LLM Evals · Turn quality into a signal
When is human review still necessary?
Short answer
For high-stakes, ambiguous or novel cases, safety incidents and calibration. Automate routine grading, but keep humans where judgement, accountability or policy interpretation is required.
Human review is expensive, slow and inconsistent, which is why judges are attractive. But some decisions cannot be delegated: safety escalations, regulated advice, novel failure modes and the calibration of the judge itself. The question is where human judgement adds the most value per unit of cost.
- High-stakes outputs where an error has legal, financial or safety impact.
- Ambiguous cases where the rubric does not decide.
- Novel failures that no eval category covers yet.
- Judge calibration and periodic quality audits.
- Customer escalations and appeals.
Follow-ups you should expect
Interviewers use these to check whether the first answer was understanding or memorisation.
- 1How would you prioritise a limited human review budget?
- 2What makes human review unreliable?
- 3How do human labels flow back into the eval set?
Say it in the interview
I keep humans where judgement and accountability matter: safety, regulated decisions, ambiguous cases and novel failures. Routine grading can be automated once a judge is calibrated. I route review by risk and uncertainty rather than reviewing everything, because uniform review leads to fatigue and rubber-stamping. Human labels from those reviews then feed back into the golden set and the judge calibration.
Use this as a model, not a script. Saying it in your own words is what makes it survive follow-up pressure.
Related questions
Reading is step one
Now say it out loud.
Understanding an answer and delivering it under pressure are different skills. Rehearse this topic in a live LLM Evals mock interview and get scored feedback on depth, clarity and confidence.