Ship Evals Before Polish

Most teams over-invest in interface polish before they can measure output quality. That sequence looks good in demos and fails in production.

An eval set does not need to be massive on day one. It needs to represent success, edge-cases, and known failure patterns tied to user impact.

Once evals are live, product decisions become clearer: which failure modes deserve UI constraints, where confidence signaling matters, and what should never auto-execute.

In AI products, quality instrumentation is the foundation. UX polish compounds value only after that foundation exists.