Hamel Husain: generic LLM eval metrics create false confidence — do error analysis instead
HamelHusain · x · 2026-10-07
- Hamel Husain answers whether to use off-the-shelf eval metrics: mostly no. Generic scores (helpfulness, coherence, quality) measure abstractions that may not matter for your use case and create false confidence.
- Instead, run error analysis, define binary failure modes from real problems, build custom evaluators, and validate them against human judgment.
- Generic metrics can still serve as exploration signals to find interesting traces for human review, once you understand why they fail as quality measures.
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