Robert Ta argues that expensive AI evaluation platforms waste money. Reading 50 real conversation traces from NurtureBoss revealed a 66% failure rate in date handling that generic tools missed. His fix: have domain experts review raw logs, label failure modes, and judge pass/fail for a week.
Here's how to fuck up your AI product in less than 60 seconds. Buy a fancy eval platform. If you're building an AI product and you just bought an eval platform, I hate to break it to you, you probably wasted your money. Hamel Hussein, who has taught over 100 OpenAI and Anthropic engineers, found that AI products fail because of poor evaluation methodology. And the fix isn't some fancy tool. It's using the tools you already have. He had this example he taught in his class that I took, NurtureBoss. They ignored dashboards they had, and then finally they were recommended to just look at 50 real conversations with their agent. They found that date handling, a use case for them, was failing 66% of the time, something no generic platform would ever catch. So stop reaching for your credit card and the shiny silver bullet that doesn't exist. Read 50 raw traces, label them with failure modes, give them pass or fail binary, ideally using a domain expert, not an engineer. Try that out for a week. You'll learn more about where your agent is actually breaking than months on any random tool would show you.
