blocked-state

blocked-state is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from bartoszarendt/agenticloop. It costs 90 tokens per session (2,291 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A procedure for recording when an Agentic Loop task cannot continue. An Agentic Loop is a workflow in which AI agents work through planned development tasks and review steps.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when work is stopped by an outage, rate limit, missing credentials, contradictory requirements, review deadlock, merge conflict, or an exhausted attempt budget. It records the blocker according to the project's task system.
Why use it?
It prevents blocked work from disappearing silently and leaves enough evidence for a person or later agent to resume it.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the agenticloop plugin — 18 skills, 2 commands, 4 agents shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/bartoszarendt/agenticloop/blocked-state
Any agent
npx skills add bartoszarendt/agenticloop --skill blocked-state
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bartoszarendt/agenticloop

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install agenticloop, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 18 skills, 2 commands, 4 agents.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for blocked-state

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bartoszarendt/agenticloop/blocked-state.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/bartoszarendt/agenticloop/blocked-state)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bartoszarendt/agenticloop/blocked-state"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bartoszarendt/agenticloop/blocked-state.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 90 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,291 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00090 $0.02291
Opus 5 $0.00045 $0.01145
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00458
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00229

Measured today against content hash a598d3b63460, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

blocked-state scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured today.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/blocked-state/SKILL.md · 249 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 249 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Blocked state

The loop must fail loudly and durably, never silently. A blocked task is not a failed task; it is a paused task with enough evidence for a human or later agent to resume.

For ownership when a gate fails, follow the canonical Gate Ownership And Dispatched Contract section in agenticloop/AGENTIC_LOOP.md: a failing gate routes work but does not transfer another role's mutation authority.

Use backend-neutral language first:

  • task record: the durable record for the work,
  • GitHub projection: issue labels and comments when the backend is GitHub,
  • files projection: local Markdown task fields when the backend is local files.

The default backend is files. Read .agenticloop/project.md for task_backend before recording a blocked state. For GitHub-backed work, state markers count only when they start a line and appear in comments authored by the loop's GitHub account. The [[agent: ...]] trailer from [[github-attribution]] helps identify the role, but it is cooperative text, not security.

For files-backed operations, follow agenticloop/backends/files.md for task-file shape and frontmatter conventions.

Transient vs durable

  • Transient: provider outage, rate limit, flaky network, temporary gh failure. Retry once or wait if the retry is cheap and safe. If it keeps failing, record a block.
  • Durable: credentials missing, task contradiction, merge conflict, review deadlock, missing human decision, or unavailable external dependency. Record a block immediately.
  • Ambiguity: if the task record is incomplete but the maintainer can fix it, use needs_context instead of blocked.

Before routing a blocked handoff, use the read-only npx agenticloop task handoff-preflight <id> --json result. It reports the disposition owner and one safe repair without treating activation as operator authorization. A stale derived observation may use the explicit task refresh-handoff-evidence <id> --plan <path> --yes path; it cannot repair a protected task contract, human decision, review disposition, or product file.

Read the full file on GitHub · 249 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. today Changed · +42 lines a598d3b63460
  2. 5d ago First seen · 207 lines · 90 tokens per session scan A 318928a1c5dd

Subscribe to this mod's changes

blocked-state is a skill published in the GitHub repository bartoszarendt/agenticloop (2 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 90 tokens to every session and 2,291 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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