Google's playbook: evaluating AI agents beyond the vibe check

bibryam · x · 2026-10-24

Google Developers Blog published a practical guide (paired with a 60-minute LangGraph eval pipeline build) on evaluating AI agents properly.

Agents fail differently from software: they can loop, burn tokens, or hallucinate yet still return a polite, plausible final answer — quietly spiking cloud bills, exhausting API quotas, and triggering duplicate side effects.
Classic trap: tweaking a system prompt to fix one workflow's edge case silently stops another workflow from calling a required tool.
The core argument: evaluation is a progressive journey — any repeatable eval system beats a vibe check, and teams should integrate eval suites early in the development lifecycle rather than after a breaking prompt change.

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