Building Production-Grade LLM Evaluation Pipelines: From Vibes to Metrics

A team deployed a RAG-based customer support assistant that initially passed manual testing but failed in production. The system generated hallucinations, providing non-existent billing policies and competitor API rate limits to over 500 users. To resolve these failures, the team replaced subjective "vibe checks" with production-grade automated evaluation pipelines. This strategic shift in methodology allowed them to successfully detect and catch 92% of hallucinations before the assistant reached the deployment stage.