September 2026 Summaries

Harness AI Evals is presented as a CI/CD quality gate for AI agents, addressing behavioral failures that conventional software tests may miss even when services are available and functioning technically. In an e-commerce support-agent example, 32 golden scenarios were evaluated for answer relevancy, task completion, and toxicity, with deployments blocked unless they met a 70% threshold. An initial 65% result exposed incorrect billing facts, incomplete shipping information, indirect policy answers, and responses to the wrong customer question, leading developers to improve knowledge sources and prompts rather than lower the standard. Subsequent runs achieved 75% and 78%, but differing results across identical evaluations also highlighted AI non-determinism and the need to verify improvements through repeated testing while distinguishing genuine quality failures from broken infrastructure or evaluators. By placing evaluation directly within the delivery pipeline, Harness aims to make AI behavior a release criterion alongside builds, tests, and service health checks.

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