Learning how to add evals to an LLM feature is the difference between shipping a demo and shipping a reliable product. When you embed an LLM into a real feature — a chatbot, a voice agent, a document summarizer — you’re not just calling a model. You’re betting your user’s experience on a non‑deterministic system that can silently break with every prompt tweak, model update, or edge case. That’s why we instrument every LLM feature we build with a purpose‑built eval suite. Here’s how we did it for an outbound AI calling agent and how you can do the same.
Why Evals Are Not Optional
LLMs are non‑deterministic: give them the same input twice, and you’ll get two different responses. That means unit tests that check for exact string matches are useless. As Pragmatic Engineer notes, you need evals to verify that the solution works well enough — because there’s no guarantee it will. When you’re building a feature that speaks to real customers, like the AI Calling Agent dashboard we built, a regression in tone or missed booking intent can cost revenue immediately. Evals turn that uncertainty into signal.
How to Add Evals to an LLM Feature: A 4‑Step Workflow
We’ll walk through the exact process we followed, from defining success to automating checks in CI, using the DeepEval framework as an example. You can swap in Evidently AI or build your own, but the pattern is the same.
