Define your success criteria

Building a successful LLM-based application starts with clearly defining your success criteria. How will you know when your application is good enough to publish?

Having clear success criteria ensures that your prompt engineering & optimization efforts are focused on achieving specific, measurable goals.

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Building strong criteria

Good success criteria are:

• Specific: Clearly define what you want to achieve. Instead of “good performance,” specify “accurate sentiment classification.”

• Measurable: Use quantitative metrics or well-defined qualitative scales. Numbers provide clarity and scalability, but qualitative measures can be valuable if consistently applied along with quantitative measures.

  • Even “hazy” topics such as ethics and safety can be quantified:

    	Safety criteria
    Bad	Safe outputs
    Good	Less than 0.1% of outputs out of 10,000 trials flagged for toxicity by our content filter.

  Example metrics and measurement methods

  Quantitative metrics:

  • Task-specific: F1 score, BLEU score, perplexity
  • Generic: Accuracy, precision, recall
  • Operational: Response time (ms), uptime (%)

  Quantitative methods:

  • A/B testing: Compare performance against a baseline model or earlier version.
  • User feedback: Implicit measures like task completion rates.
  • Edge case analysis: Percentage of edge cases handled without errors.

  Qualitative scales:

  • Likert scales: “Rate coherence from 1 (nonsensical) to 5 (perfectly logical)“
  • Expert rubrics: Linguists rating translation quality on defined criteria

• Achievable: Base your targets on industry benchmarks, prior experiments, AI research, or expert knowledge. Your success metrics should not be unrealistic to current frontier model capabilities.

• Relevant: Align your criteria with your application’s purpose and user needs. Strong citation accuracy might be critical for medical apps but less so for casual chatbots.

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Common success criteria to consider

Here are some criteria that might be important for your use case. This list is non-exhaustive.

Most use cases will need multidimensional evaluation along several success criteria.

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Next steps