Promote pre-production evals into runtime guardrails so nothing ships without passing

Digital Applied·high signal

A 2026 pattern (pioneered by Galileo) folds evaluation into the deployment pipeline itself: every PR runs evals before merge, every prompt change ships quality metrics in its description, and the same eval that gates the PR runs as a live guardrail on production traffic. This closes the gap where offline eval scores drift away from real behavior. For a self-improving pipeline, it means each regression is caught at merge and again at runtime rather than in a weekly review.