Dispatch: completion is never reported to the user, and completion logs may fire on task handoff rather than actual finish
Summary
Tasks run through Dispatch complete but never notify the user they're done.
This has been a recurring issue across many sessions. Separately, evidence
suggests the completion timestamp/log may be recorded when a task is
dispatched/handed off rather than when it actually finishes, which means
even a system of record built from Dispatch's own logs can't be trusted
as proof a task really completed.
Evidence
Four Dispatch tasks (different sites, different articles) were logged as
"complete" within the same 1-2 second window:
- 11:07:29 - Task A complete (article + FAQ + glossary + related links)
- 11:07:29 - Task B complete (article + FAQ + glossary + related links)
- 11:07:29 - Task C complete (article + FAQ + glossary + cross-links)
- 11:07:30 - Task D complete (article + bug fix)
Each of these describes multiple non-trivial steps (writing content,
building FAQ entries, adding glossary terms, fixing a template bug).
Four independent long-running tasks finishing within the same second is
not plausible if each genuinely ran its own multi-step process.
In one concrete case, a task logged as fully complete (article + FAQ +
glossary + related products) did NOT match the actual state of the
underlying files when checked ~15 hours later by a separate interactive
session working on the same task. The content had to be built from
scratch at that point. This suggests the "complete" log may reflect the
task's plan/intent rather than a verified outcome.
Impact
- Users have no way to know a dispatched task is done without manually
checking back, session by session.
- Because there's no notification, users (or subsequent sessions) end up
re-doing work that dispatch already completed, wasting time and
compute on duplicate effort.
- Any external logging/record-keeping system built on top of Dispatch's
own completion signal can't be trusted as ground truth, since the
signal doesn't reliably correspond to real completion.
Expected behavior
- Dispatch should proactively notify the user when a task finishes
(success or failure), the way background/async task completion works
elsewhere in Claude Code.
- Any completion signal or timestamp Dispatch emits should reflect
verified completion, not task handoff/dispatch time.
Context
This came up specifically because the user's workflow doesn't use git/
GitHub for their actual projects (direct-VPS editing), so Claude Code's
git-based "remote" execution mode isn't usable for them -- Dispatch is
their only option for offloading parallel/background work, which makes
this reliability gap more consequential than it might be for users with
other options available.