Research·hamel.dev·Jul 17, 2026·19 min read

LLM Evals: Everything You Need to Know – Hamel’s Blog

Hamel’s guide to LLM evaluations emphasizes that effective evaluation is a continuous development process, beginning with rigorous error analysis performed by domain experts. It advocates for identifying and prioritizing real-world failure modes in application traces, using pragmatic binary pass/fail judgments. The article recommends integrating evaluation as a core part of development, focusing on understanding actual failures rather than solely optimizing for high pass rates.

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LLM Evals: Everything You Need to Know – Hamel’s Blog Blog Notes OSS Teaching Contents Listen to the audio version of this FAQ Getting Started & Fundamentals Q: What are LLM Evals? Q: What is a trace? Q: What’s a minimum viable evaluation setup? Q: How much of my development budget should I allocate to evals? Q: Will today’s evaluation methods still be relevant in 5-10 years given how fast AI is changing? Q: How do I make the case for investing in evaluations to my team? Error Analysis & Data Collection Q: Why is "error analysis" so important in LLM evals, and how is it performed? Q: How do I surface problematic traces for review beyond user

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