Building Production-Grade LLM Evaluation Pipelines: From Vibes to Metrics

Short summary

A practical guide to building production-grade LLM evaluation pipelines, motivated by a real incident where a RAG support assistant hallucinated policies to 500+ users. The article covers domain-specific judge ensembles (faithfulness, instruction following, JSON schema, safety, domain expert), CI/CD integration to block degrading merges, and golden dataset management. Code examples show a typed evaluation harness with configurable judges and thresholds.

• •Real-world post-mortem: RAG assistant hallucinated to 500+ users with zero automated evaluation
• •Judge ensemble covers faithfulness, instruction following, schema validation, safety, and domain accuracy
• •Pipeline integrates into CI/CD to block merges that degrade quality, catching 92% of hallucinations

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