Do We Even Need Agentic Evals? - Live AMA with Hamza Tahir (CTO, ZenML)
Date: Thursday, September 11
Time: 4:00 PM IST (Ireland) 4:00 PM UK (BST) / 11:00 AM ET 8:00 AM PT
Format: Live AMA on the Jentic Community Discord (questions asked directly in Discord; answered live by Hamza & Rod)
What this session is about
The industry is split: some teams ship fast with “vibes,” others build rigorous evaluation stacks. In this AMA, we’ll cut through the noise and get practical about when evals matter, when monitoring and A/Bs are enough, and how to pick the right level of rigor for agents in production.
Topics we’ll cover
Clear definitions: research evals vs. engineering evals; offline vs. online; LLM-as-judge vs. human review
When to use what: smoke tests, regression suites, monitoring, and A/B tests for agents
Agentic specifics: long-running loops, tool use, stuckness, “silent” failures, and goal correctness
Error analysis that ships: turning traces into actionable evals without boiling the ocean
Goodharting & drift: avoiding metric gaming; keeping evals aligned to product KPIs
Coding agents vs. enterprise ops: why HITL domains tolerate lighter evals—and where you can’t cut corners
Starter kit: a minimal, sensible stack (dataset, judge, rubric, monitor, dashboard) you can adopt tomorrow
Why attend
You’re building agent workflows and need a measured, production-ready approach to quality
You want to iterate faster without flying blind
You’re deciding between eval tools, building your own, or relying on monitoring + A/B in prod
Speakers
Hamza Tahir - CTO, ZenML
Rod Rivera - Host, Jentic Community
How the AMA works
Join the Jentic Community Discord (link in the registration confirmation).
Drop your questions in the live AMA channel. We’ll answer them in real time.
Can’t attend live? Register to get the recording.
Prep (optional)
Provide one concrete scenario: your agent, the target outcome, and the current failure mode. We’ll map it to a minimal evaluation and monitoring plan during Q&A.
Cost: Free
Recording: Yes (shared with registrants)
Register now and bring your toughest “Do we even need evals?” question.