Hello, community! I’m in the process of configuring Langsmith Evaluation for my project, but I’m facing some difficulties. The documentation is quite dense, and I’m worried I’m overlooking essential steps. Has anyone successfully set up Langsmith Evaluation? I would love to hear any advice, best practices, or detailed instructions you could share. What common mistakes should I avoid during the setup? Are there particular settings that have proven effective? I’m eager to learn from your experiences and how you tackled the initial setup. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!
Had the same issues setting up Langsmith Evaluation. Start simple - get the basics working before adding complexity. I messed up by not setting the API keys properly in environment variables, which caused headaches. Also tried configuring multiple evaluators right away, making debugging a nightmare. Focus on getting one evaluator working completely first - that’s what finally clicked for me. Watch out for the input dataset format too, since Langsmith’s pretty picky about it. Once you nail the fundamentals, adding advanced metrics is way easier.
I way overthought the config file when I started.
Get your project structure right from day one. Separate folders for datasets, evaluations, and outputs. Learned this after my results ended up scattered everywhere.
Metric selection matters more than you’d think. Don’t dump every available metric into your setup. Pick 2-3 that match what you’re actually measuring. I wasted hours debugging irrelevant metrics.
Check dataset size before running evals. Start with 10-20 examples max for testing. I ran full datasets during setup and couldn’t spot config errors quickly.
Keep a simple log of what works and what doesn’t. Sounds basic but when you’re dealing with API configs and dataset formats, it’ll save you from repeating mistakes.
the tutorial vids are way better than the docs. check out youtube for some good walkthroughs on getting started. also, learned the hard way - never skip validation, even if it seems optional. it saved me from runtime errors when i was evaling models for real.
Authentication setup destroyed me when I started. Double-check your project name in the config - it needs to match your Langsmith dashboard exactly, including spaces and special characters. I wasted hours on connection errors from a simple typo. Don’t fall for interactive mode like I did. It looks appealing but it’s way more than you need. Batch mode works for almost everything and actually stays stable. I switched after debugging too many hanging interactive sessions. Test your prompt templates first. Tiny formatting bugs will kill your entire evaluation run halfway through, and the error messages won’t tell you what broke.