Best Practices for Building LLM Apps

Chapter 2 · Practice 4 of 5

Run a regression eval on every prompt, model or retrieval change

From Evals before shipping

Why it matters

Changing one sentence in a prompt can fix the case you were looking at and break five others. Only a full regression run shows both effects.

Run your eval set in CI whenever any of these change:

  • the prompt
  • the model id
  • temperature
  • a tool definition
  • a retrieval setting

Compare each run against the last accepted run. Fail the build on a drop beyond a threshold you agree on, and show the cases that flipped from pass to fail so the reviewer sees exactly what broke.

When a provider announces a new model, run the same suite before you switch, rather than trusting general benchmarks.