📖What it means

How many blocked initiatives ONE execution lane may hold before that lane stops picking up new work. The limit is per lane, not across the estate: a block sitting on the planner lane halts the planner and leaves the Albus bypass and the Orion bypass running. The operator declares the number in one place and every reader derives it from there.

The lane that counts is the lane RUNNING the work — the one actually held up — which is not always the lane that owns it. Work requested by the operator and picked up by the Albus bypass is Albus's lane for this purpose.

WHICH LANE IT IS COUNTED AGAINST is decided by lane ownership, not by who performs the work: a ladder rescue carried out by Albus's runner counts against the PLANNER lane's limit. See 'Lane ownership (the doer is not the owner)'.

PER-LANE VALUES: the operator still declares the number in one record, but a lane may carry ITS OWN key there -- Albus's bypass lane holds TEN blocked initiatives before it halts (a blocked initiative on his lane is the escalation queue to the operator, and a limit of one stopped the lane at every escalation); the planner lane reads the estate-wide value and halts at its first; the Orion bypass has no limit (not applicable). A lane with no key of its own reads the estate-wide value.

📖Easily confused with

[{"term": "Pending initiatives", "distinction": "Pending counts every blocked initiative in the estate; this limit is how many ONE lane may hold before halting."}, {"term": "Estate ceiling", "distinction": "The ceiling is a spending backstop; this is a work-pressure limit on a lane."}, {"term": "Dispatch cap", "distinction": "The dispatch cap is how many initiatives may RUN at once; this is how many may be STUCK before a lane stops."}, {"term": "Lane concurrency limit", "distinction": "This limit is how many may be STUCK before a lane halts; concurrency is how many may RUN at once."}]

📖Nuance

Ninad's ruling, 2026-09-05 (CLI-350). Before it, the count was estate-wide in three of the four places it was derived, so one blocked planner initiative halted all three lanes — measured live that day, contradicting lane independence. The threshold value itself has one derivation; this term is about what the number is counted OVER. AMENDED 2026-10-02: the value is read PER LANE from the same record (shared.breaker_threshold.lane_env_var); the earlier reading of one value for every capped lane is retired in place, not deleted.

📖Also called

- breaker threshold
- blocked limit
- lane breaker limit

📖Filed under

Category: work.

Service: Build Initiatives.