A practical guide to evaluating LLM applications
NEO Campus Editorial16 February 20266 min read
Evals are the discipline that turns LLM hacking into LLM engineering. Without them, every prompt change is a coin flip.
Start with a golden dataset
A few dozen real inputs with expected outputs are worth more than thousands of synthetic ones.
Mix metric types
Exact match, semantic similarity, LLM-as-judge, and human review each catch different failure modes.
Run on every change
Wire evals into CI. A prompt change without an eval run is a deploy without tests.
