14 section

Evaluation & Observability

How you know the system is good, and how you know it still is: judge design, retrieval scores, traces, token spend, and drift alerts on live traffic.

2 pages 18 min 3,728 words

01 the section

What is in here

Evaluation comes first, because an observability stack with no quality signal only tells you the errors were fast. That chapter covers LLM-as-judge calibration, RAGAS-style retrieval metrics and human annotation; Observability then wires the three pillars for non-deterministic systems and attributes cost per pipeline step. For the long version, the AI Evals Study Guide in Reference is roughly eight times the length.