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Podcast · July 31, 2026Research Insights Made Simple #26

Building evals that work

Replayable episodes, hidden judges, and a production scorecard. With Evgeny Sergeev, Engineering Director at Flo Health

/ Research Insights Made Simple #26 · Evals that work

Slide contents

  1. 1. Building evals that work

    Replayable episodes, hidden judges, and a production scorecard. With Evgeny Sergeev, Engineering Director at Flo Health

  2. 2. Pass rate does not prove quality

    Correct outcome, unsafe path

    Unsafe diff passes tests

    Future solution leaks into context

    Rerun takes another path

    Correct SQL, wrong grain

  3. 3. Evaluate the system, not the model

    The model is only one part of an agent loop

    what — Outcome — Actual task result

    how — Trace — Tools and actions

    how much — Operations — Cost and stability

  4. 4. 01. Replayable episode

    Freeze the work, constraints, judge, and release criteria

  5. 5. An episode fixes the whole workflow

    Start state → contract → hidden judge → trace → release gate

  6. 6. The contract fixes evaluation boundaries

    Otherwise, different environments and privileges get compared

    Frozen start state

    One commit or snapshot

    Same data and services

    Future solution stays hidden

    Agent contract

    Allowed tools and network

    Read, write, approve

    Attempts, time, budget

  7. 7. The judge should execute

    Persuasive language is not evidence

    Code: hidden tests and policies

    Workflow: tool calls and arguments

    Data: state and invariants

    Review: findings become checks

  8. 8. The path is part of the result

    Correct output cannot excuse harm

    The right tool was selected

    Arguments match the contract

    No unsafe side effects

    No needless loops or retries

  9. 9. One success is not reliability

    A run series matters more than the best run

    k runs — Pass^k — Success across runs

    σ — Variance — Trajectory dispersion

    $ / task — Budget — Cost of stable success

  10. 10. A static set becomes stale quickly

    Regression needs a holdout; reality needs fresh tasks

    Static holdout

    Stable regression gate

    Agent-version comparison

    Solutions remain hidden

    Rolling live set

    Fresh PRs and incidents

    New data questions

    Changing work environment

  11. 11. 02. Scenario families

    From a business brief to incidents and architecture decisions

  12. 12. Judges change with the task

    Requirements → code → review → tests → operations

  13. 13. Downstream work tests requirements

    A PRD must survive implementation

    Traceability from brief to AC

    Functional requirements stay complete

    NFRs and constraints survive

    Hallucinations stay outside scope

  14. 14. Features and bugs need different oracles

    The same pass rate can hide different risks

    Feature coding

    Spec + pre-PR commit

    Hidden integration tests

    Full suite and policy

    Bug fixing

    Issue + buggy commit

    Fail-to-pass regression

    Adjacent scenarios stay safe

  15. 15. Checks must find real defects

    Comments and coverage alone establish very little

    Code review

    Severity-weighted recall

    False positives are bounded

    Finding accepted or executed

    Test generation

    Fail before, pass after

    Branch and mutation coverage

    Stable without flakiness

  16. 16. Incidents need a frozen environment

    “What happened?” is not an eval by itself

    Alert, topology, and telemetry

    Runbooks and allowed actions

    Triage, RCA, mitigation

    Safe handoff to a human

  17. 17. 03. Open-ended domains

    Architecture and data platforms have no single gold answer

  18. 18. Architecture needs more than one gold

    Hard constraints → completeness → downstream executability

  19. 19. Data agents solve different problems

    Analytical answers and pipelines need different evidence

  20. 20. 04. Production scorecard

    Outcome, trace, operations, safety, and human acceptance

  21. 21. A scorecard replaces one overall score

    Weights change by domain; safety remains a gate

  22. 22. Safety is a gate, not a penalty

    Unsafe action stops release

    Safety stop

    Excess privilege and PII

    Unsafe write or remediation

    No rollback path

    Human acceptance

    The PR was accepted

    The RCA helped on-call

    The team can use it

  23. 23. One contract connects every scenario

    Scenario family × input × judge × metrics × gate

    Input bundle reconstructs the work

    Hidden judge establishes outcome

    Scorecard explains behavior

    Release gate makes the decision

  24. 24. Five mistakes invalidate the result

  25. 25. Start with your own work history

    Artifact → frozen state → contract → judge → release gate

  26. 26. Five decisions for production evals

    What to carry into your engineering system

    Evaluate replayable episodes

    Check outcome and trace

    Repeat the runs

    Keep safety as a stop

    Refresh the rolling live set

    Models change. Your episode catalog remains.

  27. 27. Benchmarks establish different boundaries

    Code, tools, SRE, architecture, and data platforms

    SWE-bench · FEA-Bench · τ-bench

    SWE-PRBench · TestExplora · AIOpsLab

    R2ABench · ArchBench · DAB · BLADE

    ELT-Bench · DataGovBench · coSTAR

  28. 28. Thank you!

    Production-grade agent evals

    The full longread, sources, and future reviews are available at polomodov.tech and in Knizhny kub

    Alexander Polomodov, Technical Director & Fellow, T-Technologies

    @book_cube