Lecture XI - Project Work I

Programming with Python

Dr. Tobias Vlćek

Kühne Logistics University Hamburg - Fall 2026

EP 11: The Build

The shop has a new owner

MunchCorp runs the shop now. Tobi kept his job, the investor kept her spreadsheets, and her next due-diligence visit already has a date: Session XIII, when your projects run in this room.

Until then, the shop rule stands: pull before you start, push when you stop, and let the commit history do the talking.

The Mark

Could anyone tell?

  • Your README carries an AI-disclosure section. Suppose you skipped it: could anyone prove that an AI wrote part of your work?
  • Since August 2026, EU rules require providers to mark AI content machine-readably, and the major ones do
  • The trick behind it is simple enough for three slides

How a watermark hides in plain text

  • Before each word, the model splits its vocabulary into a green and a red half, reshuffled at every step
  • It then softly prefers green words. The text still reads completely normally
  • By chance, a human writes about half green words. A model writes far more

You already know the mechanism

  • Session VI: the model picks a likely next token, never the next token
  • A watermark is that choice, steered on purpose: green wins a little more often than chance
  • Same next-token choice, one hidden thumb on the scale

Who can actually detect it

  • Detection is counting: one paragraph of marked text can push chance below 1 in 10 trillion
  • But you need the secret key that decided which half was green
  • In practice, only the provider can run the test

What a mark proves (and does not)

  • Proves: a model processed this text
  • Does not prove: who did the work, or whether a human verified it
  • Heavy editing can wash a mark out, and short snippets may not carry one, so an absence proves nothing

Presence without disclosure, though, looks exactly like what it is.

Disclosure is part of the work

  • The rules converged everywhere: AI cannot be an author, and its use gets disclosed
  • Your README section says which tool, for what, and what you verified yourself
  • That is standard practice, not a confession

The Work Menu

Today

  • Pull before you start, push when you stop. GitHub is your backup; commit as you go
  • Progress today means one working step pushed to GitHub, with commits that tell the story
  • I am in the room: use me for blockers, design questions, and “is this scope realistic?”
  • Use the agent where it helps, and note down what it did for your disclosure section

When you’re stuck

A red traceback you have never seen? Read the last line first, exactly as in Part I. Then, and only then, the agent.

Wrap-up

Three things to remember

  • AI text carries a watermark now: fluent, normal-looking, detectable by the provider
  • Disclosure is part of the work: which tool, what for, what you verified
  • Small commits, pushed often, are the cheapest insurance any of you can buy

Next week: your agent keeps making the same mistakes. Time to teach it once instead of correcting it every session.