Evaluating AI agents: moving past the vibe check

Google Cloud's open-source agent-eval toolkit provides a repeatable evaluation pipeline for AI agents, combining manually reviewed execution traces with automated verification to catch silent regressions that terminal spot checks miss. The playbook, tied to an AI Agent Clinic episode that builds an eval pipeline for a LangGraph agent in 60 minutes, anchors tests in critical user journeys and uses a user simulator LLM such as ADK user simulations to generate realistic multi-turn scenarios. The approach targets hidden agent failures — retry loops, redundant tool calls, and plausible but hallucinated answers — that can persist even when output looks reasonable.

Your agent can loop, burn tokens, or give a completely hallucinated answer and still look fine. A vibe check won't catch that. This post is the playbook behind our AI Agent Clinic episode How to Actually Evaluate Any AI Agent: Beyond the Vibe Check https://youtu.be/wPdoZRbvaF4 , where we build an eval pipeline for a LangGraph agent in 60 minutes. Here's what's inside: When teams start building an AI agent, testing usually looks the same. You wire up a model, hand it a few tools, run three or four prompts in a terminal, and eyeball the output. If the answer looks reasonable, you ship it. In practice, this breaks down fast. You tweak a system prompt to fix an edge case in one workflow, and suddenly the agent stops calling a required tool in another. Worse, agents fail differently than standard software. An agent can get stuck in a retry loop, fire off multiple tool calls, yet still return a polite, plausible-sounding final answer. In production, that hidden failure is costly: Integrating a reliable evaluation suite into your development lifecycle can seem like extra overhead during initial prototyping, right up until modifying your system prompt causes unexpected breaking changes. The key is recognizing that evaluation is a progressive journey: any repeatable evaluation system no matter how simple is better than relying on ad-hoc spot checks or no system at all. You don't need an elaborate automated grading architecture on Day 0. Instead, start with simple, repeatable checks and evolve your evaluation into a more complex, automated framework as your agent's capabilities and production demands grow. Establishing a repeatable evaluation system is made substantially easier by integrating these decisions into an evaluation framework. Transitioning beyond simple subjective checks relies on two core pillars: human oversight and targeted tools. In this article, we explore how to set up an evaluation framework using the open-source agent-eval https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/professional-services/tree/main/tools/agent-eval toolkit. We'll demonstrate how combining manually reviewed traces with automated verification helps detect silent regressions early in development and scales seamlessly as your agent transitions to production. Before writing test code, you need a shared vision of what a good outcome actually looks like. Anchor your tests in critical user journeys CUJs rather than abstract benchmarks. A CUJ defines what a user expects the system to achieve, structured around their persona, goals, constraints, and verification conditions: <sup "As an operations analyst, I expect the agent to ingest a counterparty trade discrepancy email, identify the disputed transaction, verify the trade economics against our internal ledger within 30 seconds, and draft a response reverse-translating our internal trade IDs back into the broker's nomenclature without human intervention."</sup Every clause in that statement becomes an evaluation point: Did the agent resolve the correct transaction ID? Did it check the ledger before drafting? Did it map internal IDs back to the external nomenclature? Defining these expectations upfront forces product stakeholders, downstream users, and engineers to agree on defining how “success” is measured. You do not need six months of production logs to build your initial golden dataset. Instead, break each CUJ down into concrete scenarios both happy paths and edge cases and feed them into a user simulator LLM we like ADK user simulations https://adk.dev/evaluate/user-sim/ . Primed with a persona and behavioral constraints for example, an impatient analyst giving incomplete ticket numbers, or a developer asking a multi-part debugging question , the simulator mirrors the messy phrasing, typos, and multi-turn complexity of real users. By testing your agent against a synthetic user and realistic scenarios, you can record comprehensive execution traces including tool logs prior to user interaction. This enables you to pinpoint and resolve any performance gaps against your release standards. As live traffic begins to flow, you can progressively replace these synthetic setups with real production traces. A single top-line score will never tell you why an agent failed. To isolate root causes, layer four types of checks: unit tests, deterministic metrics, LLM-as-a-judge rubrics, and integration tests. Setting up evaluation metrics involves trial and error, and it is tempting to delete a noisy test or swap out sample queries between runs. Every time you add or remove a test, though, you invalidate your baseline: you cannot tell if a score changed because the agent got better or because the test suite moved. Keep your golden dataset frozen while you tune a feature, change one variable at a time, and only retire a test when you are certain the underlying requirement has changed. LLMs are notoriously inconsistent at grading qualitative 1-to-5 scales; the boundary between a "3" and a "4" is fuzzy and often shifts from run to run. Whenever possible, turn your judge rubrics into boolean pass/fail questions rather than open-ended rating scales. Rather than asking "How helpful was this answer from 1 to 5?" , ask "Did the agent verify the account ID before calling the refund tool? Yes/No " . We like Adaptive Rubrics https://docs.cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise-agent-platform/models/evaluation-overview adaptive-rubrics A response that passes every quality check is still a production failure if it took 40 seconds, made twelve