September 2026
Intermediate
216 pages
5h 33m
English
Content preview from AI Evals in Practice
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Chapter 8 — Evaluating Agents: Trajectories, Tool Calls, and Multi-Turn
An agent is not a function. A function takes an input and produces an output. An agent takes an objective, makes a series of decisions — which tools to call, with what parameters, in what order — and eventually arrives at a result. The path it takes matters as much as the destination.
Consider two agents given the task “What was the revenue of Acme Corp in Q3 2025?” Agent A calls the database query tool once with the exact query and gets the answer. Agent B calls the web search tool three times, reads two irrelevant articles, calls the database query tool with a malformed query, retries with a corrected query, and eventually gets the same answer. Both arrive at the correct ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.