Improve Your Evals: Build a Failure Modes Taxonomy to Drive Iteration
realmadhuguru · x · 2026-08-20
Part 3 on getting good at evals focuses on building a 'failure modes taxonomy'. Analyze the last 500-1,000 production traces to identify and cluster failures.
Be specific: vague labels like 'bad answer' are useless. Instead, use precise categories like 'retrieved wrong document', 'hallucinated despite correct context', or 'failed to ask clarifying questions'. Naming the failure precisely allows you to design targeted eval tests, bridging the gap to an improvement flywheel.
Related event: Eval Guide: Build a Failure Taxonomy to Drive AI Improvements(2 posts)→
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