What everyone gets wrong about evals

It's really important that we don't think of evals as just tests, the common trap that a lot of people fall into, because they jump straight to the test, like, let me write some tests. And usually that's not what you want to do. You should start with some kind of data analysis to ground what you should even test. And that's a little bit different than software engineering, where you have a lot more expectations of how the system is going to work. With LLMs, it's a lot more surface area, and it's very stochastic. And so evals help you create metrics that you can use to measure how your application is doing and kind of give you a way to improve your application with confidence that you have a feedback signal in which to iterate against.