A demonstration answers a narrow question: can this system produce a useful result in this example? Testing asks what happens across defined conditions, including the cases that are less convenient to show. Both have value, but they support different claims.
Write the comparison before the conclusion
Suppose a hypothetical assistant extracts job details from notes. A useful test might ask whether the extracted date, address, and work description match the source. The evaluation needs a known answer, records of missing information, and a rule for handling ambiguity.
The baseline should be explicit. Is the new approach being compared with the previous workflow, a simpler program, one AI call, or a human review? If several things change at once, the result cannot easily tell us which change mattered.
Measure more than an attractive answer
Holistic Evaluation of Language Models, or HELM, evaluates models across multiple scenarios and metrics, including accuracy, calibration, robustness, and efficiency. Its broader lesson for my work is to define more than one dimension of success.
A system might produce a better answer while taking longer, costing more, or requiring more human correction. Those trade-offs should be visible. A single score can hide the reason the tool is useful—or the reason it is difficult to use.
Keep the run reproducible
For a proposed test, I would record the task set, source versions, model and tool versions, prompts that are safe to share, scoring criteria, and time and cost. Repeated runs help reveal whether a result is stable under the selected conditions. Private data should stay outside the public record.
Failures deserve the same record as successes. If the assistant invents a missing date, that case should remain in the evaluation rather than disappear from the examples. A later correction can then be tested against the same problem.
Limit the claim to the evidence
A prototype is evidence that an approach can be explored. Reliability, general usefulness, and commercial readiness require further evidence. This article describes an evaluation approach; it presents no new CommonGround test results or product reliability claim.
Keep reading
The CommonGround question · The costs behind software
About Tim Hauptrief · Research notebook
Prepared with AI assistance. Featured illustration generated with AI.
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