This. Even if you hold a reference to the task, your program very likely has a bug. At some point you should always await it to see if it failed or not. It's e

This. Even if you hold a reference to the task, your program very likely has a bug. At some point you should always await it to see if it failed or not. It's easy to miss this if you observe completion via a side-channel, for example item removed from a queue. But this is also a bad way to write tasks in the first place, let them return meaningful data rather than mutate shared objects. That way you are forced to await them and your code becomes much more straightforward. It's counter-intuitive at first if you think in threads, because there you are more used to worker pools and such, whereas asyncio tasks can be written in a more linear way and don't background workers to the same extent. After having done this mistake several times, I've concluded one should almost never use create_task. It's much better to place them into a top-level list of background tasks, that is always awaited, using this method they are both started automatically and always awaited for errors appropriately.