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

A team deployed a RAG-based customer support assistant that initially passed manual testing through 'vibe checks'. However, in production, the assistant provided hallucinated responses regarding billing cycles and API rate limits, affecting over 500 users. To resolve this, the team replaced subjective 'looks good to me' assessments with production-grade automated evaluation pipelines. This strategic shift in metrics allowed them to successfully catch 92% of hallucinations before the system reached the deployment stage.