The Metric Chose the Architecture: How Gold-Answer QA Rewarded Our Guardrails
This is Part 6 of Field Notes from a Korean Phone Voice Agent, a seven-part series about a project I led: a real-time Korean phone voice agent (STT → LLM → TTS) for a public-service call line. STT evaluation → Rules vs. models → Latency → Silent failures → Guardrails → Metrics → Simplification. Part 5 covered how the dialog layer’s rules piled up one failing QA row at a time. This part is about the evaluation that kept rewarding them. ...