The dashboard says the judge is fine. The document disagrees. Judge is an easy word to trust. It suggests robes, procedure, and someone in the room who is supposed to be less confused than everyone else.
In AI evaluation, the word has become dangerously comfortable. Product teams now use LLMs to score summaries, rank chatbot answers, approve RAG outputs, compare model releases, and decide whether another model’s response is “good enough.” The attraction is obvious: human review is expensive, slow, and occasionally insists on context. An LLM judge is fast, scalable, and does not ask why the evaluation rubric was written five minutes before the sprint review.
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