In https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio-task.html#task, there is a note about a warning being logged if a pending task is destroyed.  The section does not explain or link to an explanation of how a task might get destroyed.  Nor does it define pending, but that seems reasonably clear from context (ie: the future has not completed).

The example linked to does not show how the pending task got destroyed, it only shows an example of the resulting logging, with not enough information to really understand what the final line of the error message is reporting (is kill_me an asyncio API, or the name of the task, or the future it is wrapping?)

"destroyed" means "collected by the garbage collector", when the last reference the task objected was cleared. To be honest, I have no idea who keeps a reference to tasks nor how the "pending task destroyed" bug occurs.

"pending" means that the execution of the coroutine object didn't finish. In fact, it's related to Task.done(): a task is pending is task.done() is False.

There is a corner case: if task.cancel() was called but the coroutine object was not executed yet to handle the CancelledError, the task is still "pending".

Maybe "pending" is not the best word, and "not done" is better.

It seems that the note about a warning being logged if a pending task is destroyed does not exist in the new, rewritten version of the asyncio docs.  Therefore, I'm going to close this as out of date.