system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Asking for authorship as an undergraduate

Hello, looking to get some feedback from people who have a lot of experience with academia.

This would be my first publication as an undergraduate.

A few years ago, I worked on a project during the summer, primarily under the supervision of a post-doc there. I helped carry out experiments on his workflow and helped troubleshoot some problems. I found some novel targets for his project. I also helped kickstart analysis of the data due to familiarity with a few programming languages that he had not had experience with. When I left to go to school (at a different institution), I wasn't involved much with research at all as I was primarily focused on my schoolwork. 

I met with him briefly over the holidays and his project has been completed. We faced many problems because of a core issue; once this issue was fixed, the workflow worked on the order of magnitudes better than previous methods. He and I had been the only ones that done experiments: **however, the experiments I did were not directly part of the final data (due to the core issue I mentioned earlier)**. The general workflow I worked on was. Some of my targets (basically, proof-of-concept that the workflow works) is included. I asked him and he is willing to add my name as coauthor. If it is relevant, there would likely be two others maximum, excluding the post-doc and professor, included on that paper, for intellectual contributions. 

I wanted to know if it is likely that the professor would approve of coauthorship or how much hold the professor has on this decision. During my time at the university the professor's wife had just had a baby so I was not able to develop a close relationship with him.
gpt
It sounds like you're in a bit of a gray area. Just explain to your professor that you'd like to be an author but only if he feels it is scientifically and ethically appropriate. He might say "no" if he's a hard-ass, but he'll probably say "sure".