Notes ยท Munna Suprathik
When I Trusted the LLM to Grade Itself
By Munna Suprathik, Generative AI Engineer.
I wanted to test hundreds of outputs without reading each one, so I did the obvious thing and had an LLM grade another LLM. For about a day it felt like I had cheated the universe.
Then I spot-checked. The judge was handing 9 out of 10 to answers that were flatly wrong. It had opinions, it had confidence, and it was hallucinating exactly like the model it was supposed to police.
A grader with no ground truth is just a second guesser in a lab coat.
Confident scores, nothing underneath them.
What actually made it trustworthy was treating the judge like code, not an oracle. I gave it a rubric with concrete pass/fail criteria instead of asking "is this good." I forced it to quote the exact span it was judging so it could not vibe its way to a score. And I hand-labeled maybe forty examples as a fixed answer key, then measured the judge against me. If it drifted from the human labels, the judge got fixed, not the model.
LLM-as-judge is genuinely useful for catching regressions at scale. It just moves the hallucination up one floor if you forget to audit it, and I forgot.