TESTING THE HARNESS ITSELF

EVALUATION-DRIVEN ITERATION Iteration means improving something through repeated cycles. Evaluation-driven iteration means improving the system guided by measured results rather than by hunches. The cycle looks like this. Step one: measure the current system with your eval suite to establish a baseline. Step two: look at the failures and identify the most common or most serious pattern. Step three: form a hypothesis, which is a specific guess about the cause and a possible fix, such as "the agent ignores the date field because the context builder places it too far from the question." Step four: make one focused change. Step five: re-run the eval suite and compare with the baseline. Step six: keep the change if it helped without hurting other areas, and discard or rethink it if not. Step seven: repeat. This disciplined cycle is similar to the scientific method. Its great advantage is that it protects you from fooling yourself. Without measurement, a change that feels like an improvement may secretly make things worse. Make one change at a time where possible, because if you change five things and the score moves, you will not know which change mattered.