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Playbook · Evaluation

What is evaluation-driven development for AI applications?

The interviewer is usually testing whether you build AI features with the same seriousness you would bring to shipping any other production system. A weak answer says "we test prompts manually." A strong answer explains how evals become the release discipline for prompts, retrieval changes, and model swaps.

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Practical answer framework for AI engineer interview loops.

01Interview Context

The interviewer is usually testing whether you build AI features with the same seriousness you would bring to shipping any other production system. A weak answer says "we test prompts manually." A strong answer explains how evals become the release discipline for prompts, retrieval changes, and model swaps.

02The 90-second answer

Evaluation-driven development means defining representative test cases and quality metrics before you start tuning the system. Every meaningful change then runs against that eval set so you can improve quality deliberately instead of relying on vibes, cherry-picked examples, or ad hoc spot checks.

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