For your specific case where you're polling an API status every 5 seconds, you definitely want to disable caching since you need fresh results each time. Here's how you can disable caching for your task in Prefect 3.x:

python
from prefect import task
from prefect.tasks import NO_CACHE

@task(cache_policy=NO_CACHE)
def check_computation_status():
    # Your API call code here
    return status

This solution is perfect for your use case because: 1. Setting

cache_policy=NO_CACHE

ensures the task runs every time it's called 2. It will allow your polling mechanism to actually check the API status every 5 seconds instead of returning cached results If you're currently using a task without any decorator parameters, just add the

cache_policy=NO_CACHE

parameter to your existing decorator. For reference, here's a complete example of how your polling logic might look:

python
from prefect import task, flow
from prefect.tasks import NO_CACHE
import time

@task(cache_policy=NO_CACHE)
def check_computation_status():
    # Your API call here
    response = api.get_status()  # Replace with your actual API call
    return response.status

@flow
def monitor_computation():
    while True:
        status = check_computation_status()
        if status == "succeeded":
            break
        time.sleep(5)
    return "Computation completed successfully"

This will ensure that each status check actually calls the API instead of returning cached results.