Stateless Tools

Your tools should be stateless: every invocation is independent from every other invocation, there should be no state that persists between each invocation that has to be accounted for when doing the next invocation. Unfortunately, shell is a very popular tool and it has a particulary pernicious form of local state: current working directory. Sonnet 3.7 is very bad at keeping track of what the current working directory is. Endeavor very hard to setup the project so that all commands can be run from a single directory.

Ideally, models would be tuned to prefer not to make tool commands that change state, even if they are available. If state is absolutely necessary, continuously feeding the current state into the model could help improve coherence. The RP community probably has quite a lot of lessons here.

Examples

• A TypeScript project was divided into three subcomponents: common, backend and frontend. Each component was its own NPM module. Cursor run from the root level of the project would have to cd into the appropriate component folder to run test commands, and would get confused about its current working directory. It worked much better to instead open up a particular component as the workspace and work from there.