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Building the agent eval standard | @iris_eval | More to come
United States Beigetreten Kasım 2016
970 Folgt786 Follower

@claudeai this is where eval becomes critical. when agents are reading code and running tests that's one thing. when they can open your apps and click through real systems the cost of a wrong action goes way up. the eval layer can't be optional anymore.
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@lukatofocus @AlexEngineerAI @tanujDE3180 this. the compounding part is what nobody talks about. once the eval loop is running you stop guessing. every iteration gets tighter because you're working from data not vibes. that gap between teams who eval and teams who don't only grows.
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@AlexEngineerAI @tanujDE3180 exactly. and the ones who build the eval loop first end up with a compounding advantage - they know what actually works not what sounds like it should work
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Welcome to level two: recursive self-improvement is now table stakes
Your agent is begging for the infra to evaluate variations of itself at scale
Everyone who saw this early had the same underlying ideas in their approach:
1. tighten the analyze, iterate, eval loop
2. map evals and traces to failure modes
3. keep writing harder evals
If your product's "features" are agents, they are by definition never "complete". Even a magical 99.9% on the benchmarks, is still not the most time or token-efficient version of itself.
It's not just slow to A/B test changes to the agent, you're also getting stuck on local maxima. A single regression does not mean the line of experimentation is a failure. Keep driving it forward, explore the sub-paths
Erik Bernhardsson@bernhardsson
CI feels more interesting today than it ever was. Writing code has gotten a lot faster, but this shifts the bottleneck elsewhere. I’m excited about sandboxes as a primitive for massive parallelization of tests.
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full post on why the eval loop is the loss function for agent quality:
iris-eval.com/blog/the-eval-…
63% of teams have no continuous eval. they shipped an agent that passed a test once. they have no loop.
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@bernhardsson the missing piece in the new ci: output eval. tests verify code works. eval verifies the output is actually good. agents can pass every test and still leak pii or burn 10x your cost budget. ci for agents needs a scoring layer, not just pass/fail.
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@GG_Observatory this is the take more people need to hear. the moat isn't the agent — it's knowing when the agent is degrading. eval drift is invisible until it's expensive. most teams find out from users, not from their own systems.
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@TrustWallet even more reason to use @iris_eval
evaluate what your agents are doing onchain
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@VibeCoderOfek @ZssBecker agents without eval are demos, not products.
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@ZssBecker Finally someone saying it. Agents are amazing but the cleanup still needs senior taste. Team human forever.
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we've been calling this exact gap "the eval gap" — the distance between benchmark performance and production reality. it's structural, not incidental.
wrote about it here: iris-eval.com/blog/the-eval-…
the short version: benchmarks test capability. production needs continuous inline eval on every execution. different problem, different tooling.
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Explore 15 essential datasets for training and evaluating AI agents, including tool calling, web navigation, and coding benchmarks like SWE-bench and WebArena. #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #DataScience hubs.li/Q048DYYW0
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the eval tax isn't just the cost of evaluating. it's the cost of not evaluating — the failures, the manual review, the customer churn from bad agent outputs.
you pay it either way. the only question is whether you pay it with tooling or with incidents.
the data is starting to prove this out at scale.
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cio.com just wrote about the "hidden cost of ai agent evaluations" — $47K from a single runaway agent, organizations getting 5-figure eval bills they didn't expect.
we've been calling this the eval tax. published about it weeks before this article came out.
iris-eval.com/blog/the-ai-ev…
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wrote about it here: iris-eval.com/blog/eval-drif…
this is the part that matters: when anthropic describes a problem and an indie builder already named it, defined it, and built the solution — that's the signal.
the category vocabulary is being written right now. the question is who gets to write it.
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here's the thing about categories — they get defined in a window. once the big players lock in their terminology and tooling, the window closes.
we're in that window right now.
the open-source, mcp-native eval layer is not a feature. it's infrastructure. and it's being built. @iris_eval
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the numbers tell the story:
- agent market: $7.84B to $52.62B by 2030
- 65% of mcp tools now take actions (up from 27%)
- cio.com reporting $47K runaway agents and 5-figure eval bills
- two acquisitions in 48 hours
agents without eval are liabilities. the market just figured that out.
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march 2026 is the month agent eval became a real category.
openai acquired promptfoo ($23M raised, 25%+ fortune 500 clients). databricks acquired quotient ai (built by the github copilot quality team). salesforce published mcpeval. aws bedrock added quality evaluations.
let me tell you what this looks like from the inside.
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