BasicAgent

LLM Evaluation for Agent Systems

LLM Evaluation for Agent Systems — How to evaluate multi-step agent pipelines: golden runs, stage-level checks, diffing, regression gates, and drift monitoring.

Most eval advice is for single prompts. Agents fail at the workflow level:

  • stage contracts break (JSON shape, tool arguments)
  • retrieval changes silently
  • costs spike
  • “helpful” model updates change outputs

Evaluation that actually works for agent pipelines

  1. Golden runs
    • stable inputs → expected stage outputs (or invariants)
  2. Stage-level checks
    • schema validation, citations present, numeric consistency, required fields
  3. Diffing
    • compare outputs across model versions / prompt versions / retrieval versions
  4. Regression gates
    • block deploys when gates fail
  5. Drift monitoring
    • alert when distributions shift (length, citations, tool usage, cost)

Download a checklist you can use immediately: /tools/agent-evaluation-checklist/

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