Sequence Matters

The eight concepts form a sequence of dependencies. Each one only makes sense after the previous one:

1. Self-verification: the agent checks its work before delivering. Without this, everything that follows is measuring a careless system.
2. Human baseline: how accurate are we today? Without that number, no agent result means anything.
3. Evals: the criteria and cases that measure, the same way every time, after each change.
4. Golden dataset: the answer key against which the evals measure.
5. LLM-as-Judge: how to measure what is subjective without giving up on measurement.
6. Regression: why the entire suite runs even when you changed one word.
7. Determinism vs. Variance: where output can vary, and where it never can.
8. Monitoring: what the lab does not catch, because it only appears in production.

Notice the structure: 1 and 2 happen before building. 3 through 7 are the lab. 8 is real life, and what it finds feeds back into 4, closing the loop. With that feedback, each error improves the system, instead of simply returning it to normal.