# What Are AI Agent Evals?

> Evals are scored tests that measure whether an AI agent behaves correctly — catching prompt, tool, or skill changes that quietly break quality before users do.

**Term:** Evals  
**Category:** Operations  
**Also known as:** agent evaluation, LLM evals, evaluation suite  
**Updated:** 2026-08-03  
**Canonical:** https://www.frameworkr.com/glossary/evals

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**Evals** (evaluations) are structured tests that score an AI agent's behavior on representative tasks. When you change a prompt, swap a model, add a tool, or edit a skill, evals tell you whether the agent got better or worse — before production users find out.

Unlike unit tests that assert exact strings, agent evals often score for correctness, safety, format, or task completion — sometimes with another model as a judge, sometimes with deterministic checks.

## What evals typically cover

- **Task success** — Did the agent achieve the goal?
- **Tool discipline** — Did it call the right tools with valid arguments?
- **Safety** — Did it refuse or escalate when it should?
- **Regression** — Did a "small" prompt tweak break a known-good case?
- **Cost / latency** — Did quality come at an unacceptable spend?

## Evals vs. tracing

**Tracing** records what happened on a real run (every model and tool call). **Evals** deliberately probe whether behavior meets a bar. You need both: traces diagnose a failure; evals prevent shipping the next one.

## Blueprint implication

If the agent will evolve — and it will — plan for an eval set alongside tools and skills. Start with the ten cases that would embarrass you in production. Expand from failures you actually see.

## Related reading

See [Prompt Engineering](/glossary/prompt-engineering) for instruction changes evals should catch, and [Guardrails](/glossary/guardrails) for automated safety checks that complement scored tests.

## Related terms

- [prompt engineering](https://www.frameworkr.com/glossary/prompt-engineering.md)
- [guardrails](https://www.frameworkr.com/glossary/guardrails.md)
- [agent orchestration](https://www.frameworkr.com/glossary/agent-orchestration.md)
- [skills](https://www.frameworkr.com/glossary/skills.md)


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_Published by Frameworkr — https://www.frameworkr.com_