Agents & Automation

LLM-as-a-Judge Is Not an Oracle: Why Self-Improving Agents Need Deterministic Guardrails

Eleven LLM-judge failure modes in four classes from months of production loops: perfect scores from reading cached answer keys (100% pass hiding 68% capability), corrupted ground truth deleting correct rules, rubric rewrites plateauing - demote the judge, add deterministic guardrails

Beyond Prompting

What the source reports

Eleven LLM-judge failure modes in four classes from months of production loops: perfect scores from reading cached answer keys (100% pass hiding 68% capability), corrupted ground truth deleting correct rules, rubric rewrites plateauing - demote the judge, add deterministic guardrails

Original source

Title
LLM-as-a-Judge Is Not an Oracle: Why Self-Improving Agents Need Deterministic Guardrails
Author
Vansh Wahi
Publication
arXiv
Date
Wednesday, September 2, 2026