kept happening that drove me completely crazy. Everything worked. And everything was wrong. I would ask Copilot to build something. It would build it. Clean. Working. No errors. And completely disconnected from everything else in my project. Wrong folder Wrong naming convention New utility function even though one already existed New component even though one was three files away Every single time. I kept thinking: Does this thing even see my project? Or is it just generating into a void? After a lot of frustration, I realized the answer is both. Your AI does not read your project. It reads your prompt. This sounds obvious when you say it out loud. But it took me an embarrassingly long time to actually understand it. When you open a new Copilot session and write a prompt, it does not automatically scan your entire code