Personally, CLAUDE_BASH_MAINTAIN_PROJECT_WORKING_DIR=1 made all my cd problems go away (which were only really in cmake-based projects to begin with).

So it does a forced reset of the dirt after each bash command? Does it confuse Claude? I frequently find it lacks path awareness of what it's working directory is

That’s exactly what it does, I’ve found it completely un-confuses Claude Sonnet 4.5.