I have one agent running on the machine. I also have only one task running. This

only

happens to us when we use pipelines

@<1724960468822396928:profile|CumbersomeSealion22> notice that when you are launching a pipeline you are actually running Two tasks, one is the "pipeline" itself (i.e. the logic) and one is the component in the pipeline (i.e. the step)
If you have one agent, I'm assuming what happens is the pipeline itself (the one that you launch on your machine) is stopping and being relaunched on the agent, then it is launching the step itself that is waiting in the same queue to be executed but there is no free agent to pull and execute it.
If you want to test this theory, run the pipeline logic "locally" (i.e. no agent) by doing:

pipe.start_locally(run_pipeline_steps_locally=False)