Building a gold-standard eval set with zero users: the day-zero dataset dilemma
Illustrious-Roll9476 · reddit · 2026-09-19
A prelaunch developer hits the classic eval cold-start problem: the standard advice is to build datasets from production logs, but with zero users the ground truth has to be manufactured from scratch.
- Current approach: building synthetic users and adversarial personas to brute-force prompt breakage and hallucination triggers
- Using Braintrust to manage prompt versions and evals as a single source of truth
- Main worry: structuring the dataset now so the later transition to real traces isn't painful
Asks recent launchers: go full synthetic at day zero, or ship and fix in production?
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