---
title: "Evals Are Operational Gates"
category: "claims"
status: "seeded"
confidence: "high"
sourceLabels: ["Harness synthesis", "Official schedule", "Question layer", "Topic synthesis"]
---

# Evals Are Operational Gates

## Claim
The conference corpus supports treating evals as operational gates for agent behavior, release decisions, and review routing, not only as after-the-fact benchmark reports.

## Why It Is Supported
Evaluation pages, coding-agent workflow pages, and quality-gate talks converge on the need to stop or route agent work when evidence is missing or checks fail.

## Source Evidence
- [[agent-evaluations]] - Topic synthesis
- [[agent-eval-gate]] - Harness synthesis
- [[coding-agent-code-review-loop]] - Harness synthesis
- [[how-should-coding-agents-be-evaluated-before-production-use]] - Question layer
- [[2026-06-29-nnenna-ndukwe-how-to-build-quality-gates-into-agentic-coding-workflows]] - Official schedule
- [[2026-06-29-laurie-voss-from-vibes-to-production-evaluating-and-shipping-ai-agents-that-work-101]] - Official schedule
- [[2026-06-30-philipp-schmid-don-t-ship-skills-without-evals]] - Official schedule

## Confidence
high

## Evidence Boundary
This claim summarizes a recurring evidence pattern. It should not be used as proof that every cited talk made the same recommendation in the same words.