Q: What’s a minimum viable evaluation setup?

Start with error analysis, not infrastructure. Spend 30 minutes manually reviewing 20-50 LLM outputs whenever you make significant changes. Use one domain expert who understands your users as your quality decision maker (a “benevolent dictator”).

Use a notebook to review traces and analyze data, or build your own custom annotation interface with an AI coding assistant like Claude or Codex. Either way, you can write arbitrary code, visualize data, and iterate quickly. The video below shows a simple annotation interface built inside a notebook.

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This article is part of our AI Evals FAQ, a collection of common questions (and answers) about LLM evaluation. View all FAQs or return to the homepage.