Lead · Beginners Guide
Temperature 0 can still give you a shallow answer — it governs word-selection randomness, not how thoroughly Claude thought. That's effort's job.
Adrian Koch
·
September 02, 2026
If you've read articles about temperature and articles about effort side by side, it's easy to blur them into the same thing — both get described as "dials that adjust how Claude generates output." But these two parameters actually control completely different mechanisms, and one of them has quietly stopped working on newer models. If your mental model is still stuck in an older version, you...