Bakers and recipes: which one do I need?

GrannyBakes lets you make two things: bakers and recipes. The names sound alike, but they do different jobs, and they work best together.

A baker: a helper you talk to

A baker (an AI agent) is a helper with its own name, job and oven (the AI model it bakes in). You chat with it: you ask, it answers, you ask again. It can remember you, answer from your documents in the Pantry and pick up a utensil, such as the calculator, when it needs one.

Make a baker when the talk goes back and forth and you don't know the next question in advance:

• Shop Helper answers customer questions from your price list.
• Email Helper turns your notes into a polite email, and you ask it to make the email shorter.

A recipe: the same job, the same steps, every time

A recipe (a workflow) is a card of numbered steps that Granny follows from start to finish when you press Bake ▶, or by herself on a schedule or when someone writes to your Telegram bot.

Make a recipe when the job should happen the same way every time:

• it has several steps in a fixed order, such as write, check, save;
• it needs a decision ("is this review unhappy?") or your OK before anything goes out;
• the result should be saved to a file or sent somewhere;
• it should start by itself.

For example, Review Reply checks whether a review is unhappy, writes an apology or a thank-you, waits for your OK and saves the reply. Morning Digest reads a web page every morning and saves five bullet points.

Which one do I need?

Ask yourself one question: do I want to chat with it, or press one button (or nothing at all)?

You want to…	Make a…
ask questions and talk things through	baker
get the same kind of result again and again with one click	recipe
have it run every morning, or answer people on Telegram	recipe
read the text before it reaches a customer	recipe with a Granny check

Not sure? Start with a baker and chat with it until you like its answers. When you catch yourself doing the same thing with it every day, put it in a recipe.

They work together

Every thinking step in a recipe is one of your bakers. The baker knows its job; the recipe says when it works and what happens with its answer. That's why a recipe step only needs a few words, like "Offer a free croissant": the baker already knows the rest, and Granny passes on what the step before it made.

The quickest way to see both at once is the CookbookCookbook. Granny asks a few questions, then sets up a recipe and its baker. You can chat with that baker on its own, too.

Granny's rule of thumb: a baker is the cook, and a recipe is the card the cook follows.