Issue 7, Oct 21, 2026
The Temperature 0 Trap
Senior AI Engineer interview at Google, and the interviewer asks:
“Your agent makes different tool calls on identical inputs. A teammate says “set temperature to 0 and we’re done”
Don’t say: “Temperature 0 makes the model deterministic, so the tool calls become consistent.”
Why zeroing temperature silently locks in bad tool calls and how GPU batching quietly breaks determinism in production anyway.
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The full answer, with the mechanism and the arithmetic, is for paid subscribers on Substack.