What to do about working on project with modern scum?

I will be working on a project with a scum and a non scum. Right now the roles are that the scum will work on the menial part while me and the other non scum will work on the fun scientific part. I will be leading the project.


My question is, should I just let the scum work independently on his part and me and the other non scum work on our part? Or should I be including the scum guy on our meetings, and invite him to contribute to the fun part?

My instinct is to do the latter, but since the scum is charismatic I am worried he will end up taking all the credit, or somehow forcing us to do our work in a scummy way.

This isn't a hypothetical. It has actually already happened with the menial part. I had a solution that worked, and then later on the scum developed his own solution and made it look nice and made documentation, and added continuous integration icons to make it look professional, and made a commit for almost every character in he added, with quirky nonchalant commit messages for every commit.  And so my boss is having us use his solution rather than mine for the menial part. At first I thought he deserved it because it looked like he had done a better job than me. But then after he demoed his software I saw that he wasn't as far along as me, and all the advantages I thought his software had were things he was "working on".

I am worried it is going to end up being a similar story with the fun part if I let him work on it. He will find some reason to start his own repo, add some quirky commit messages, add some CI/CD icons, and now since his thing looks more "professional", my boss is going to make us work on his repo and do things his way.

So I am thinking not to include him, but since there is only 1 other person involved I am worried it will look like I am making an effort to leave him out (which I would be). What should I do? Should I make an effort to invite the scum to our meetings on the fun part of the project?

Another thing to mention is that the scum has been talking about wanting to work on this project with me since literally day 1 of his employment here. The work is actually kind of trivial, but it has the appearance of being a cool project, so this would be an ideal project for a charismatic person who wants something to pad his resume with. The reason why he went out of his way to do the menial part of the project I described in the previous post is because it would give him an excuse to get involved, which it looks like it worked.

Leave him out if it's possible. If leaving him out is not possible, don't include him on your meetings.

I won't give advice because I don't have experience with this.  Thank God I left employment before modern scum.