Eval
A repeatable test of an AI system’s output quality, run to check whether a change made the answers better or worse.
What it tells you about a developer
Eval experience marks a developer who has taken an AI feature past the demo into something a company can maintain. It is one of the clearest signs of an AI team that ships rather than prototypes.
Code either works or it does not, so an ordinary test gives a yes or a no. Model output is a matter of degree, so teams build evals: a fixed set of inputs, a way to grade the answers, and a score to compare across changes. The grading is done by people, by rules, or by another model. Teams that run evals can tell whether a change helped, and teams without them are guessing.