As other commenters have noted, if the awk script is just a pure function of the output of the black-box generator to a new output, then I would consider this a modification to the generator, and no problemo.

However, if your awk script requires the current state of the generated code as input in addition to the output of the black-box generator, and tries to reconcile a diff between the two things, then yep, I consider that busted.

> It's wrapping the generator in a bash script that pipes the result through AWK, etc.

Which is itself a generator

Sure, that's orthogonal. If you wrap the generator in your build system and still always regenerate, it's effectively the same. And also, I think, not what GP was talking about