Skip to lesson
Exit
Evals & Production Reliability1 / 3

2 min lesson

Evals make “done” definable

Make the call in this situation: "In a Cursor FDE interview, why is hand-waving on 'how do you know it works?' a uniquely costly mistake?" Explain what supports it.

Step 1 of 3

Evals make “done” definablethe operational version of a success metric

An FDE who can't define success criteria can't define done. "The migration script works" is not a finish line. "The script converts 412 of our 430 components, the other 18 are flagged for manual review and zero introduce a type error" is a finish line a customer can sign off on.

WITH EVALS VS WITHOUT: TWO POSTURES

Interactive diagram. Tab through its regions; each focused region shows its detail in the panel below.

diagram: compare

The right column is what a senior customer engineer will run unattended.

Learn more

Full explanation

Full explanation

Say it like this

“I don't ship a workflow I can't measure. Before I build, I write down the success metric and a small eval set that operationalizes it. That's what lets me tell you, with a number, whether this is ready for your team or not.”