A Clear Guide to Designing Agent Evaluations
Jeande_d · x · 2026-07-14
An article detailing how to design practical evaluations for agents, with clear core principles:
- Good tasks must be verifiable and clearly defined; difficulty should stem from the problem itself, not from intentionally hidden prompts.
- Evaluations should describe the outcome and let the agent figure out the steps.
- Verifiers must accept all correct paths, rather than being designed around a single path预设 by the author.
- Evaluations are best derived from real-world tasks—proving the task is solvable first, then observing where the agent fails.
- The author emphasizes that authoring and reviewing should still be done by humans, and reviewers should ideally be able to solve the problems themselves.
- Conclusion: A small set of high-quality tasks is often more valuable than a massive quantity of tasks.
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