Evals before vibes: a practical starting point
You cannot improve what you only feel. A lightweight evaluation loop you can set up in an afternoon, and why it pays for itself in the first week.
Maya Okafor3 min read
Maya Okafor
Staff ML Engineer
Maya leads applied ML at a mid-sized SaaS company and has spent the last three years putting language models in front of paying customers. She writes about evaluation and reliability.
Articles by Maya
Retrieval that actually retrieves: a RAG checklist
Most retrieval-augmented generation failures are retrieval failures. Twelve checks to run before you blame the model.
Maya Okafor & Daniel Reyes3 min read
Structured outputs without tears
Getting reliable JSON out of a language model is a solved problem — if you combine schemas, validation and a sensible retry policy.
Maya Okafor2 min read
What we learned shipping an AI feature to 40,000 users
A retrospective on launching an AI writing assistant: what we got right, what surprised us, and what we would do differently.
Maya Okafor & Daniel Reyes2 min read