Building an Eval Harness

Your benchmark, for your task: golden sets from real traffic, the grader ladder, and a harness you can rerun on every change.

Content last verified 2026-09.

Lessons

1. Your Golden Set
2. The Grader Ladder
3. Harness Mechanics
4. Interpreting Results

Sources

• Chen et al. (2021) — Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code (HumanEval, pass@k)
• Zheng et al. (2023) — Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena
• Liang et al. (2022) — Holistic Evaluation of Language Models (HELM)