Eval vs Production: Why Your Agent Eval Numbers Lie in the Real World
blaizedsouza · x · 2026-08-10
Developers often face a harsh reality: an agent's eval performance looks perfect, but it completely fails in production.
The root cause is a growing divergence between the two environments:
- Code & Execution: Evals often run in notebooks while prod is a service. Prod handles retries, timeouts, and rate limits, whereas evals assume every call lands.
- Data Drift: Tests use clean fixtures, but production deals with late and incomplete data.
To fix this, the author proposes Eval Engineering, advocating for an automated gate that reads evidence and lets agents merge code without human review.
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