---
title: "Quality gates that block bad deploys — Retrace"
description: "Gate CI/CD on AI agent quality. Retrace scores runs with an LLM judge against your criteria; the eval gate exits non-zero below your threshold."
canonical: "https://retraceai.tech/features/eval-gates"
last-updated: 2026-08-26
format: text/markdown
---

# Quality gates that block bad deploys

Score runs against your own quality criteria with an LLM judge, then gate your CI/CD pipeline on the result, so regressions fail the build instead of reaching users.

## What it does

- **LLM-as-judge** — Define weighted criteria in plain language; a judge scores each run against them using the full conversation, not just metadata.
- **Auto eval-rules** — Automatically evaluate incoming runs and trigger webhooks or emails the moment a score drops below your bar.
- **CI gate** — retrace eval gate exits non-zero when a run scores below your threshold, drop it into any pipeline to block a bad deploy.
- **Suggested gates** — Retrace studies clusters of past failures and proposes ready-made eval criteria that would have caught them.
- **Datasets** — Turn real runs into datasets and run batch evaluations to track quality over time.
- **Offline regression gates** — Diff a candidate run against a recorded golden run completely offline, with per-step tolerance and flaky-step detection.

## Examples

Fail the build when a run scores below your threshold.

```ci.yml
- name: Eval Gate
  run: retrace eval gate --evaluation $EVAL_ID --trace $TRACE_ID --threshold 0.8
  env:
    RETRACE_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.RETRACE_API_KEY }}
```


## REST API

- `POST /api/v1/evaluations: create an evaluation`
- `POST /api/v1/evaluations/:id/run: run it on traces`
- `POST /api/v1/evaluations/:id/gate: pass/fail gate`
- `POST/GET/DELETE /api/v1/eval-rules: automatic eval rules`

## Related

- HTML page: https://retraceai.tech/features/eval-gates
- Documentation: https://docs.retraceai.tech
- OpenAPI specification: https://retraceai.tech/openapi.json
- Authentication for agents: https://retraceai.tech/auth.md