Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Short definition
A stage photograph of a working context: the complete state of its material, its decisions and its conclusions at a given moment, kept as it stands.
Full definition
The word circulates in two technical traditions. In machine learning, a checkpoint is the state of a model's weights saved during training, meant for resuming the computation. In version control and databases, it designates a recovery point after an incident. In both cases, it serves to restart.
In the articles on this blog, it designates something else: not a point of resumption, but a piece of the chain of traceability. You don't go back to a checkpoint to resume work — the current state serves for that — you go back to it to know where a conclusion comes from. It is the link that ties a consolidated synthesis to the working sessions that produced it, and it is kept to be reread, not to be restored.
It is thus distinguished from the two floors it sits between: above it, the synthesis condenses and loses the circumstance; below it, the session log records the unfolding without ranking it.
Usage in the field
Used to situate the intermediate floor of a working memory, and to explain how a decision is traced back to the sources that grounded it.
Synonyms and variants
"stage photograph" when the emphasis falls on keeping a state; "snapshot" in technical vocabulary, where the word stays attached to restoration.
Not to be confused with
- Session memory — a written trace, kept over the course of exchanges, of what was done, decided and left pending. It records the unfolding of a day; the checkpoint freezes the overall state at a date.
- backup — a copy kept in order to restore a lost state. It aims at recovery, the checkpoint aims at rereading.
- Context — a durable workspace gathering, around a goal, sources, notes, decisions and drafts. The checkpoint is a dated image of it, not a living part.
Examples
Tracing a product conviction back to the checkpoint that produced it, then from that checkpoint to the sessions, then from the sessions to the original interview.
Ambiguities / debates
The word is received by technical teams as a restore point, and here it designates a document of evidence. The confusion leads to treating it as a backup you can overwrite, whereas its value lies precisely in keeping a state that is past.