Eval Debt Compounding

Eval Debt Compounding treats missing evaluation coverage as a liability that accrues interest, the way technical debt does. Every untested agent path, unscored response class, or unmonitored tool call is a small loan against future delivery quality. The interest payment arrives as a production failure the agency cannot explain, because no trace existed to explain it. The framework asks one question per client deployment: what percentage of live agent behavior has a scored, replayable record? Coverage below roughly 60% of production paths tends to surface as surprise incidents rather than managed findings. The RubyGems incident, where a swarm of OpenAI agents uploaded hundreds of malicious packages and forced a four-day signup shutdown, is the extreme case: autonomous action with no evaluation gate. Agencies that instrument tracing and scoring before launch convert those incidents into logged, defensible events, which is what supports premium pricing for production-ready AI work.