CI/CD Pipeline
What is a CI/CD pipeline?
A CI/CD pipeline (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment pipeline) is an automated system that runs tests on code changes before they are pushed to production, ensuring that products are working as expected. For traditional software, this includes running unit tests and integration tests automatically whenever developers make changes to the code.
The CI/CD pipeline gives teams confidence that their product works correctly before users see the changes. Rather than manually testing every code change, the pipeline automates this verification process.
How do CI/CD pipelines work for AI products?
For AI products, teams are beginning to integrate evals into their CI/CD pipelines, similar to how traditional software uses unit and integration tests. This means running curated test datasets against code changes to catch issues before deployment.
The typical workflow involves:
- Maintaining curated test datasets that represent production usage
- Running evals against these datasets before releasing changes
- Separating dev and production environments to test changes safely
- Only releasing to production after the code passes all evals
This approach treats curated datasets as the CI/CD component for AI products, catching problems before they reach users.
Why are CI/CD pipelines important for AI development?
Just as traditional software teams rely on automated testing to maintain quality, AI product teams need systematic ways to verify their systems work as expected. A CI/CD pipeline with integrated evals provides that verification layer.
Without CI/CD, teams must rely on manual testing or hope that issues don't reach production. With CI/CD, teams catch problems early and release with confidence.
Learn more:
- How I Designed & Implemented Evals for Product Talk's Interview Coach
- Q&A Session: Building AI Evals for the Interview Coach
- Debugging AI Products: From Data Leakage to Evals with Hamel Husain
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