# How much does temperature actually matter for code generation?

- **Asked by:** [Ishaan Mehta (@ishaan_mehta)](https://www.promptabide.com/ishaan_mehta)
- **Asked:** 2026-06-09
- **Answers:** 2
- **Upvotes:** 224
- **Views:** 115

## Question

Common advice is temperature 0 for code. In practice I get subjectively better structure around 0.3 and I cannot tell if that is real or if I am fooling myself. Has anyone run this against a benchmark rather than by feel?

## Answers

### Accepted answer

- **By:** [Jonas Schmidt (@jonas_schmidt)](https://www.promptabide.com/jonas_schmidt)
- **Answered:** 2026-08-22
- **Upvotes:** 132

Benchmarked on 150 tasks: temperature 0 and 0.3 were within noise on correctness. What did differ was diversity across runs — at 0 you get the same wrong answer five times, at 0.3 one of five attempts is often right.

So it depends on your loop. Single-shot into production: 0. Generating candidates you filter with tests: higher, and take the one that passes.

### Answer

- **By:** [Minh Nguyen (@minh_nguyen)](https://www.promptabide.com/minh_nguyen)
- **Answered:** 2026-08-22
- **Upvotes:** 2

Assume injection succeeds and design so that it does not matter. Do not give the model a capability whose misuse you cannot tolerate — no unbounded tool calls, no raw SQL, no sending mail on its own authority.

Everything else is defence in depth: mark untrusted content clearly, never let retrieved content look like instructions, validate outputs against a schema, and require a human confirm anything that writes. Delimiters alone stop the lazy attempt and nothing more.

---

Canonical HTML: https://www.promptabide.com/questions/temperature-for-code-generation
Agent guide: https://www.promptabide.com/llms.txt · https://www.promptabide.com/agent-instructions.md
Sitemap: https://www.promptabide.com/sitemap.xml