Recorded live during the Lightning Talks at the MLOps World | GenAI Summit 2025 — Austin, TX (October 8, 2025). Session Title: Beyond the Vibe: Eval-Driven Development Speaker: Robert Shelton, Applied AI Engineer, Redis Talk Track: Scoping and Delivering Complex AI Projects Abstract: Building AI systems isn’t just about intuition—it’s about evaluation. In this lightning talk, Robert Shelton, Applied AI Engineer at Redis, unpacks how AI systems’ probabilistic nature makes “what’s better?” a challenging question to answer. Too often, teams rely on guesswork—swapping models, tweaking retrieval pipelines, or adjusting prompts—without truly knowing what’s driving improvement. Robert introduces Eval-Driven Development, a practical approach that grounds experimentation in metrics. By defining success early and measuring every iteration, teams can move beyond vibes to build AI systems with confidence, clarity, and measurable progress. What you’ll learn: • Why AI systems need evals, not just intuition • How to measure and iterate on probabilistic systems • How Eval-Driven Development transforms experimentation into progress • Practical evaluation frameworks for AI builders.