Ask HN: How to unit test AI responses?

You need evals. I found this post extremely helpful in building out a set of evals for my AI product: https://hamel.dev/blog/posts/evals/

Your question is very general. "A customer support app" can mean many things from a faq to a case management interface.

If you 100% can not tolerate "bad" answers, only use the LLM in the front end to map the user's input onto a set of templated questions with templated answers. In the worst case, the user gets a right answer to the wrong question.

You can’t (practically) unit test LLM responses, at least not in the traditional sense. Instead, you do runtime validation with a technique called “LLM as judge.”

This involves having another prompt, and possibly another model, evaluate the quality of the first response. Then you write your code to try again in a loop and raise an alert if it keeps failing.

To ensure the AI doesn't hallucinate bad responses, focus on the following steps:

Quality Training Data: Train the model on high-quality, up-to-date company documents, ensuring it reflects accurate information.

Fine-tuning: Regularly fine-tune the model on specific support use cases and real customer interactions.

Feedback Loops: Implement a system for human oversight where support agents can review and correct the AI's responses.

Context Awareness: Design the system to ask clarifying questions if uncertain, avoiding direct false information.

Monitoring: Continuously monitor and evaluate the AI’s performance to catch and address any issues promptly.

You don't. You have to separate concers between deterministic and stochastic code input/output. You need evals for the stochastic and mocking when the stochastic output is consumed in the deterministic code.