Lifecycle States

Every ticket travels through a fixed set of states. This reference lists them, what they mean, and what can happen from each one.

The main states

State	Meaning	Can move to
Planning	FORGE is writing (or waiting on) the plan; no code is written. The first state a ticket enters.	Blocked, or Building (on plan approval)
Building	FORGE implements the approved plan and runs tests.	Testing, Blocked
Testing	Test work is underway.	Review ready, Blocked
Review ready	FORGE opened a pull request and marked it for review.	Blocked, Awaiting human
Review	SENTINEL is adversarially reviewing the pull request.	Merged (on approval), or back to Building (on rejection, continuous-integration failure, or conflict)
Merged	VESSEL merged the approved pull request. Terminal — the workspace is torn down and documentation follows.	—
Blocked	Work is stuck at a step.	Usually toward Awaiting human
Awaiting human	Parked for a human decision; the system stopped retrying.	Resolved by a human action or a reset

A fresh ticket can only start in planning (or blocked) — it can’t skip planning.
Leaving planning requires consuming an approval that only the reviewer can issue.
The approval is single-use — it can’t be replayed.

Separate from the ticket phases, recovery tracks things like:

Stale worker — a workspace went silent (its heartbeat fired too long ago) and is marked for recovery.
Orphaned ticket — assigned or in progress, but with no active worker.
Crashed workspace — the machine or session died.
Unmerged pull request — a pull request that should have been processed but wasn’t.

These are repaired automatically, with a bounded number of attempts, before escalation. See the Limits & Defaults reference for how recovery behaves.

You’re notified when a ticket enters awaiting human.
You can see every state in the control panel.
Closing or commenting on the issue, or resetting a ticket, moves it between states.
A merged ticket is your output: a reviewed, production-ready pull request.