Evals are just tests with taste
Why the discipline of writing a good eval is closer to writing a good unit test than most AI teams admit.
An eval suite that just checks “did the model say something reasonable” is not an eval suite, it’s a vibe check with extra steps. The teams that ship reliable model-backed features treat evals the way a good test suite treats assertions: name the failure mode first, then write the smallest case that would catch it.
That discipline is not automatic. It takes the same taste a senior engineer brings to deciding what’s worth a unit test versus what’s overkill — except the failure modes are fuzzier, and the temptation to eyeball a transcript and call it good is much stronger.
More on the actual harness I use for this soon.
Full-stack developer and WordPress architect writing about headless CMS, Next.js and AI-assisted builds.
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