It does not pick an arbitrary order for operations. They happen in total (known at the time, eventually converging) order across all clients thanks to hybrid logical clocks. If events arrive that happened before events a client already has locally it will roll back to that point in time and replay all of the actions forward in total ordering.

As for the specific scenario, if a client sets a task as COMPLETE and another sets it as CANCELLED before seeing the COMPLETE from the other client here's what would happen.

Client1: { id: 1, action: completeTask, taskId: 123, clock: ...}

Client1: SYNC -> No newer events, accepted by server

Client2: { id: 2, action: cancelTask, taskId: 123, clock: ...}

Client2: SYNC -> Newer events detected.

Client2: Fetch latest events

Client2: action id: 1 is older than most recent local action, reconcile

Client2: rollback to action just before id: 1 per total logical clock ordering

Client2: Replay action { id: 1, action: completeTask, taskId: 123, clock: ...}

Client2: Replay action { id: 2, action: cancelTask, taskId: 123, clock: ...} <-- This is running exactly the same application logic as the first cancelTask. It can do whatever you want per app semantics. In this case we'll no-op since transition from completed -> cancelled is not valid.

Client2: SYNC -> no newer actions in remote, accepted

Client1: SYNC -> newer actions in remote, none local, fetch newer actions, apply action { id: 2, action: cancelTask, ...}

At this point client1, client2, and the central DB all have the same consistent state. The task is COMPLETE. Data is consistent and application semantics are preserved.

There's a little more to it than that to handle corner cases and prevent data growth, but that's the gist of it. More details in the repo.

The great thing is that state is reconciled by actually running your business logic functions -- that means that your app always ends up in a valid state. It ends up in the same state it would have ended up in if the app was entirely online and centralized with traditional API calls. Same outcome but works totally offline.

Does that clarify the idea?

You could argue that this would be confusing for Client2 since they set the task to cancelled but it ended up as complete. This isn't any different than a traditional backend api where two users take incompatible actions. The solution is the same, if necessary show an indicator in the UI that some action was not applied as expected because it was no longer valid.

edit: I think I should improve the readme with a written out example like this since it's a bit hard to explain the advantages of this system (or I'm just not thinking of a better way)