redundant tool calls, and cost sixty cents per query. Always evaluate the whole system rather than just the final text. Track latency, token consumption prompt, reasoning, and completion tokens , API cost, and tool-call counts right alongside answer quality. Switching orchestration frameworks often forces teams to scrap and rewrite their entire testing suite. While most frameworks emit OpenTelemetry traces, they don’t use the same semantic conventions for tool calls, steps, and tokens. Standardizing your traces around open specifications like OpenInference https://arize.com/glossary/openinference/ solves this by decoupling evaluation from your orchestration framework. Tools like the agent-eval toolkit https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/professional-services/tree/main/tools/agent-eval support this natively, with minimal setup. You do not need to build an observability platform from scratch. You can stand up the evaluation pipeline in a couple of hours using open-source utilities like the agent-eval toolkit https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/professional-services/tree/main/tools/agent-eval which pairs OpenTelemetry trace capture with the Agent Evaluation service on the Gemini platform formerly Vertex AI Evaluation . But building your actual evaluation strategy requires more thought. Start small and stay close to the raw data: Why the red pen matters: Manually reading twenty traces feels slow compared to auto-generating a chart, but it saves days of wasted effort. Instead of guessing at hypothetical failure modes and writing generic rubrics that miss the mark, an hour with a red pen shows you how your system actually breaks in reality. Aggregating those notes gives you a high-signal list of the exact deterministic assertions and boolean judge checks you need to build next. Once you have that initial list of checks, tools like agent-eval toolkit https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/professional-services/tree/main/tools/agent-eval takes over the heavy lifting and standardizes execution. Helping you with things like: base-url or offline. Establish a regular cadence of runs with your eval pipeline: Once your Day 1 framework is active, optimization becomes a disciplined, mechanical loop: In a real deployment, reaching production quality often takes 50 to 60 small iterations. You are not rewriting the entire system prompt every morning; you are gradually turning individual knobs. One tweak clarifies a tool parameter description. The next adds a negative constraint. The next adjusts the JSON output schema. For instance, upon completion of each evaluation run, the agent-eval framework constructs an interactive, all-in-one HTML report . This report aligns pass/fail boolean metrics alongside key operational metrics, including latency, token usage, API expenditure, cache utilization, and detailed tool-call execution paths. Additionally, it incorporates automated Gemini root-cause analyses for failed conversational turns, pinpointing the exact prompt directive or parameter setting that triggered the failure to guide your next adjustment. That data replaces hunches. A prompt change might feel much smarter in manual spot-checking, only for the test battery to reveal that latency doubled and tool-call hallucinations ticked up by 15%. The lesson for teams building agents: small, measured changes beat big rewrites every time. Once you trust the signal coming out of your eval pipeline, turn it into a permanent regression safety net: Running three or four prompts in a terminal only shows you the final text response. An agent can loop on retries, hallucinate tool parameters, burn token budgets, or trigger duplicate side effects while still returning a polite answer. Automated trace evaluation checks intermediate tool calls, state transitions, latency percentiles, and API cost alongside answer quality so silent regressions don't ship. Treat evaluation as a progressive rollout from Day 0 to Day 2 rather than an all-or-nothing jump. On Day 0 , break your critical user journeys CUJs into a handful of test scenarios and run them through ADK user simulations https://adk.dev/evaluate/user-sim/ . Read those first 5 to 20 execution traces with a "red pen" to see where the agent hesitates, picks the wrong tool, or rambles. On Day 1 , turn those red-pen notes into automated checks so you can tune one variable at a time. Once your pass rates stabilize, lock those checks into Day 2 CI/CD pull request gates. LLM judges don't grade 1-to-5 scales consistently because the boundary between a "3" and a "4" shifts from run to run. With Adaptive Rubrics https://docs.cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise-agent-platform/models/evaluation-overview adaptive-rubrics , you split broad quality goals into strict Yes/No questions like "Did the agent verify the account ID before refunding?" Pair those boolean rubrics with deterministic computation metrics https://docs.cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise-agent-platform/models/determine-eval computation-metrics for tool parameters and reference checks, plus trace assertions for latency and token budgets. Yes, if you decouple your evaluation pipeline from your agent framework by standardizing OpenTelemetry traces on OpenInference https://arize.com/glossary/openinference/ semantic conventions. The open-source agent-eval toolkit https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/professional-services/tree/main/tools/agent-eval routes those traces straight to the Agent Evaluation service on the Gemini platform formerly Vertex AI Evaluation . You don't have to rewrite grading code when switching orchestration frameworks. Once your Day 2 pipeline exports traces and scorecards to BigQuery or Cloud Storage, you can compare live traffic against your pre-production baseline. When users hit edge cases your initial scenarios missed, ambient quality agents like The Outer Loop https://developers.googleblog.com/the-outer-loop-insights-first-an-ambient-quality-agent-that-diagnoses-your-production-agent/ help you diagnose those failing production traces. You can then promote those real traces straight into your Day 0 golden dataset so your test suite evolves with live usage.