Don't treat evals as a mere checklist. Instead, use them as a creative tool to discover opportunities. A well-designed eval can reveal that a product is underperforming for a specific user segment, pointing directly to areas for high-impact improvement that a simple "vibe check" would miss.

To trust an agentic AI, users need to see its work, just as a manager would with a new intern. Design patterns like "stream of thought" (showing the AI reasoning) or "planning mode" (presenting an action plan before executing) make the AI's logic legible and give users a chance to intervene, building crucial trust.

As AI generates more code than humans can review, the validation bottleneck emerges. The solution is providing agents with dedicated, sandboxed environments to run tests and verify functionality before a human sees the code, shifting review from process to outcome.

Instead of manually refining a complex prompt, create a process where an AI agent evaluates its own output. By providing a framework for self-critique, including quantitative scores and qualitative reasoning, the AI can iteratively enhance its own system instructions and achieve a much stronger result.

Treating AI risk management as a final step before launch leads to failure and loss of customer trust. Instead, it must be an integrated, continuous process throughout the entire AI development pipeline, from conception to deployment and iteration, to be effective.

The primary bottleneck in improving AI is no longer data or compute, but the creation of 'evals'—tests that measure a model's capabilities. These evals act as product requirement documents (PRDs) for researchers, defining what success looks like and guiding the training process.

To improve the quality and accuracy of an AI agent's output, spawn multiple sub-agents with competing or adversarial roles. For example, a code review agent finds bugs, while several "auditor" agents check for false positives, resulting in a more reliable final analysis.

The prompts for your "LLM as a judge" evals function as a new form of PRD. They explicitly define the desired behavior, edge cases, and quality standards for your AI agent. Unlike static PRDs, these are living documents, derived from real user data and are constantly, automatically testing if the product meets its requirements.

OpenAI identifies agent evaluation as a key challenge. While they can currently grade an entire task's trace, the real difficulty lies in evaluating and optimizing the individual steps within a long, complex agentic workflow. This is a work-in-progress area critical for building reliable, production-grade agents.