Your team is debating a sprint on hierarchical chunk-me...

When facing a faithfulness regression, it is best to prioritize low-effort, high-impact interventions. Infrastructure-level changes, such as hierarchical chunk-merging, are complex and can inadvertently introduce new faithfulness issues. A one-line system-message change is a cheap, baseline-setting intervention. By shipping the prompt change first and measuring the results, you establish a performance baseline. If the regression persists, you can then justify the engineering effort of a pipeline rewrite to address the remaining gap.