Agent quality requires trajectory-level evaluation; step-by-step accuracy misses the actual outcome.
What AI does well here
Evaluate task-completion rate (did the agent finish what was asked)
Evaluate trajectory quality (was the path reasonable)
Compare to human-judgment ground truth on representative tasks
Track quality over time as system updates
What AI cannot do
Substitute step accuracy for trajectory quality
Eliminate the human-judgment component of evaluation
Predict trajectory quality from training data alone
Practice this safely
Use a small project example from your own work. The useful move is to compare the AI's draft against your goal, sources, and constraints before you trust it.
Ask AI to explain agent evaluation in plain language, then underline anything that sounds uncertain or too broad.
Give it one detail from "Agent Quality Evaluation: Beyond Single-Step Accuracy" and ask for two possible next steps plus one reason each step might be wrong.
Check trajectory quality against a trusted source, teacher, adult, expert, or original document before you use it.
End-of-lesson check
10 questions · take it digitally for instant feedback at tendril.neural-forge.io/learn/quiz/end-agentic-agent-quality-evaluation-creators
What is the main idea of "Agent Quality Evaluation: Beyond Single-Step Accuracy"?