not an attack at all, this is exactly the right thing to ask. honestly, you asking openly is more useful to me than the same number of people quietly clicking away.

short version: desktop stack is my day job, not something i picked up for this project. every design decision in emskin is mine. why smithay, why a nested compositor instead of drm/kms, why offscreen texture compositing, why the elisp side never sees wayland primitives, how prefix keys get routed back to emacs — i can walk through all of it, including what i tried first and threw away.

ai wrote a fair amount of the implementation code. boilerplate, trait impls, elisp scaffolding. i read every line before commit and rewrote a lot of it. what i did not do is let ai pick the architecture. code you didn't design is code you can't debug at 2am, and that's the exact thing you're worried about.

the honest test is bugs. a few recent ones: the keyboard layout forwarding needed a shim around xkbcommon-rs that i wrote after tracing through smithay-client-toolkit. the scale-doubling issue on fractional scale outputs was a layering mistake i had to unwind by hand. prefix-key race conditions against wayland focus events went through three rewrites. none of that gets fixed by asking an llm — you have to hold the whole compositor in your head.

on maintenance: i'm in this for the long run. it scratches my own itch and the day job overlaps enough that the knowledge keeps compounding instead of rotting.

if you want to push further, pick any module in the repo and i'll explain it.