Pass everything the helper needs

A helper does not inherit what you already said. It starts with nothing except the instruction you hand it at that moment. There is no shared memory sitting behind it and nothing carries over from the last one.

So if a fact is not passed, it does not exist for that helper. This is behind most of the "why did it forget" moments. It did not forget. It was never told.

The practical version: write the instruction as though to someone who has just walked into the room. Everything they need travels with the request, including the findings from the step before. Not a summary of those findings, the whole of them.

Common questions

1. Is there really no shared pool of context?
   None. Nothing arrives by default, so anything you leave out of the task is something the helper simply will not have. There is no enclosing scope behind it, which means the whole input has to travel in the request.
2. Do the helpers hold no state at all, then?
   Each one holds its own. A helper you called before still has its own prior turns when you come back to it. What it never has is yours, or its siblings'. So the boundary is not amnesia, it is that no state crosses it.
3. What is the trap for whoever writes the task?
   The coordinator writes the task knowing everything, and cannot tell what it knows from what it actually said. That gap is where the missing context comes from.
4. Should I pass a summary of the previous step or the whole thing?
   The whole of it. Not a summary, not a pointer. The framework will sequence the work correctly and still let you starve the next step of context, so completeness is your discipline rather than something it guarantees.
5. Prose or structure?
   Structure. If what you pass is unclear the result is unlikely to be good, so structure protects the quality of the next answer. It also keeps the content in one field and its source in another, so a claim keeps pointing at where it came from.
6. Should I pass the steps as well as the goal?
   Pass the goal and the criteria for judging the work complete, and withhold the procedure. That empty space is the room the helper needs to use its judgement, which is the whole reason you delegated rather than writing code.
7. Is there an exception to withholding the steps?
   The steps that must not vary. Give the destination and the standard, stay silent on the route, except where the route itself is non-negotiable.

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