Agent evals

Production outcome evals run continuously against live traffic and are measured by what changed because of them, not by a headline pass rate. Three shapes recur: always-on outcome evals, shadow mode (the agent proposes, the human does, the diff feeds learning), and causal in-the-wild evaluation that defines its estimand before it counts.

Trajectory grading treats the reasoning path and the tool-call sequence as a first-class object alongside the artifact, because outcome-only grading passes an agent that arrived by a forbidden or wasteful route, the trajectory is where the bugs live.

Benchmark numbers routinely fail to mean what they appear to: saturation and contamination, verifiers with their own error rates, agents attacking the eval harness, and run variance a single number hides. And a benchmark score measures a capability ceiling, deciding to deploy is a different exam, a per-use-case qualification with a risk envelope and an oversight policy.

A brief that cannot state a falsifiable check is a brief that has not been specified, and the review gate before authoring is where that is caught, the readiness discipline written into a methodology rather than a benchmark suite. Verify rows are the task-plus-rubric slice; evidence-cited verdicts are the trajectory-plus-artifact slice. Abstention is already first-class: blocked-on-human and needs-decision are sanctioned exits, not failures.

Verify rows run before a merge and run once. That is the honest position: nothing always-on exists, no post-merge standing evaluation, no judge agent scoring live outcomes, no re-run of a brief’s verify rows after the world moves under them. And nothing ties a landed brief back to whether a higher-level outcome moved; that absence is precisely why the recurring reports count activity.

No trace-level metric of any kind exists, “tokens per verified brief” is the concrete upgrade over activity counting. The verifiers have no audit of their own: a verify row that passes on a sabotaged submission is a broken row, and sabotage runs as a routine audit of row quality is the single cheapest steal in this theme. Verify rows also stay closed-form and adversary-resistant rather than judged by a model, a verify row is a tiny verifier, and verifiers are the thing being attacked.

8 of 41 talks shown, the ones that reach the most concepts in this theme. Every sighting, per talk, is on the concept pages above.