Evaluation Lags Architecture

When a technical pattern becomes “standard,” the lack of evaluation infrastructure often becomes the limiting factor, not the architecture itself.

RAG became ubiquitous before anyone agreed on how to measure if it was working well. The RAGBench authors note that despite RAG being a “standard architectural pattern,” comprehensive evaluation remained “a challenge due to the lack of unified evaluation criteria.”

This pattern recurs: enthusiasm for new approaches outpaces the development of rigorous assessment methods. You ship because you can, not because you’ve proven it works. The gap persists until someone builds the measurement infrastructure.

The meta-insight: if you’re struggling to improve a system and don’t have clear evaluation metrics, the problem might not be your system (it might be that you’re optimizing blind.

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