You cannot ship an LLM feature without an eval suite

Manual spot-checking does not scale past the demo. Offline evals are the difference between a prototype and a product.

S. Haddad28 July 202611 min read

The failure mode is consistent: a feature demos well, ships, and then quietly degrades as prompts drift and models update.

Build the eval before the feature

Write fifty labelled examples first. They will clarify the scope more than any spec.

An eval that runs manually is an eval that stops running. Put it in CI.

S. Haddad

VP, Data & AI

Writes about data platforms and putting AI into production.

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