AI Evaluation And Data Flywheel

AI Evaluation And Data Flywheel

Use When

• Use when improving AI-assisted research workflows, agent prompts, retrieval, tool use, or model selection.
• Use when building eval datasets, failure taxonomies, feedback loops, or regression tests.
• Use when agent outputs must improve through measured evidence rather than intuition.

Do Not Use When

• The task is a one-off research answer.
• There is no repeatable workflow to evaluate.

Evaluation Intake Guidance

• Workflow under test, expected outputs, failure examples, user feedback, source material, and acceptance criteria.
• Metrics that matter: correctness, citation integrity, cost, latency, coverage, and usability.

Evaluation Core Method

1. Define the task class and quality criteria.
2. Collect representative examples and known failures.
3. Build a small regression set before changing prompts or tools.
4. Measure correctness, source integrity, tool failure, cost, and latency.
5. Tag failures by cause: retrieval, reasoning, tool, prompt, source, or format.
6. Improve the workflow and rerun the same examples.
7. Add production feedback to the eval set after human review.

Quality Standards

• Evaluation examples are representative, not cherry-picked.
• Source-integrity failures are tracked separately from prose quality.
• Improvements are measured against a stable baseline.
• Synthetic data is labelled and does not replace real failure cases.

Evaluation Pitfalls

• Changing prompts without evals.
• Treating polished prose as correctness.
• Measuring only pass/fail when failures need categories.
• Adding user feedback without verification.

Evaluation Deliverables Guidance

• Eval set.
• Failure taxonomy.
• Regression report.
• Data flywheel plan.

Evidence Produced

References

• Load references/eval-flywheel.md for eval structure and failure tags.

Companion Skills

Capability Contract

Evaluation is read-only by default. Capturing feedback or changing datasets, prompts, models, production traffic, or release gates requires explicit authority and versioned rollback evidence.

Degraded Mode

Without executable models or representative data, return an evaluation design and mark performance, regression, and safety outcomes not assessed.

Decision Rules

Flywheel Failure Modes

• Optimising one headline score; retain slice metrics.
• Training on the test set; separate datasets.
• Adding unverified synthetic examples; record provenance.
• Erasing failures after fixes; retain regression cases.
• Mutating production from an evaluation run; require authority.

Worked Example

A citation error becomes a versioned regression case with expected evidence fields before any prompt change is accepted.

Companion Skills

• agentic-research-operations supplies agent workflow design.
• validation-contract supplies release evidence standards.
• source-verification supplies citation-integrity checks.

Inputs

Workflow

1. Define the decision, failure taxonomy, slices, and release threshold before running cases.
2. Execute representative cases and preserve raw outputs with configuration identifiers.
3. Stop when provenance is missing, test data leaks into training, or a release gate fails.
4. Recover by quarantining contaminated cases, restoring clean versions, and rerunning the affected slices.
5. Add reproducible failures to the regression set only after human verification.

Outputs

Anti-Patterns

• Optimising one headline score. Fix: retain failure slices and guardrail metrics.
• Training on the test set. Fix: enforce versioned separation and contamination checks.
• Adding unverified synthetic cases. Fix: record provenance and human acceptance.
• Deleting fixed failures. Fix: keep them as regression cases.
• Mutating production during evaluation. Fix: require separate deployment authority and rollback evidence.