1 min lesson
Offline evals before you risk production
Walk through "Offline evals before you risk production" in order, then name the proof that tells you it worked.
Step 1 of 2
Offline evals before you risk production
You don't A/B test a change you haven't sanity-checked, because exposing millions of users to a regression is expensive and erodes trust. Gate on offline evals first.
- 1Build a held-out task set. Real tasks with known-good outcomes - this refactor should compile, this completion should match the accepted ground truth.
- 2Grade automatically where you can. Compile, type-check and test-pass are deterministic, fast and trustworthy; reserve an LLM-judge for taste a test can't express.
- 3Set a gate. A candidate has to clear the offline threshold before it earns a live experiment. Regressions die here, cheaply.
- 4Watch for overfitting. A set you tune against stops measuring; refresh tasks and hold some fully blind.