The GitHub Slopocalypse and the Coming Trust Tax

GitHub's value was never storage. It was legible history. Every commit told you who made a decision, why they made it, and what changed. That's what made open source work at scale—you could trace a bug to a specific human judgment, review the reasoning, fix it. The transparency enabled automation. You could build CI/CD pipelines, automate deployments, reduce ship risk—because you trusted the historical record. Now that history is being flooded with AI-generated code, and the entire trust infrastructure is collapsing. The Trust Tax I'm calling this the Trust Tax—the additional cognitive and temporal cost you now pay to verify code provenance before you can use it. When GitHub launched, the excitement wasn't about free hosting. It was about confidence. Git's original value proposition was perfect historical records. You could pinpoint a commit in space and time and feel confident in the record of code changes in a way that you rarely feel confident about anything in software. The system