taskflow

A deterministic task state machine improves workflow governance by enforcing strict legal transitions across six states, preventing invalid advancement and ensuring reliable tracking from dispatch to completion. It caps fix-loops and handles escalations safely.

The six-state task lifecycle model defines legal transitions between queued, in-progress, needs-decision, blocked, done, and cancelled. These states enforce dependency rules and handoff invariants to ensure safe work advancement.

You track task dependencies by materializing tasks into the status.json tasks[] array, which serves as the source of truth for command-center integration. This representation provides visibility and auditing for dependency resolution across workflows.

Use needs-decision when user input is required via an inbox escalation flow, and use blocked when dependencies halt progress. Both states enforce fix-loop caps and handoff invariants to prevent runaway task cycles.

A fix-loop cap in task lifecycle governance limits automated retry cycles a task can undergo before requiring escalation. This prevents infinite loops and ensures work advances safely to needs-decision or blocked states.