Add opt-in persistent conversation checkpoints - #21

Repeated coding conversations currently recompute their full prompt after each request or process restart. This adds opt-in persistent inference checkpoints so the server and Python engine can restore the longest saved token prefix and process only the unmatched suffix.

The implementation uses a radix index backed by SQLite, immutable shared safetensors KV blocks, and checkpoint-specific recurrent, logits, and prerouter state. It includes namespace fingerprints, checksums, atomic publication, cross-process locking, bounded LRU eviction, exact-message tokenization caching, CLI inspection/clearing, and cached-token usage metrics. Caching defaults to disabled; when enabled, the defaults are 20 GiB and a 2,048-token interval.

Validation:

• 84 regular tests passed; 1 skipped.
• Both local 8B real-weight tests passed. Two 35B tests were explicitly skipped because the weights were unavailable.
• A 2,799-token coding fixture produced identical output tokens with caching disabled, on first write, on repeat, and after process restart.
• On an M5 MacBook Air with 24 GB RAM, measured TTFT was 6.51 s disabled, 6.77 s on first write, 0.50 s on repeat, and 0.61 s after restart. These are sequential single samples with a warm OS filesystem cache, not controlled cold-SSD measurements.

Publication increased peak MLX allocation by about 24% in this sample. Shared blocks are currently reserialized synchronously, so retained-storage deduplication does not eliminate write work. Real-weight 35B validation, short-prefix break-even measurements, and sustained/cold-filesystem trials remain outstanding. This does not add GGUF support, KV quantization, or active-context offloading.

Usage, raw benchmark results, and continuation limitations are documented in docs/conversation-cache.md, docs/conversation-cache-results.md, and docs/benchmarks/conversation-cache-m5.json.

Disclosure: This implementation, tests, documentation, benchmarks, and PR description were produced with OpenAI Codex assistance. Codex also ran the reported local validation and prepared this draft PR at the repository owner's request.