Temperature: how adventurous is your baker?

When an oven writes, it picks one word after another. For each next word it has a list of good candidates, some very likely and some a bit unusual. Temperature decides how adventurous that pick is.

What it does

• Low temperature (0 to 0.3): the oven nearly always takes the most likely word. Ask the same thing twice and you get almost the same answer, like a baker who follows the recipe to the gram.
• Medium (around 0.7): a little variety, still sensible. Good for everyday writing.
• High (1 and above): the oven takes more unusual words. Answers vary a lot and can get creative, or a bit odd.

Here is the same request baked three times at each temperature on the same oven. Read down each column:

At 0 the runs are nearly identical. At 1.2 every run is different. Neither is "better": it depends on the job.

Which number to pick

Use low numbers when you want the same, correct answer every time: pulling data out of an invoice, answering from your price list, sorting messages. Use 0.7 for emails and posts. Go above 1 for brainstorming names or ideas, and read the results with a smile.

Top P, the other knob

Top P also controls variety, in a different way: at 0.9 the oven only chooses among the most likely words that together make up 90% of the chance. Change either temperature or Top P, not both, or the effects get hard to predict.

Not every oven has this knob

Thinking ovens (reasoning models) choose their own variety, so they ignore temperature and Top P. GrannyBakes keeps your setting and shows it as "not sent" for those ovens, so nothing breaks when you switch.

Granny's rule of thumb: low (0–0.3) for facts and data, medium (0.7) for everyday writing, high (1+) for brainstorming.