LLM Evals Are Not Enough: The Missing CI Layer Nobody Talks About

Running LLM evals is not the same as being able to trust them in production release workflows. That is the core argument of this piece. Evals generate useful measurements such as pass rates, groundedness scores, safety findings, and per-test results, but CI/CD systems do not need measurements alone. They need a deterministic answer to a much narrower question: should this build pass or fail? The article argues that most teams are missing a middle layer between raw eval outputs and release decisions. That layer is policy. Without it, organizations end up relying on fragile assumptions about which metrics matter, what thresholds are acceptable, how regressions should be handled, and whether missing or malformed data should block a deployment. The solution proposed is simple but important: treat eval frameworks as evidence generators, and place a separate, explicit, versioned policy layer above them. That makes build decisions auditable, portable across tools, and strict without becoming chaotic.