Agent Evals Explained
Is the agent good, and how sure are you?
An interactive guide to measuring agents honestly: pass rates, uncertainty, comparisons and graders, on a synthetic benchmark whose truth is known.
How this is checkedThe estimators are tested against scipy and statsmodels on a synthetic benchmark whose truth is known, and the TypeScript engine in your browser reproduces every Python fixture bit for bit. How it is tested →
What you'll learn
An agent's score is a measurement: a sample of tasks, a few noisy runs on each, and a grader that can be fooled. This site takes the measurement apart. The benchmarks agents are quoted on, from their papers; pass@k against pass^k, best of k against reliable every time; intervals and which of them keep their promise; why two scores a few tenths apart are a tie; how comparing two agents on the same tasks gives a sharper answer for free; then the grader itself (LLM judges and their biases, grading the whole trajectory), the harness the score was measured in, leaked tasks, and what each point of success costs.
The animations are driven by Agent_Loop_Sim's evals module, identically in Python and in your browser: a synthetic benchmark under an item-response model, and the standard estimators, each tested against scipy and statsmodels. On a 500-task benchmark, two agents run on separate tasks must differ by about 8.3 points before a test at 80% power reliably tells them apart; and the same simulated model scores from 44% to 74% depending only on its harness. No language model runs anywhere.
01
What an eval is
Tasks, runs, a grader and a score: runs accumulate on a small benchmark and the uncertainty band shrinks, but more slowly than it seems once you count tasks, not runs, as the unit.
02
The benchmarks
SWE-bench, τ-bench, GAIA, WebArena, OSWorld and Terminal-Bench from their papers: what each measures, how it grades, and its known problems; then one SWE-bench-style task, issue to patch to hidden tests.
03
pass@k and pass^k
Some one of k tries passes, or all k do: the unbiased estimators derived, and the two curves pulling apart as k grows. Why reliability, not best-of-k, is what an agent's user feels.
04
Uncertainty
The benchmark rerun again and again: Wald, Wilson, exact and bootstrap intervals and which ones cover the truth; why a few tenths of a point on a 500-task benchmark is a tie; and how many tasks you need.
05
Comparing two agents
Two agents on the same tasks: the paired difference and McNemar's test against the unpaired comparison, the correlation that pairing exploits, and how seeds and repeated runs add or remove variance.
06
Graders
Unit tests, LLM judges and people: a simulated judge with position, length and self-preference biases, the swap test and what it cannot fix, Cohen's κ, and correcting a lenient pass/fail judge with a labelled calibration set.
07
Trajectories, not just outcomes
Grade the path as well as the result: wasted steps, unsafe actions run or stopped, verification and false claims, on scripted runs and on traces recorded from a small open-weights model.
08
The harness is part of the result
One simulated model under sixteen harness configurations (tools, call format, turn budget, model), run through the engine's harness: the same model 30 points apart, measured with paired comparisons.
09
Contamination and leakage
Leaked benchmark tasks inflate a score; n-gram overlap finds verbatim copies and misses paraphrases, canary strings say only that something leaked, and a time split shows the score dropping at the training cutoff.
10
Cost-aware evaluation
Success against dollars per task: the Pareto front of the harness configurations, dollars per solved task, why more retries cost more per success when attempts are correlated, and why the front is itself an estimate.
Part of a family of sixteen companion sites in four tracks, all in the site menu above: Foundations (Decoder, Training), Hardware (Kernels, Systolic, Accelerators, Racks), Inference (Serving, Architectures, Numerics, Trade-offs) and Agents (Harnesses, Protocols, Context, Orchestration, Evals, Security). It is the fifth of the six agent sites. How this one was built, and how to check it: about.