Building a Continuous Evaluation Pipeline
Integrate LLM-as-judge evaluation into your CI/CD pipeline so every prompt or model change is automatically evaluated against a regression test suite before deployment.
Why Evaluation Must Be Continuous
One-time evaluation at deployment is not enough. LLM quality degrades silently: model providers update their models, system prompt changes slip in, retrieval quality shifts as the document corpus grows, and user query distribution changes over time. A continuous evaluation pipeline runs the same suite of evaluations on every change and on a schedule so quality regressions are caught within hours, not weeks.
Core Components of the Pipeline
A continuous evaluation pipeline has five components: a test dataset (curated questions with expected outputs), a system runner (calls your LLM pipeline for each test question), a judge (scores each response), a results store (database or time-series store for historical metrics), and a reporting layer (dashboards and alerts). Each component is independently upgradeable.
# Pipeline architecture:
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# test_dataset.json
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# v
# system_runner.py --> calls your LLM pipeline
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# v
# judge.py --> scores each (question, answer) pair
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# v
# results_db --> stores timestamped metric history
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# v
# dashboard + alert --> Grafana / Slack notificationAll lessons in this course
- The LLM-as-Judge Pattern
- Pointwise and Pairwise Evaluation
- Calibrating Judge Models Against Humans
- Building a Continuous Evaluation Pipeline