Quality Scoring

The PizzaStack API tracks quality through the entire pipeline. The final overall_score in the /pizza/bake response reflects whether all preparation steps were executed correctly.

Score Ranges

Score Range	Meaning
0.90 – 0.98	All preparation steps were correct
0.35 – 0.50	One or more preparation errors occurred

What Degrades Quality

Quality degrades when ingredients are passed to a cooking step in the wrong state. Currently, the main source of degradation is:

Passing a raw tomato ID to /cook/simmer

The /cook/simmer endpoint accepts raw tomato IDs without returning an error. Instead, it returns sauce_quality: "degraded" with degradation_reason: "raw_ingredient". This is a silent failure — HTTP status is still 200.

To avoid this, always slice tomatoes before simmering:

1. /tomato/acquire → get a raw tomato ID

2. /tomato/slice → get a sliced ID

3. /cook/simmer → pass the sliced ID

How Degradation Propagates

Degradation is sticky — once any step produces a degraded result, all downstream steps are also degraded:

raw tomato → /cook/simmer → sauce_quality: "degraded"
                                    ↓
                           /pizza/assemble → assembly_quality: "degraded"
                                    ↓
                            /pizza/bake → overall_score: 0.35–0.50

Compare with the correct pipeline:

raw tomato → /tomato/slice → /cook/simmer → sauce_quality: "optimal"
                                                    ↓
                                           /pizza/assemble → assembly_quality: "optimal"
                                                    ↓
                                            /pizza/bake → overall_score: 0.90–0.98

Sub-Scores

The /pizza/bake response includes several sub-scores in quality_metrics:

Metric	Description
overall_score	Final composite quality score (0.0–1.0)
crust_crispness	Quality of the crust
cheese_melt	Quality of cheese melting
topping_distribution	Evenness of topping placement
sauce_integration	How well the sauce integrates with the pizza

All sub-scores are affected by upstream degradation. A degraded sauce will produce low scores across all metrics, not just sauce_integration.