A practical LLM evaluation harness you can build in a day
You do not need an evaluation platform. You need fifty cases, a runner, and the discipline to look at the output before you ship.
What we learn shipping AI systems, computer vision, and automation into production — written for the engineers and operators who have to run them.
You do not need an evaluation platform. You need fifty cases, a runner, and the discipline to look at the output before you ship.
The demo works, the pilot stalls, the rollout quietly dies. Four failure modes we see in almost every agent project — and what a system that survives contact with real users looks like.
Chunk, embed, search, stuff into a prompt. That pipeline gets you a convincing prototype and a support queue full of confidently wrong answers. Here is what we build instead.
Fine-tuning is rarely the first answer and occasionally the only one. A short decision procedure for choosing between prompt engineering, retrieval, and training.