Checkpoint Protocol

Checkpoint Protocol — Technical Description Checkpoint Protocol (CP) is a local-first, model-agnostic continuity layer for AI-assisted work. It captures the operational state of a session as a compact, structured, versioned snapshot that can be stored on the user’s device and restored in a later thread, application, or compatible AI system. Each checkpoint preserves the information needed to resume work: active objectives, established facts, decisions, corrections, constraints, artifacts, open actions, deadlines, and references to source material. Transient dialogue is excluded unless it remains operationally relevant. Processing pipeline 1. Capture: Extract and normalize durable task state from the current session. 2. Package: Serialize the state using a defined schema, timestamp, schema version, topic identifier, and content fingerprint. Newer checkpoints can supersede earlier facts through explicit corrections. 3. Persist: Store the checkpoint locally or at a user-controlled location. An optional packaging layer such as CP-AUTOPACK can provide encryption, integrity validation, and tiered payload access. 4. Restore: Validate the checkpoint, resolve corrections or conflicts, and selectively inject relevant state into the model’s working context. Instead of retransmitting an entire conversation history, CP reconstructs a minimal working context. This can reduce prompt size, repeated token consumption, and the errors caused by manually reconstructing prior work. It also separates continuity from any single model provider or conversation thread. CP does not preserve model weights, hidden states, or a model’s internal key-value cache. It preserves external working state, not synthetic human-like memory. Token savings depend on checkpoint compactness and selective restoration rather than occurring automatically. For sensitive deployments, checkpoints should use authenticated encryption, access controls, and integrity checks. Credentials and other high-risk secrets should remain in dedicated secure storage, with checkpoints retaining only the references needed to retrieve them.