How to Eval AI Agents — The 2026 Guide
howtoeval.com · 3,178 words · saved by 1 readers
The no bullshit guide for evaluating AI agents. Offline evals, production monitoring, and self-healing loops — what actually works in 2026.
Foreword A year ago, agents barely existed. Now they are everywhere: in banking, engineering, medicine and more. For a while, I hated the word agent. Why add a new word for an LLM call? But, it soon became obvious to me and everyone else that a new word was indeed necessary. Agents are an entity, almost self-aware, navigating their environment. Using tools at their disposal, and finding creative solutions to problems their creators could never have imagined. Sometimes those creative solutions are helpful. Sometimes they cause real harm. But what's for sure: we've come a long way from next toke
related reading
- Demystifying evals for AI agents \ Anthropicanthropic.com
- Agent Evaluation: A Detailed Guidecameronrwolfe.substack.com
- Building Effective AI Agents \ Anthropicanthropic.com
- Building Effective AI Agents \ Anthropicanthropic.com
- AI agent evaluation frameworks for production - Vercelvercel.com
- Your AI Product Needs Evals – Hamel's Blog - Hamel Husainhamel.dev
- Agentic Evals Pyramidrwilinski.ai
- What We’ve Learned From A Year of Building with LLMs – Applied LLMsapplied-llms.org
- Thoughts on slowing the fuck downmariozechner.at
- A pragmatic guide to LLM evals for devsnewsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
- A Practical Guide to Becoming an AI-Native Engineerblog.bytebytego.com
- Why I'm Betting Against AI Agents in 2025 (Despite Building Them)utkarshkanwat.com