Every agent project we inherit has the same missing piece: nobody can say whether the new version is better than the last one. Demos are run by hand, judgement is vibes, and regressions ship silently.
We start every agent engagement by building a golden set — one hundred to two thousand real cases drawn from your own history, each with an agreed correct outcome. It is slow, unglamorous work, and it is the single highest-leverage thing you can do.
The set becomes the release gate. A build that regresses on the golden set does not ship, regardless of how well it demos. Production traces feed back into the set every sprint, so the bar rises as the system matures.
The second-order effect matters more than the first: once you have an evaluation harness, you can change models, prompts and architectures freely. Without one, every change is a bet.
If you cannot measure the change, you cannot defend the system that caused it.
If this is the kind of problem you are working on, we are usually happy to compare notes — even when it does not become an engagement.
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