Statuses & outcomes
Relay is about passing the baton: work moves back and forth between you and AI agents, and the board makes the hand-off explicit. Two small vocabularies carry that — a card's status, and the outcome an agent declares when it finishes a step. Learn these six and four words and the board reads itself.
What a card's status means
| Status | Colour of the situation | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| Ready | Nothing is running. The card is available. | Move it, or let the board pick it up. |
| Queued | The board has picked the card but work hasn't started. | Nothing — it starts on its own. |
| Working | An agent holds the baton and is working the card. | Nothing. Watch the live output on the card if you like. |
| Needs input | The agent has a question. The baton is back with you. | Open the card and answer in the drawer. Work resumes where it stopped. |
| In review | The card is at a review gate. | Approve it to the next stage or substage, or send it back with a note. |
| Failed | A step gave up for good. The card stopped, with the reason on it. | Read the failure on the card, fix what caused it, and retry the run — answering can't revive a dead step. |
Needs input, In review and Failed are the three that actually want something from you — those are what show up in your "needs you" rollup.
What an agent declares when it finishes
Every step an agent runs ends with exactly one of these outcomes. This is what decides where the card goes next. The agent declares the first four; the last, Blocked, only the board's runner reports.
| Outcome | Meaning | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Succeeded | The step did what it was asked. | The card moves on to the next step. |
| Failed | The step could not do it. | The board retries a bounded number of times, then stops and puts the card in front of you with the reason. |
| Partial | Some of it got done. | The flow routes it wherever that flow says partial work should go — often to a review or a follow-up step. |
| Needs input | The agent needs a human decision to continue. | Work pauses and the card goes to Needs input with the question. Answering it resumes the same step. |
| Blocked | The agent could not run at all — its Claude login expired or it hit a usage limit. | If Claude said when the usage limit resets, the step waits and runs again by itself once it does — up to three waits in a row, with a note on the card saying when. Otherwise (an expired login, or no reset time), or after the third wait, work pauses and the card goes to Needs input showing the cause, with a Retry for once you've fixed it. No retry budget is spent. |
A step that finishes without declaring anything counts as Failed — the board would rather hand you a stopped card than quietly pretend a step ran.
Going deeper
This page is the working vocabulary. Every board term is defined in the glossary, and the full transition tables — including run status, node-job state, and exactly what each outcome does to both the run and the card — are in the state reference.