Research
18 April 2026Public-safe
Evaluation-First: Measuring Model and Agent Behaviour
An argument for building the measurement system before the product — defensible evaluation of model and agent behaviour as the precondition for trustworthy deployment.
Hunter Xu
Arc Intelligence
EvaluationAgentsMeasurement
Most systems are built first and evaluated later. Arc inverts the order: the evaluation apparatus is the first deliverable, because a behaviour you cannot measure defensibly is a behaviour you cannot ship.
Defensible measurement
We describe an evaluation-first methodology — instrumented traces, evidence grids, and reproducible scoring — that turns "it seems to work" into a record that survives scrutiny.
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