Last updated: 2026-02-14
Evaluation Budgets That Do Not Block Shipping
How small teams define quality budgets without turning release flow into process overhead.
Start with failure categories that affect users directly: tool misuse, hallucinated actions, and broken citations.
Map each category to one measurable threshold in CI and one runtime monitor.
Treat exception paths as first-class; most incidents come from edge conditions, not happy paths.
Tradeoffs and constraints
- Stricter test budgets reduce regressions but may increase false failures.
- Lower thresholds improve release speed but raise incident probability.
Sources
- Benchmark papers
- Ops runbooks
- Incident postmortems