# Agentic evaluation

Agents fail differently from chat. They reach a wrong final state, take a wrong path to a right state, call a tool they shouldn't, or quietly regress on an edge case. Agentic evaluation is the **pre- and post-deployment** practice of catching these failures before they ship.

## The shape of the work

1. **Capture a representative trace set.** Your agent's actual runs — inputs, tool calls, outputs, every span. Real or synthetic.
2. **Define evaluation criteria.** Mix three types:

* **Natural-language assertions** — "the agent identified the customer's account tier"
* **Deterministic rules** — "the agent never called `admin_api.delete_*`"
* **LLM judges** — "rate the helpfulness of the final response 1-5"

3. **Run the evaluation.** Stratix runs all criteria over the trace set in one job.
4. **Read verdict + root-cause.** Each failed criterion ties to the trace, the span, and the decision that broke it.
5. **Detect regressions.** Compare to a baseline; surface newly failing criteria.

## Why it works on Stratix

* **One engine, three criteria types** — assertions, rules, and judges in the same evaluation
* **First-class trace and span access** — rules can inspect any field of any span
* **Judge engine + GEPA optimization** — your subjective bar gets sharper over time
* **Regression detection** — built-in baseline comparison
* **Pre- and post-deployment fit** — runs on your candidate change, not on live traffic

## Tools you'll use

* [Stratix Premium — Agent Evaluation](/7.-observe-see-whats-happening/agent-evaluation.md)
* [Stratix Premium — Traces](/7.-observe-see-whats-happening/traces.md)
* [Stratix Premium — Judges](/8.-evaluate-score-the-outputs/judges.md)
* [SDK: `client.trace_evaluations.create()`](/4.1-general-use-cases/general.md)

## Outcomes you should see

You'll know this is working when:

* **Zero CRITICAL deterministic-rule violations** in any release-gate run.
* **>95% pass rate on your assertion criteria** across the curated trace set.
* **Regression report names <2 newly failing criteria** per release.
* **Auditor questions about agent safety are answered live in-meeting** with the verdict + root-cause artifacts.

## Anti-patterns

* **Judge-only evaluations.** Judges are the slowest, most expensive criterion. Anchor with deterministic rules and assertions; use judges for the residual subjective bar.
* **No regression detection.** Without a baseline, today's pass rate is meaningless.
* **Evaluating live traffic for pre-deploy gates.** Live traffic is for [continuous evaluation](/4.1-general-use-cases/continuous-evaluation.md). Pre-deploy uses a captured trace set.

## Where to next

* [Concept: Agentic evaluation](/4.1-general-use-cases/agentic-evaluation.md)
* [Overview: Agentic evaluations](/4.1-general-use-cases/agentic-evals-overview.md)
* [Workflow: Evaluate](/9.-improve-tune-the-system/workflow.md)
* [Cookbook: agentic recipes](/2.-get-started/all-cookbook-recipes.md)


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