Shipping to Production
Evals: The Unsexy Core
10 min+110 XPStep 1/11
Vibes are not an eval
'Seems better' dies the moment you change the prompt, the model, and the retriever in the same week. Production GenAI runs on evals — repeatable, scored measurements of output quality. They're the CI of AI products.
The unsexy truth: the strongest predictor of a good AI product isn't which model you picked — it's whether the team built evals before they built features.
insight
Without evals, every prompt edit is astrology: you changed something, vibes happened, ship it.