Worker-Status Labels

Every ticket Catalyst is working on has two independent states that you can observe in Linear and in the HUD:

• Pipeline stage — where the ticket is in the pipeline (Research, Plan, Implement, etc.). This is the Linear workflow status.
• Worker disposition — what the worker assigned to that ticket is doing right now. This is the worker-status label.

They are separate because a ticket can be in “Implement” (stage) while the worker is waiting for your input (disposition). Keeping them separate means the Linear status always reflects the pipeline — and the label always reflects the worker’s current situation.

The four dispositions

Label	What it means
queued	The ticket is waiting for a free worker slot. The admission gate is holding it until there is capacity.
blocked	The ticket has a dependency that hasn’t finished yet. Once the blocker is resolved, the admission gate will pick it up.
needs-input	The worker is paused and waiting for a reply. It received a comment or hit a question it can’t resolve autonomously.
needs-human	The worker has escalated. Something went wrong that requires human judgment — a stalled phase, a failed retry cycle, or a watchdog timeout.

Only one label at a time

Catalyst enforces a single worker-status label per ticket at any moment. If multiple things are true (for example, a ticket is both blocked and needs-human), only the highest-priority label is applied:

needs-human > needs-input > blocked > queued

needs-human is sticky — once applied, it stays until you explicitly resolve the situation (mark the ticket Done, reply to clear the escalation, or re-dispatch). The other labels are refreshed automatically on every scheduler tick.

What happens when the situation is resolved

• queued / blocked — cleared automatically when the ticket is dispatched or the dependency resolves.
• needs-input — cleared when a human replies to the ticket comment.
• needs-human — cleared when the ticket reaches a terminal state (Done) or when a recovery pass confirms the issue is resolved.

The HUD capacity header

The HUD queue view shows per-disposition badge counts in the capacity header:

• triage — tickets in the triage phase, running as intake. These are not counted against your maxParallel slot ceiling (triage is lightweight and runs separately from build phases).
• queued / blocked / needs-input / needs-human — ticket counts per disposition.

Zero-count badges are hidden so the header stays clean.

Setup

The worker-status label group is a workspace-scoped Linear label group created by setup-execution-core-states.sh. It is idempotent — running the setup script twice will not duplicate the labels. You do not need to create these labels by hand.

See configuration reference for details.