A practical LLM evaluation harness you can build in a day
You do not need an evaluation platform. You need fifty cases, a runner, and the discipline to look at the output before you ship.
Teams postpone evaluation because they imagine a platform. The version that actually helps is a folder of cases and a script.
Cases come from failures
Every complaint, every wrong answer, every awkward edge case becomes a row. Fifty real cases beat five hundred invented ones.
Grade in three tiers
Exact match where the answer is deterministic. Assertions where the answer must contain or avoid something specific. A model judge only for the genuinely subjective remainder — and spot-check the judge.
Run it before you merge
The harness earns its keep the first time it catches a prompt change that fixed one case and broke six.