“It’s Hard to Eval” Is a Product Smell – Hamel's Blog

Created 7/2/2026 at 8:45:28 PM

The most common objection I hear to evals is “our product is hard to eval”.

This objection is a product smell. Artifacts that are hard for you to verify are often hard for users too. In the worst case, users have to redo the work from scratch to verify the output. More importantly, designing your product for ease of verification should come before building evals.

Public