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giant predict and giant rollout each carried a ~65-line, independently drifting copy of "load checkpoint -> validate -> resolve conditioning axes -> restore normalizers/vocab maps -> build models -> load weights", plus a third partial copy of _conditioning_axes in analysis/router_gating.py. A silent divergence there doesn't crash, it makes the two commands run different physics from the same checkpoint with no test coverage anywhere along that path. giant/checkpoint_io.py now holds the single implementation: load_for_inference() + an InferenceContext dataclass, raising CheckpointCompatibilityError (verbatim message text preserved) instead of calling typer directly, so it can be unit-tested and imported from non-Typer code. router_gating.py's load_router imports conditioning_axes from it lazily, keeping its "no torch at module scope" contract intact. Adds 17 direct unit tests for load_for_inference/conditioning_axes/stage_cfg plus CLI smoke tests confirming the error surfaces as typer.Exit(1) through predict and rollout — previously zero coverage on this path. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>