What Exactly Is Blocked?

Long-horizon AI-assisted work can encounter several different nonterminal states that are easily flattened into the single word “blocked”: an optional route can be unavailable, an active route can be waiting on an external condition, an artifact or provenance path can be incomplete, a release can be held on missing evidence, or an authority decision can remain unresolved. This technical experience note examines seven purposively selected worked traces from one author-held research and publication program. Six are core examples spanning five case-derived attachment labels, while a seventh, broader portfolio-scheduling trace is retained as a peripheral illustration. The labels are non-exhaustive and case-derived; they are not proposed as a new workflow taxonomy. The public reporting fields capture the governing work objective, what was unavailable or unresolved, the retrospectively reconstructed decision point, the recorded action, and the trace status. Examples include unavailable optional preprint branches, an external venue wait, a missing historical artifact requiring a provenance-explicit successor, a release-local evidence prerequisite, and a publication-authority hold. The note deliberately does not claim novelty for plan repair, trajectory rectification, resource-disruption replanning, workflow wait states, issue dependencies, human escalation, goal drift, operational-state preservation, or agent-failure taxonomies. It also does not claim that the reporting fields improve decisions, prevent erroneous stopping, or generalize beyond the retained examples. Coding was retrospective and outcome-known, performed by the sole author on September 30, 2026. No second coder or independent audit was used. The underlying private workbooks and correspondence are not publicly released and cannot be independently reconstructed from this package. The residual contribution is therefore modest and practical: a public-safe worked register illustrating that cases summarized retrospectively under the same umbrella term “blocked” contained different unresolved items, decision points, recorded actions, evidence requirements, and authority states. Supplement A provides the public-safe worked-trace register and explicit claim boundaries.