Building images that enable improved utilization of previously built image layers. An image build system evaluates commands prior to their use and differentiate between stateful and stateless commands. Employing such an approach enables stateless commands to be identified (e.g. labeled), thus enabling the image build system to handle the stateless commands differently from stateful commands. This enables the re-use of cached/stored image layers, thus reducing image size by avoiding the creation of new image layers.